Commentary on: Bethard JD, DiGangi EA. Letter to the Editor—Moving beyond a lost cause: Forensic anthropology and ancestry estimates in the United States. J Forensic Sci. 2020;65(5):1791–2. doi: 10.1111/1556‐4029.14513.

Abstract

Recently, Drs. Bethard and DiGangi opened a dialogue on the application of ancestry estimation as part of the biological profile in forensic anthropology [1]. Ancestry estimation of human skeletal remains is routinely used to predict a probable social race based on metric and morphological data from the skeleton. Anthropologists accept the social construction of race and are acutely aware of its harmful impact in American society, particularly with respect to the historic use of anthropology to promote scientific racism. When scientists fail to 'call out' racist ideas in their field, these ideas can become embedded within institutions and society, further reifying racist ideology [2]. In this context, we wish to respond to Bethard and DiGangi's request to open a conversation regarding the use of ancestry estimation in forensic anthropology and how it contributes to the identification process. In this letter, we provide a foundation for a conversation about ancestry as a means to encourage thoughtful discussion moving forward on the issues of redress, diversity, and multidisciplinary collaboration.

Uncloaking a Lost Cause: Decolonizing ancestry estimation in the United States

“…As an example of such excuses, the recent opinion by Stull et al (2021) takes the antithetical position to ours by asserting that despite the problematic history of race science in anthropology, the use of morphoscopic traits and ancestry estimation should be preserved because they lend value to the investigative process. As one solution for ameliorating concerns about anthropology's history with race, these authors suggest that manuscripts touting race science be rejected from scientific journals in our field; however, we would contend that approximately one-third of the articles in the bibliography they constructed to support their arguments for the maintenance and continued use of ancestry estimation are race science, as interrogated using a CRT lens.…”

“…Therefore, some anthropologists' claims of weekly meetings with "stakeholders" (i.e., law enforcement) (Stull et al, 2021) are immaterial-because it is the broad, overall trend of racial bias in the American criminal justice system we are discussing, and our hypothesis to be tested is that its systemic entrenchment extends to human identification. We reemphasize that the formulation of this hypothesis stemmed from multiple lines of evidence, as outlined above.…”

“…In our editorial (Bethard & DiGangi, 2020), we indicated forensic anthropology has demonstrated willful ignorance of the advances in biological anthropology (namely theory as it is or is not applied to morphoscopic traits, and here it bears emphasizing that contemporary anthropological theory includes the rejection of the biological race concept). The theme of forensic anthropology's imprudence and defiance is unfortunately reflected in a recent opinion by Stull et al (2021) when they simultaneously state that the historical legacy of race in anthropology is problematic yet they cannot see a way forward in the discipline without the continued use of ancestry estimations. This viewpoint is emblematic of American forensic anthropology being in conformance with perpetuating the ideology of the race state.…”

Ancestry Studies in Forensic Anthropology: Back on the Frontier of Racism

“…Thus, in 1992 a name change from "race" to "ancestry" was proposed as a less loaded term [7]. This has been rationalized by the notion that we can connect craniofacial morphology (i.e., size and shape variants of skull bone features) to social race categories (e.g., United States Census categories) [8,9]. However, some biological anthropologists questioned the ethics of even estimating this parameter fearing that its continued use would endorse racist views and be complicit in the social injustices faced by underrepresented groups [2,[10][11][12].…”

Evaluating population affinity estimates in forensic anthropology: Insights from the forensic anthropology database for assessing methods accuracy (FADAMA)

“…This historical background in scientific racism, along with the possibility that assigning decedents to categorical groups inadvertently reifies race [6] and the evidence that in some cases, ancestry estimates provide little novel information toward an identification [7], has motivated scholars to call for a rejection of some or all components of ancestry estimation [4,8,9]. On the contrary, proponents of the practice argue that abandoning ancestry estimation before thoroughly researching the various genetic and environmental contributions to the features and measurements we analyze could undermine our relationships with medicolegal stakeholders and cause our discipline to stagnate [10]. Forensic anthropologists frequently note that, however imperfect and problematic, our estimates of ancestry are proxies for social race, and social race is inextricably encoded in the framework of death investigation [11–16].…”