Tracing the Dead, or Tracking the Living?: Memory & the Politics of Forensic Science in Tulsa

• In Event: Sociology of Human Rights Section Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

This study explores how DNA is mobilized to address the afterlives of racial terror in the United States through a case study of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Graves Investigation. The 1921 Graves project aims to locate and identify victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, inviting Black community members to contribute DNA samples to assist in identifying victims. Accordingly, we examine how a history of anti-Black racism in science and state violence shapes the use and reception of forensic technology. Drawing on both human rights and science technology and society frameworks, we trace how forensic science, and DNA specifically, embodies both the potential for repair and the risk of renewed surveillance and harm.
We utilize 28 in-depth interviews with activists, scientists, oversight committee members, academics, and Tulsa residents, as well as a discourse analysis of social media communications from the 1921 Race Massacre Burial Sites Oversight Committee, to analyze how the project’s scientific aims are entangled with both historical trauma and ongoing community distrust. We argue that the Tulsa project exposes a complex terrain in which tools that create vital opportunities for recognition and remembrance also operate as symbols and instruments of state control. Accordingly, we outline policy implications for the role of science in future efforts to confront and reconcile histories of racial violence through forensic technology.

Authors

• Katherine Waggoner, University of California-Irvine

• Nicole Iturriaga, University of California-Irvine