Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Since its discovery, DNA has been an axis for identity, a kind of incontestable key to mapping

who we are and where we have come from.

But like all human discoveries, it has become laden with politics.

How we talk about and interpret DNA affects how we think about identity.

And more often than not, these ideas are used to reinforce the hierarchy that drive systems of division and racism.

In this essay from our archive, Nigerian writer, Bioakumalafe, presents race as emergent and dynamic,

and identity as unwieldly, deeply composite, and intertwined with the living world. Drawing on advances

in genealogical testing, bio-deconstructs old stories of colorism, and puts forward monstrosity,

that which upends the familiar, that which challenges and resists the order of things, as a site to truly meet ourselves.

As the Anthropocene lays bare, the interconnectedness and interdependence of all life,

and dispels boundaries between human and non-human,

bio invites us to disturb, rethink, and remake how we construct identity and race.

A stunning invitation is in the air, urging us to rethink ourselves, our bodies, our hopes

for justice, and how we respond to the politics of whiteness. In these times of painful displacements

on avertible crises and unexpected entanglements,

the Anthropocene,

the logic of race and identity

collides with genetic technologies and splinters

...