Mixed Race Studies

Race Finished: Book Review

American Scientist
April-May, 2012

Jan Sapp, Professor of Biology and History
York University, Toronto

Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth. Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle. xviii + 226 pp. Texas A&M University Press, 2011.

Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture. Edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan. xiv + 296 pp. Columbia University Press, 2011. cloth.

Few concepts are as emotionally charged as that of race. The word conjures up a mixture of associations—culture, ethnicity, genetics, subjugation, exclusion and persecution. But is the tragic history of efforts to define groups of people by race really a matter of the misuse of science, the abuse of a valid biological concept? Is race nevertheless a fundamental reality of human nature? Or is the notion of human “races” in fact a folkloric myth? Although biologists and cultural anthropologists long supposed that human races—genetically distinct populations within the same species—have a true existence in nature, many social scientists and geneticists maintain today that there simply is no valid biological basis for the concept.

The consensus among Western researchers today is that human races are sociocultural constructs. Still, the concept of human race as an objective biological reality persists in science and in society. It is high time that policy makers, educators and those in the medical-industrial complex rid themselves of the misconception of race as type or as genetic population. This is the message of two recent books: Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth, by Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle, and Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture, edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan. Both volumes are important and timely. Both put race in the context of the history of science and society, relating how the ill-defined word has been given different meanings by different people to refer to groups they deem to be inferior or superior in some way.

Before we turn to the books themselves, a little background is necessary. A turning point in debates on race was marked in 1972 when, in a paper titled “The Apportionment of Human Diversity,” Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin showed that human populations, then held to be races, were far more genetically diverse than anyone had imagined. Lewontin’s study was based on molecular-genetic techniques and provided statistical analysis of 17 polymorphic sites, including the major blood groups in the races as they were conventionally defined: Caucasian, African, Mongoloid, South Asian Aborigines, Amerinds, Oceanians and Australian Aborigines. What he found was unambiguous—and the inverse of what one would expect if such races had any biological reality: The great majority of genetic variation (85.4 percent) was within so-called races, not between them. Differences between local populations accounted for 8.5 percent of total variation; differences between regions accounted for 6.3 percent. The genetic divergence between geographical populations in the course of human evolution does not compare to the variation among individuals. “Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance,” Lewontin concluded…

…Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth is a beautifully presented book, elegantly reasoned and skillfully written. Tattersall, a physical anthropologist, and DeSalle, a geneticist, are both senior scholars at the American Museum of Natural History. Their aim is to explain human diversity in terms of human evolution and dispersal since our ancestors walked out of Africa some 100,000 years ago. The patterns of diversity, they write, reflect the processes of divergence and reintegration, the yin and yang of evolution.

In biology, a grouping has biological meaning based on principles of common descent—the Darwinian idea that all members of the group share a common ancestry. On this basis, and on the ability to interbreed, all humans are grouped into one species as Homo sapiens, the only surviving member of the various species that the genus comprised. Species are arranged within the “tree of life,” a hierarchical classification that situates each species in only one genus, that genus only in one family and so on. Nothing confuses that classification more than the exchange of genes between groups. In the bacterial world, for example, gene sharing can occur throughout the most evolutionarily divergent groups. The result is a reticulate evolution—a global net or web of related organisms, and no species. Among humans, reticulation occurs when there is interbreeding within the species—mating among individuals from different geographical populations. The result of such genetic mixing of previously isolated groups—due to migrations, invasions and colonization—is that no clear boundaries can be drawn around the variety of humans, no “races” of us…

…Although race is void of biological foundation, it has a profound social reality. All too apparent are disparities in health and welfare. Despite all the evidence indicating that “race” has no biological or evolutionary meaning, the biological-race concept continues to gain strength today in science and society, and it is reinforced by those who design and market DNA-based technologies. Race is used more and more in forensics, medicine and the genetic-ancestry business. Tattersall and DeSalle confront those industries head on and in no uncertain terms, arguing that “race-based medicine” and “raced-based genomics” are deeply flawed. Individuals fall ill, not populations. Belonging to any socioculturally defined race is a poor predictor of an individual’s genes, and one’s genes a poor predictor of one’s health.

Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture arose from two projects, both funded by the Ford Foundation and organized by the Council for Responsible Genetics, that “examined the persistence of the concept of human races within science and the impacts such a concept has had on disparities among people of different geographical ancestries.” The first project brought together academics and social-justice advocates to discuss “racialized” forensic DNA databases and seek policy solutions. The second focused on the effects of modern genetic technology in reinscribing and naturalizing the concept of race in science and society. The resulting book is a fine and richly textured compilation, in which a multidisciplinary group of scholars explore racialized medicine, various uses of genetic testing in forensics and the genetic-ancestry industry, and attempts to link intelligence and race.

Sociologist Troy Duster argues that the growing genetic-ancestry industry not only reinforces a biological conception of race but is sorely in need of government regulation in regard to claims made and accuracy of methods used to pinpoint ancestry, as was suggested by the American Society of Human Genetics in 2008…

…A different aspect of racial profiling is evident in the growing industry of racialized medicine, whose proponents might argue that even if race has no evolutionary or biological meaning, it can still be useful for medical treatments. After all, more and more diseases are reportedly correlated with ethnicity and race. But as evolutionary biologists Joseph L. Graves Jr. and Jonathan Kahn argue in their respective chapters on the subject, racialized medicine is a bad investment and is bound to fail for two reasons. First, although individual ancestries are useful on medical questionnaires, ancestry should not be conflated with race. “The issue is not primarily one of whether to use racial categories in medical practice but how,” Kahn writes.

Carefully taking account of race to help understand broader social or environmental factors that may be influencing health disparities can be warranted. . . . But it is always important to understand that race itself is not an inherent causal factor in such conditions.

As an example, he considers the drug called BiDil, FDA approved as an anti–heart-attack agent specifically marketed to African Americans on the grounds that they have a biological propensity for heart disease brought on by high blood pressure. Not only is the drug not effective for all African Americans, it is quite effective for many individuals who self-identify as Caucasian…

Read the entire review here.

Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth

Texas A&M University Press
2011-09-01
256 pages
6 x 9
Photo. 9 line art. 6 tables. Index.
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-60344-425-5

Ian Tattersall, Curator Emeritus
American Museum of Natural History

Rob DeSalle, Curator of Entomology
American Museum of Natural History in the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics

Race has provided the rationale and excuse for some of the worst atrocities in human history. Yet, according to many biologists, physical anthropologists, and geneticists, there is no valid scientific justification for the concept of race.

To be more precise, although there is clearly some physical basis for the variations that underlie perceptions of race, clear boundaries among “races” remain highly elusive from a purely biological standpoint. Differences among human populations that people intuitively view as “racial” are not only superficial but are also of astonishingly recent origin.

In this intriguing and highly accessible book, physical anthropologist Ian Tattersall and geneticist Rob DeSalle, both senior scholars from the American Museum of Natural History, explain what human races actually are—and are not—and place them within the wider perspective of natural diversity. They explain that the relative isolation of local populations of the newly evolved human species during the last Ice Age—when Homo sapiens was spreading across the world from an African point of origin—has now begun to reverse itself, as differentiated human populations come back into contact and interbreed. Indeed, the authors suggest that all of the variety seen outside of Africa seems to have both accumulated and started reintegrating within only the last 50,000 or 60,000 years—the blink of an eye, from an evolutionary perspective.

The overarching message of Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth is that scientifically speaking, there is nothing special about racial variation within the human species. These distinctions result from the working of entirely mundane evolutionary processes, such as those encountered in other organisms.

The Biologistical Construction of Race: ‘Admixture’ Technology and the New Genetic Medicine

Social Studies of Science
Volume 38, Number 5 (2008)
pages 695-735
DOI: 10.1177/0306312708090796

Duana Fullwiley, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and of Medical Anthropology
Harvard University

This paper presents an ethnographic case study of the use of race in two interconnected laboratories of medical genetics. Specifically, it examines how researchers committed to reducing health disparities in Latinos with asthma advance hypotheses and structure research to show that relative frequencies of genetic markers characterize commonly understood groupings of race. They do this first by unapologetically advancing the idea that peoples whom they take to be of the `Old World’, or `Africans’, `Europeans’, `East Asians’, and `Native Americans’, can serve as putatively pure reference populations against which genetic risk for common diseases such as asthma can be calculated for those in the `New World’. Technologically, they deploy a tool called ancestry informative markers (AIMs), which are a collection of genetic sequence variants said to differ in present-day West Africans, East Asians, Europeans, and (ideally Pre-Columbian) Native Americans. I argue that this technology, compelling as it may be to a range of actors who span the political spectrum, is, at base, designed to bring about a correspondence of familiar ideas of race and supposed socially neutral DNA. This correspondence happens, in part, as the scientists in question often bracket the environment while privileging racialized genetic variance as the primary source of health disparities for common disease, in this case between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans with asthma. With their various collaborators, these scientists represent a growing movement within medical genetics to re-consider race and `racial admixture’ as biogenetically valid points of departure. Furthermore, many actors at the center of this ethnography focus on race as a function of their personal identity politics as scientists of color. This to say, they are driven not by racist notions of human difference, but by a commitment to reduce health disparities and to include `their’ communities in what they describe as the `genetic revolution’.

The very word ‘race’ applies to a hypothetical past, or to a problematical future, not to the actual present … the only way to measure the genetic relationship of ethnic groups would be by ascertaining the quantitative values of their coefficients of common ancestry, which would be based entirely upon the statistical methods of probability theory. (We Europeans [Julian Huxley and Alfred Court Haddon, 1939: 114])

To me, the refusal to use race in medicine is political correctness gone awry. It’s a lot of white researchers gone political. (Esteban Gonzàles Burchard, asthma geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco Lung Biology Center; field notes 2003)

The Molecularization of ‘Admixture’: A History of the Present

In 1949, the year before the first United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) statement rallying against the race concept, Linus Pauling characterized sickle cell anemia as the first ‘molecular disease’ (Pauling et al., 1949). At the time, most experts and lay people considered sickle cell a ‘black-race disorder’. Despite global good will and contrition for the violence perpetuated in the name of racial purification in Germany and elsewhere a few short years before, some North American scientists called the UNESCO statement an ‘incautious affirmation’ and claimed that sickle cell anemia in American blacks (who by definition, it was assumed, had white ancestry) was a perfect example of how ‘race mixture can be disadvantageous in its racial effects’ (Gates, 1952: 896). The then ‘odd’ observation that ‘hybrids’ (black Americans) seemed to have more sickle cell disease than their ‘pure’ (African) counterparts who had more sickle cell trait (which was actually mistaken for a milder form of the disease in many cases) gave immediate rise to theories that ‘racial admixture’ could affect disease risk and/or severity (Gates, 1952). With Pauling’s Nobel-winning observations came the first intellectual opening for the molecularization of race. Immediately with it came the idea that racialized ancestral mixing, or ‘admixture’, constituted increased risk of disease pathology. In what follows, I examine a present-day resurgence of the concept of human biological admixture as a factor in disease risk in some quarters of contemporary American medical genetics…

…Over the past few years, social scientists studying genetics and race have urged their colleagues to ‘go to the very sites’ of scientific production and ‘document how [racial] categories are being constructed’ anew (Reardon, 2005: 18; Duster, 2006a: 12). Following from this, it is as imperative that ethnographers also attempt to understand better scientists’ motives for wanting to resuscitate such troubled categories. To this end, it is important for me to note how my informants’ social experiences shape the tautological product of genetic racial admixture they use on a daily basis. In particular, one challenge these scientists have posed for themselves is to ‘care’ for their own disproportionately sick communities of ‘racially admixed subjects’ by recruiting and enrolling them in genetic research. A crucial aspect of their effort to reduce health disparities is a search for the biological component of these communities’ mixed racial heritage. For several of my informants, this heritage is a point of biological difference that may contain clues about present-day health differences. Here it is many ‘drops of blood’ – rather than one – that now constitute the brown bodies in question. Today, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in the US are assumed to be differentially constituted from African-Americans and Native Americans, based on their varying amounts of African, European, and Native (pre-Columbian) genetic ancestral contributions. Yet, contrary to earlier American norms of hypo-descent, these mixed groups must remain conceptually separate, ‘ethnically’ and ‘politically’, from the referent groups that make them up. Today, Mexicans’ and Puerto Ricans’ African ancestries are deemed important for reasons that will become clear below, but they are rarely collapsed into a category of ‘blackness’. In fact, as one of the main researchers featured in this ethnography reminded himself and his team time and again, as of the 2000 census, Latinos surpassed African-Americans as the largest minority group in the US. Over the course of my fieldwork in his lab, I heard this feat by numbers repeated, as if to say that this researcher’s ‘community’ needed and deserved the same kind of attention, political courtship, and scientific resources as one of the most historically ‘important’ and visible American minority groups…

Read the entire artcle here.

Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture

Columbia University Press
September 2011
304 pages
1 illus; 4 tables
Paper ISBN: 978-0-231-15697-4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-15696-7

Edited by:

Sheldon Krimsky, Professor of Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning; Adjunct Professor of Public Health and Family Medicine
Tufts School of Medicine
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Kathleen Sloan

Do advances in genomic biology create a scientific rationale for long-discredited racial categories? Leading scholars in law, medicine, biology, sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology examine the impact of modern genetics on the concept of race. Contributors trace the interplay between genetics and race in forensic DNA databanks, the biology of intelligence, DNA ancestry markers, and racialized medicine. Each essay explores commonly held and unexamined assumptions and misperceptions about race in science and popular culture.

This collection begins with the historical origins and current uses of the concept of “race” in science. It follows with an analysis of the role of race in DNA databanks and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Essays then consider the rise of recreational genetics in the form of for-profit testing of genetic ancestry and the introduction of racialized medicine, specifically through an FDA-approved heart drug called BiDil, marketed to African American men. Concluding sections discuss the contradictions between our scientific and cultural understandings of race and the continuing significance of race in educational and criminal justice policy.

Table of Contents

• A short history of the race concept / Michael Yudell
• Natural selection, the human genome, and the idea of race / Robert Pollack
• Racial disparities in databanking of DNA profiles / Michael T. Risher
• Prejudice, stigma, and DNA databases / Helen Wallace
• Ancestry testing and DNA : uses, limits, and caveat emptor / Troy Duster
• Can DNA witness race? Forensic uses of an imperfect ancestry testing technology / Duana Fullwiley
• BiDil and racialized medicine / Jonathan Kahn
• Evolutionary versus racial medicine : why it matters? / Joseph L. Graves Jr.
• Myth and mystification : the science of race and IQ / Pilar N. Ossorio
• Intelligence, race, and genetics / Robert J. Sternberg … [et al.]
• The elusive variability of race / Patricia J. Williams
• Race, genetics, and the regulatory need for race impact assessments / Osagie K. Obasogie.

Brazilian Miscegenation: Disease as Social Metaphor

2012 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association
San Francisco, California May 23-26, 2012
23 pages

Okezi T. Otovo, Assistant Professor of History
University of Vermont

Brazilian medicine of the 19th and early 20th centuries had a peculiar cultural relationship to disease. Certain debates consistently recurred as disease experts typically argued that Brazil was uniquely prone to higher manifestations of particular diseases or that its cultural and social milieu (or the deficiency thereof) gave universal diseases distinctive local contours – making certain diseases exceptionally Brazilian. Many considered disease to be one of the most critical issues facing Brazilian society, and disease was wrapped up in strange and often unexpected ways with intellectual and cultural understandings of Brazilian nationality. Disease became a way of understanding Brazil itself, as it was considered either the cause or effect of social phenomena as well as the expression of various “truths” or “problems” of class, race, and gender. As one prominent physician proclaimed, the entire nation of Brazil was a “vast hospital” where epidemic and endemic disease were the rule rather than the exception.

One of the most fascinating sites for analyzing these trends is the cultural history of syphilis between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, a period of great transition in which the end of slavery and empire triggered new anxieties about Brazil’s ranking amongst so-called “civilized” nations. Transmission of syphilis emerged as a major medical concern at the time as the disease was labeled a significant cause of Brazilian degeneracy, compromising the future of both nation and nationality. According to leading physicians, syphilis—like tuberculosis, Chagas disease, and alcoholism—was a disease that weakened the race and prevented Brazil from achieving its full economic potential. Physicians also worried that certain Brazilian traditions, such as the widespread use of black wet-nurses to nourish infants, contributed to the spread of syphilis and thus to the larger crisis of degeneracy. Domestic servitude and syphilis became intertwined in a certain medical dialogue that reflected changing debates about race, nation, and “progress.”

Among domestics, the figure of the black wet-nurse, the mãe preta or literally the “black mother,” is an iconic character in Brazil. This cultural veneration of the mãe preta, however, only dates back to the early 20th century when she became a folkloric symbol of harmonious and intimate relationships between white and black Brazilians. In the 1800s, at least in medical discourse, the wet-nurse was a more sinister figure whose ignorance and irresponsibility threatened the health of the infants in her care and whose transmission of syphilis through breast milk caused their premature deaths. This version of the wet-nurse as contagion did not completely disappear with the dawn of the new century; it existed alongside the newly created figure of the beloved wet-nurse of old. Yet her contagions in 20th century literature were much more likely to be expressed in cultural terms, rather than in racial ones. That is, whatever deficiencies or diseases she represented were the result of social problems rather than her African heritage. Brazilian intellectualism was by then emerging from the pessimistic trap of climatic and racial determinism and reaching a more optimistic consensus. Physicians increasingly agreed that the “problematic” demographics and racially-integrated social relations of which the wet-nurse was a part did not necessarily doom the nation to incurable backwardness.

Physicians never argued that wet-nursing was the sole or even the primary cause of syphilis in Brazil although they did consider wet-nursing to be one of the principal methods of transmission to children. By the late 19th century, prominent physicians at Brazil’s two medical schools—in Bahia and in Rio de Janeiro—identified high infant mortality rates as a major impediment to national “progress” and urged governmental action. This article examines broad Brazilian patterns, while emphasizing the state of Bahia from which the majority of evidence for this analysis is taken. The rising concern over the supposed dangers of wet-nursing was one element of this new attention to infant health, yet the alarm over wet-nursing as a mode of transmitting syphilis, in particular, held greater significance as it united various intellectual strains on race, gender, sexuality, and nation. The heightened medical interest in syphilis and servitude reflected tensions related to political and social change in the late 19th century and to Brazil’s long-standing anxieties over race. Brazilian slavery’s slow death was finally complete in 1888 and the monarchy fell apart soon after, leaving intellectuals and politicians to ponder how the new Brazil could take its rightful place amongst the community of modern 20th century nations without the institution of slavery which had organized social, political, productive, and even familial relations for centuries. During this period, and well into the 20th century, intellectuals produced a wealth of medical scholarship, social science, and political treatises analyzing the contemporary state of Brazilian “civilization” and prescribing measures that would ensure a stronger nation in the future, populated by a supposedly better class of Brazilians. The issue of race was at the center of all of these debates as it was at the center of medical discourse about syphilis and servitude.

By the early 20th century, Brazilian intellectuals, including physicians, had reached a uniquely Brazilian “solution” to their racial anxieties in the face of universally negative assessments of the political and economic potential of predominantly black and mixed-race tropical nations. According to these new homegrown theories, Brazil’s racial composition may have created certain social complications, such as the prominence of diseases like syphilis, but it should not be considered an insurmountable obstacle if the nation could “whiten” itself both biologically and culturally. Renowned scholar Gilberto Freyre, and others, went even further than this already optimistic assessment by asserting that biological and cultural miscegenation was Brazil’s distinguishing feature and that each “primordial” race had made significant contributions to the national “character.” Freyre’s ideas are treated in detail at the end of this analysis because his highly influential work posited that the enslaved black wet-nurses and nursemaids of the colonial and imperial periods were principle characters in Brazil’s historical narrative: maternal figures that culturally and biologically united the descendants of the slave masters and the descendants of the slaves. Freyre’s arguments best illustrate this new faith in Brazil’s potential. Rather than being plagued by some inherent weakness or “mestiço degeneracy” as 19th century intellectualism claimed, Brazil’s cultural and racial hybridity embodied the best of diverse elements. This type of theorizing was clear in medical discourse as well, but none of it meant that physicians abandoned the notion that there was a problematic side to their blended society. Caregivers could still be incompetent, servants sexually promiscuous, and all disease-ridden.

With a spate of new literature, the medical understanding of syphilis was color-coded in novel ways in the early years of the new century, as experts began to see the disease as a result of a uniquely Brazilian hypersexuality that resulted from historical and contemporary race relations. While the wet-nurse became an important symbol of Brazilian cultural miscegenation, syphilis was implicated in the nation’s biological miscegenation. Miscegenation, therefore, was ironically both an asset to Brazil’s cultural development and a symptom of the excessive sexuality that kept Brazil behind more “civilized” nations. The concern over race and servitude took on an updated medicalized tone in the early 20th century, turning away from the explicitly racist 19th century theories and embracing more modern ways of thinking about social “problems” and degeneracy through disease. Thus, despite Brazilian medicine’s adoption of many French medical theories, this history of the domestic servitude, syphilis, and medical discourse is fundamentally Brazilian and not simply the story of the transfer of medical ideas and racial theories across national borders. Through debates about syphilis, public health, and family welfare, experts theorized about what the reorganization of society post-slavery and empire and the assumed loosening of deeply entrenched hierarchies would mean in medical terms for Brazilian development…

Read the entire paper here.

Sequencing the Trellis: The Production of Race in the New Human Genomics

Brown University
December 2003
185 pages

Brady Dunklee, Executive Director
ATRAVES US

In partial completion of the requirements for honors.

Note on the Title: “Trellis” refers to an analogy that NHGRI director Francis Collins uses to describe race and human evolution, emphasizing mixture between “races,” in opposition to evolutionary trees which emphasize divergence. “Sequencing” refers to the main activity of recent genomic research, and is meant to suggest both this activity and the differentiation of groups of people, which is the subject of this thesis.

Human genomic science has emerged in the past decade as a powerful new biological field, combining molecular and population genetics with advanced information technologies, allowing DNA sequencing and analysis in a rapid, high throughput fashion. In addition to producing a vast quantity of scientific data, the Human Genome Project and other efforts in human genomics have produced claims about the social implications of their work. The result has been a complex expert discourse on the nature of the human.

A particularly rich subset of this discourse has addressed the meanings, use and reality of race and ethnicity in light of new genomic knowledge. A great variety of positions on racial and ethnic difference have been put forth, best known of which is the contention that race is biologically meaningless.

This thesis shows that this claim is not the whole story. Genomic discourse has, since its beginnings, deployed and produced race in a constant, if variegated manner. A “technology of difference” has been produced, a set of terms, meanings, and ways in which knowledge is structured and authorized, whose collective action is to differentiate people racially and ethnically.

This thesis examines this technology of difference, showing that genomics is in fact making race, and demonstrating some of the ways in which it does so. My approach is an analysis of discourse, which addresses terminology, formal configurations and epistemology in the literatures produced by genomic scientists. The dominant characteristic in this discourse is instability. Meanings, forms, and claims shift and change on a variety of levels.

This thesis shows that surprising patterns can be seen in this instability, and that instability is itself a constitutive factor giving strength and cohesion to the genomic production of human racial and ethnic difference.

I suggest, further, that now is a crucial time for interventions to be made in the genomics of human difference. Those who want an end to race, or who want positive, livable transformations of race, can find both opportunity and danger in these new differentiations.

Table of Contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Table of Figures
• Inscriptions
• Thesis Statement…………………………………………………………………
• Introduction……………………………………………………………………………
  • I. Unifications
  • II. Divisions
  • III. Contexts
  • IV. Materials and Methods
• Chapter 1: Categories and Keywords in the Genomics of Race
  • I. Transferals
  • II. “Race” and “Ethnicity”
  • III. Populations, Groups and Communities
  • IV. “Minorities” and “Inclusion”
  • VI. Chapter Summary
• Chapter 2: Formal Configurations: Nested Proxies & Perspectival Phasing
  • I. Theoretical Framework
  • II. Making Difference Within Race
  • III. Making Difference Around Race
• Chapter 3: Instability and Discourse
  • I. Reading and Writing
  • II. Articulate Instability
• Chapter 4: Epistemology……………………………………………………………
  • I. Definitions and Methods
  • II. One Drop
  • III. White Normativity
  • IV. Racial Essentialism
  • V. Three Spaces
• Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………
• Bibliography

Table of Figures

• Figure I-1— Craig Venter of Celera Genomics, left, shakes hands with Francis Collins of NHGRI, right, at a ceremony at the White House, June 2000.
• Figure I-2 — Cover of Nature, February 15, 2001. The mosaic includes the faces of Mendel, Watson and the Beatles.
• Figure I-3 — Stills from “Exploring Our Molecular Selves,” a film produced by NHGRI as part of a free educational toolkit for high school students.
• Figure 1-1 — “Populations” and Race: “Not everyone’s smiling. A plan to study haplotypes in these populations is prompting angry words.”
• Figure 2-1 — Diagram of racial schema in Risch, et al. (2002).
• Figure 2-2 — Perspectival Differentiation in Collins (2003).
• Figure 4-1 — One Drop Rule and Founding Populations in genomics.

…At first glance, the appearance of these types of anti-race critiques appears to frustrate an attempt to theorize a mainstream of genomic ideas about race and ethnicity—they simply appear contradictory. It is my contention that they are contradictory on significant levels, but that they share a terminology, a set of discursive patterns, and a certain epistemology that allow them to resolve such contradictions, and unite them in making race.

Even when the term race is used as a “misconception,” race is configured in new ways with respect to genomic knowledge. Race is produced, as an entity that is purely mythical and controverted by this expert discourse. Race is made by genomicists into something new which is not genomic…

Read the entire thesis here.

Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2007
250 pages

Anne Pollock, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia

Submitted to the Program in Science, Technology and Society In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the History and Social Study of Science and Technology At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This dissertation is an examination of intersections of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease over the course of the 20th century and today. Each of these parts has had a dynamic history, and when they are invoked together they provide a terrain for arguments about interventions in health and in justice in the present.

An enduring aspect of discourses of heart disease over the past century has been articulating connections between characterizations of the modem American way of life and of heart disease. In that process, heart disease research and practice has participated in differentiating Americans, especially by race. This dissertation uses heart disease categories and the drugs prescribed for them as windows into racialized medicine.

The chapters are organized in a way that is roughly chronological, beginning with the emergence of cardiology as a specialty just before World War II and the landmark longitudinal Framingham Heart Study that began shortly thereafter. A central chapter tracks the emergence and mobilization of African American hypertension as a disease category since the 1960s. Two final chapters attend to current racial invocations of two pharmaceuticals: thiazide and BiDil. Using methods from critical historiography of race, anthropology, and science studies, this thesis provides an account of race in medicine with interdisciplinary relevance.

By attending to continuities and discontinuities over the period, this thesis illustrates that race in heart disease research and practice has been a durable preoccupation. Racialized medicine has used epistemologically eclectic notions of race, drawing variously on heterogeneous aspects that are both material and semiotic. This underlying ambiguity is central to the productivity of the recorded category of race. American practices of medicating race have also been mediating it, arbitrating and intervening on new and renewed articulations of inclusion and difference in democratic and racialized American ways of life.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Preoccupations with Racialized Modernity in Early Cardiology
• Chapter 3: Constructing and Supplementing Framingham’s Normal White Americans: The Framingham and Jackson Heart Studies
• Chapter 4: The Durability of African American Hypertension as a Disease Category
• Chapter 5: Thiazide and Racialization of a Generic Drug
• Chapter 6: BiDil: Medi©ating the Intersection of Race and Heart Failure
• Epilogue: Tracking Plural Noninnocent Discourses
• Works Cited

…Early Framingham investigators did their research in an all-white population, but they participated in larger conversations about black/white differences, too. The Framingham investigators themselves participated in the simultaneous constructions of hypertension and African American hypertension in the 1960s, an era that saw the ascendance both of hypertension as a risk factor and of the Civil Rights Movement. Their own study’s lack of inclusion of African Americans did not preclude their participation in arguments about racial differences in hypertension. Addressing “Environmental Factors in Hypertension” in a 1967 publication, the investigators wrote:

The principal population groups among whom blood pressures have been reported to be lower than among Americans and Europeans are various primitive peoples. The sample size has usually been small, especially in the older ages, and conclusions about age trends are complicated both by this fact, and by the fact that it is often not possible to accurately determine the age of the subjects. Among those population groups studied adequately, the following may be said:

Blood pressure distributions are similar among such diverse groups as: Caucasians living in Europe, the United States, and the West Indies; among Chinese living in Taiwan, and among Japanese in Japan.

Negro populations have higher blood pressures than whites living in the same areas and studied by the same investigators, particularly among females and in the older age groups. Distributions of blood pressures among Negro populations living in the United States and in the West Indies, whether rural or urban, high or low salt eaters, are similar. Their blood pressures are higher than those of Negroes in Liberia, a principal source of Negro migration to the Western Hemisphere. Admixture of the Negro races in the Western Hemisphere makes the interpretation of this data difficult. It is in this general background of unencouraging experience that the study of particular environmental factors, which could conceivably affect the blood pressure level, must be approached.

I will return to the question of African American Hypertension as a disease category in Chapter 4, but for now attend to other aspects of this quote. Here, we can see the distance between direct evidence or argument and the invocation of a common sense of racialization of cardiovascular disease. Although their phrasing evokes neutral grammars of data, there are no citations or evidence for these assertions about “Negro populations,” suggesting that the authors conceive of these statements less as arguments than as reflecting the consensus of the field. Unable to grapple with the embodied admixture that is not merely biological but also historical and cultural, much history is paved over in word choices such as “migration” to describe the slave trade and “admixture” to describe oppressive sexual relations under slavery.

Paucity of data is not actually the problem. The investigators make an odd claim about the cause of the difficulty of research into environmental causes of racial disease disparities: that “admixture” gets in the way of interpretation. Logically, assimilation would be the kind of mixing that would pose a problem for separating out environmental causes of disease by race, but the investigators lacked a language for cultural, in addition to biological admixture. The peculiarity of the investigators’ framing should alert us both to the fact of racialized hypertension’s existence at the nexus of the biological and the environmental, and that Framingham is telling both a white story and a universal one…

Read the entire dissertation here.

A Racialized Medical Genomics: Shiny, Bright and Wrong

RACE-The Power of an Illusion
July 2005

Robert Wallace, Postdoctoral Fellow
Public Health Phylogeography
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
University of California, Irvine

Armand Marie Leroi announces in his Times op-ed that race is biologically real (New York Times, March 14, 2005). The crusty trope that race is a social artifact crumbles in the face of the bright new genomics, he asserts. Genetic variation may be greater within groups than between groups, as Richard Lewontin pointed out back in the dark ages of the 1970s, but only for single genes. Taken together, across genetic loci allelic distributions correlate into clusters long recognized as the five races: European, East Asian, African, Amerindian, and Australasian. So suck it up, constructionists, race is biologically intrinsic.

Moreover, get out of the way. The recognition that race is inherently biological, Leroi writes, can improve medical care, “as different races are prone to different diseases.” African Americans, for example, suffer greater prevalences of heart disease and prostate cancer. Even if such differences arise from socioeconomic causes, Leroi argues, we should—ignoring the man behind the curtain—embrace geneticists’ very important mission, “searching for racial differences in the frequencies of genetic variants that cause diseases.”

And yet much of Leroi’s article unravels his own argument. Leroi takes population geneticists to task for caving into political correctness by investigating “ethnic groups,” a euphemism that conflates human differences across scale. Never mind that population geneticists prefer the term less out of deference to present sensibilities than to the data themselves. Work by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza’s group (Cavalli-Sforza 2001, Underhill 2003), among others, show human history—back to our species’ origins—to be marked by layers of migration sweeping back and forth across the continents, gurgling here and there into local pools of idiosyncratic admixture. While the resulting genetic frequencies do not embody a homogenous mush, neither does a stark black and white favored by the new racialists result. Instead, genetic maps are marked by fine-scaled and functionally important population gradients…

…For one, according to Leroi, the pharmaceutical companies. As race can affect medical treatment, “many new drugs are now labeled with warnings that they may not work in some ethnic or racial groups.” That such effects need not be predominantly biological in origin apparently matters little. Leroi admits differences among races arise from population averages alone. But as we are unlikely to have individuals’ genomes sequenced any time soon, and presumably won’t be able to individualize medical treatment that way, we’ll just have to accept a racialized medical genetics. Nothing like an argument of expediency to convince a crowd. The pharmaceutical companies are doing it, so get with it, baby!

Here, Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist, bumbles back into the typology the Darwinian revolution revoked. As Ernst Mayr (1976, 2004) explained, until the early 19th century biologists classified species in essentialist terms. A specific type or specimen defined a species and any variation from the type was considered deviant or unreal. In statistical terms, a centroid measure such as the mean phenotype defined the species, while the variance was thought noise. Typological definitions accounted for the differences among species and, without variation, explained the impossibility of evolution.

Darwin and his colleagues turned biology on its head. The population thinking they introduced emphasized the variation in populations. As natural history studies accumulated, it became apparent individual organisms varied in just about any and all characteristics, both across and within species. Individuals even changed over the course of their lifespans. Here, averages became thought of as constructs and the variances the reality. Variation’s reality proved fundamental to Darwin’s natural selection. The greater the variation in the population, the faster natural selection works and adaptations arise…

Read the entire article here.

“Racially-Tailored” Medicine Unraveled

American University Law Review
Volume 55, Number 2 (December 2005)
pages 395-452

Sharona Hoffman, Professor of Law, Professor of Bioethics, and Associate Director of the Law-Medicine Center
Case Western Reserve University School of Law

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• I. “Race-Based” Research and Therapeutic Practices
  • A. The Story of BiDil
  • B. “Race-Based” Research
  • C. A Growing Interest in “Race-Based” Medicine: Why Now?
• II. Does “Race” Mean Anything?
  • A. “Race” in the Medical and Social Sciences
  • B. “Race” and the Law
  • C. Shifting the Focus Away from “Race”
• III. The Dangers of “Racial Profiling” in Medicine
  • A. Medical Mistakes
  • B. Stigmatization and Discrimination
  • C. Exacerbation of Health Disparities
• IV. Violation of Anti-Discrimination Provisions
  • A. Constitution and Federal Civil Rights Laws
  • B. State Laws Prohibiting Discrimination in the Medical Arena
    • 1. Civil rights statutes
    • 2. Hospital and medical facility licensing requirements
    • 3. Patients’ bill of rights laws
    • 4. Public services regulation
    • 5. Insurance codes
  • C. Violation of Research Regulations and Guidelines
    • 1. NIH policy and guidelines
    • 2. Federal research regulations
  • D. Discrimination Theory
• V. Recommendations
  • A. Review of Research Studies by Scientific Review Boards and IRBs
    • 1. Scientific reviews
    • 2. Institutional review boards
  • B. Investigators and Health Care Providers
  • C. Public Discourse Concerning Attribute-Based Medicine:The Responsibilities of Investigators, Institutions, and the Media
• Conclusion

Introduction

F.D.A. Approves a Heart Drug for African-Americans. This June 2005 headline announced the arrival of BiDil, a heart failure edication that is approved for African-Americans only. BiDil is the first drug in pharmaceutical history that will constitute standard therapy for only one particular “race.”Health care professionals are becoming increasingly interested in “racebased” medicine in the research and therapeutic contexts. Many researchers are attempting to discern “racial” differences in disease manifestation, biological functioning, and therapeutic response rates. As this approach develops, physicians may prescribe different dosages of medication for people of separate “races” or may provide them with entirely different drugs. In light of the success of BiDil, investigators are also likely to pursue the development of additional “racially-tailored” medications. In fact, several academic and professional conferences have already devoted significant time to the discussion of “race-based” medicine. On April 18, 2005, the University of Minnesota hosted aconference entitled Proposals for the Responsible Use of Racial & Ethnic Categories in Biomedical Research: Where Do We Go From Here? Likewise, the Eighth World Congress on Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, held in 2004 in Brisbane, Australia, devoted an afternoon to ethnopharmacology.While “racial profiling” in medicine has generated significant discussion in medical and bioethics circles, it has thus far gained relatively little attention in legal literature. This Article aims to develop the discourse concerning this important topic. It argues that “race-based” medicine is an inappropriate and perilous approach. The argument is rooted partly in the fact that the concept of “race” is elusive and has no reliable definition in medical science, the social sciences, and the law.  Does “race” mean color, national origin, continent of origin, culture, or something else? What about the millions of Americans who are of mixed ancestral origins—to what “race” do they belong? To the extent that “race” means “color” in colloquial parlance, should physicians decide what testing to conduct or treatment to provide based simply on their visual judgment of the patient’s skin tone? “Race,” consequently, does not constitute a valid and sensible foundation for research or therapeutic decision-making.

Further, this Article contends that “racial profiling” in medicine can be dangerous to public health and welfare. A focus on “race,” whatever its meaning in the physician’s eye, can lead to medical mistakes if the doctor misjudges the patient’s ancestral identity or fails to recall that a particular condition affects several vulnerable groups and not just one “race.” The phenomenon can also lead to stigmatization and discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere if the public perceives certain “races” as more diseased or more difficult to treat than others. In addition, “racial profiling” could exacerbate health disparities by creating opportunities for health professionals to specialize in treating only one “race” or to provide different and inferior treatment to certain minorities. It could also intensify African-Americans’ distrust of the medical profession. Finally, “race-based” medicine might violate numerous anti-discrimination provisions contained in federal law, state law, and federal research regulations and guidelines…

…The Article will proceed as follows. Part I of the Article will describe “race-based” research and therapeutic practices and will examine the growing interest in “race-based” medicine and the reasons for it. Part II will argue that “race” is a concept that has no coherent meaning and that is potentially pernicious. Part III will focus on the dangers of “raciallytailored” medicine, and Part IV will analyze a variety of anti-discrimination mandates that could potentially be violated by the practice. Finally, Part V will detail recommendations for the development of attribute-based medicine in a manner that will promote the health and welfare of all population groups…

…This Article argues against substantial use of the concept of “race” in medical settings. A primary reason for this restriction is that “race” has no coherent meaning, and therefore, reliance upon it for research or treatment purposes can be confusing at best and can lead to significant adverse consequences at worst. This section will build the argument that based on medical science, the social sciences, and the law, “race” has no reliable definition or real meaning. Moreover, it is a pernicious concept that has been used to suggest that human beings can be divided into subspecies, some of which are morally, intellectually, and physically inferior to others. Thus, medical professionals should focus on more precise and meaningful aspects of human identity rather than on the amorphous concept of “race.”…

Read the entire article here.

English R1A: Keeping it Real?: Racial & Queer Passing in American Literature

University of California, Berkeley
Fall 2010

Rosa Marti­nez

“I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.”
—Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard

This course intends to explore the “art” of racial passing and masquerade in American literature and culture through a diverse sample of American novels and short stories, such as traditional narratives of black-to-white passing, which is historically prevalent particularly in African-American literature, and other modes of passing, for instance gender and ethnic ambiguity as well as posing and the “closeting” of one’s sexuality. What are the connections or disjunctions between “closeting,” posing, and crossing the gender or color line? By focusing on the trope of the passing figure, we will ask how people and imagined characters negotiate their identity in various and varying social spaces and also, how authors disclose the frailty of social order regarding sexuality, race and the body to make alliances in unimagined ways. Venturing out of the closet as another and as they please, these passing figures are, indeed, queer. Yet what are the personal costs in relinquishing a disfavored identity for a favored one?

This course intends to hone your reading and writing skills, and will focus on helping you make thoughtful questioning and “interesting use of the texts you read in the essays you write.” Through a gradual process of outlining, rewriting and revising, you will produce 32 pages of written work (including brief response papers and three 3-4 page argumentative essays).

Book List

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Naufragios (1542); William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860); Joseph Harris, Rewriting (2006); Nella Larsen, Passing (1929); Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894); a course reader containing critical readings.