Mixed Race Studies

Taking racism into account does not mean refusing to collect and classify data in medical research according to race and ethnicity. On the contrary, those classifications provide important epidemiological information, as Risch et al. maintain, about the impact of social and environmental factors—including socio-economic inequities and cultural biases—on the health of individuals and groups. As Troy Duster argues, the way to ‘recognize, engage, and clarify the complexity of the interaction between any taxonomies of race and biological, neurophysiological, society, and health outcomes’ is to consider ‘how science studies deploy the concept of race’. The story of how biotechnology is revolutionizing medicine has put genomic research very much into public consciousness and has made genetic explanations of health disparities among individuals and especially groups the ‘default position’. Distinguishing between genomic and social and environmental factors in disease susceptibility and drug response is notoriously difficult, especially since, as Keita et al. note, ‘some environmental influences can be so subtle and occur so early in life as to be missed . . . ’. Yet, that distinction determines how researchers and practitioners understand and address the problem of health disparities. ‘Race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are very different as surrogates for genomics and for social and environmental factors in the assessment of health outcomes, which is why the larger stories in which the research is embedded are scientifically and medically as well as socially relevant.

Priscilla Wald, “Blood and stories: how genomics is rewriting race, medicine and human history,” Patterns of Prejudice, Volume 40, Numbers 4
/5 (2006): 316.

Given the historical fact that White supremacy has been constructed by Whites for the benefit of Whites, White supremacy is routinely interpreted as a code word for White people. However, White supremacy is more than a collection of White people. As a system, many people participate in it, and as an ideology, many people think, feel, behave, and operate according to it, and in many ways defend and uphold it—White and “non-White” alike. The institution of colorism exemplifies how “non-Whites” serve to uphold White supremacy. For example, while most individuals who bleach their skin vehemently reject accusations that they desire to be White, and in fact are aware that no amount of chemical intervention will actually render them White nor will Whites, the gatekeepers to Whiteness, ever grant them access to the racial or social category, as they seek to gain access to the privilege that has historically been afforded to lighter skin as an approximation of Whiteness, they endorse the constructed superiority of Whiteness and thus White supremacy. As such, any true understanding of White supremacy must transcend focus on White people and physical White power alone. It must address White supremacy as an ideology and confront the psychological power of Whiteness.

Yaba Amgborale Blay, “Skin Bleaching and Global White Supremacy: By Way of Introduction,” The Journal of Pan African Studies, (Volume 4, Number 4, June 2011): 7-8.

In the past, the belief that human races had substantial and clearly delimited biological differences contributed to justify discrimination and was used to oppress and foment injustices, even within the medical context. The concept of race is still loaded with ideology and carries within it relationships of power and domination. It is similar to a banana peel: empty, slippery and dangerous.

S. D. J. Pena, “The fallacy of racial pharmacogenomics,” Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research, Volume 44, Number 4 (April 2011): 272.

White Supremacy is an historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples classified as “non-White” by continents, nations, and peoples who, by virtue of their white (light) skin pigmentation and/or ancestral origin from Europe, classify themselves as “White.” Although history illuminates the fabrication, changeability, and contingencies of Whiteness (e.g. the case of Irish and Italians once being denied entry into the White “race”), it is important to note that this global power system is structured and maintained not for the purpose of legitimizing racial categories as much as it is for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege. Thus, it has been Whites who have constructed racial categories based on the economic, political, and social aspirations of Whites, for the benefits of Whites (L. Ross, 1995). In this way, Whites define who is White; a definition that has changed and will likely continue to change based upon the particular economic, political, and social conditions of the moment (e.g. the case of Egyptians now being classified as White when they were once classified as Arab, and previously as Black). It is clear then that White supremacy is based less on racial Whiteness (as evidenced by skin color) than it is on ideological Whiteness—the exclusive value assigned that involves “a series of immunities, privileges, rights, and assumptions…” This [value is] not inherent, natural, or biologically determined. Rather [it reflects] artificial beliefs created by social, economic, and political conditions” (L. Ross, 1995).

Yaba Amgborale Blay, “Skin Bleaching and Global White Supremacy: By Way of Introduction,” The Journal of Pan African Studies, (Volume 4, Number 4, June 2011): 6-7.

Ethnicity and Stroke: Beware of the Fallacies

Stroke
Volume 31, Issue 5 (May 2000)
pages 1013-1015
DOI: 10.1161/​01.STR.31.5.1013

Osvaldo Fustinoni, MD
Departments of Neurology
University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina

José Biller, MD, Professor of Neurology and Neurological Surgery
Loyola University, Chicago

The role of ethnicity in stroke has been the subject of a considerable number of published reports. A quick Medline search detected 454 citations on “ethnicity and stroke,” 386 on “stroke in blacks,” 251 on “stroke in African Americans,” and 74 on “stroke in Hispanics,” of which only a few can be mentioned here. There even exists a journal dedicated to ethnicity and health.

However, the assumption that ethnicity is an isolated epidemiological variable delineating clinically distinct disease subgroups is controversial. The very concept of the word may be confounded with race (“black”), a common language or culture (“Hispanic”), a shared geographic origin (“Asian”), or a presumed common descent with diffuse boundaries (“Caucasian”). Ethnic categories are usually not defined in scientific reports, which results in dubious findings that are difficult to compare. The idea that a socially defined variable may reveal biological differences is fallacious, leading dangerously to biological determinism. For example, the genetic variation between races, traditionally classified on phenotype, is only slightly greater (10%) than that between nations (6%), and much larger within a local population (84%). Moreover, the genes responsible for skin color are few and are not associated with genetic markers for disease.

Ethnicity as a variable may be too greatly influenced by cultural attitude and therefore biased. In the past, this attitude led to the entire invention of diseases on the basis of race. At a time when the genetic inequality of races was considered obvious, the existence of these diseases was not questioned. In the present, ethnicity may be used euphemistically to avoid racist implications. A survey of 48 medical schools in the United States revealed that up to 91% of clerkship directors answered “yes” or “variable” after being queried whether students were taught by example to use the terms “black” or “white” when introducing case presentations. In another study, “black” patients were far more likely than “whites” to be racially identified at morning report. As recently as 1991, arterial hypertension has been related to skin color, even allowing for the fact that darker “blacks” may as a consequence be poorer and suffer more psychosocial stress.

Ethnic classification may vary from one community to another, as the perception of an ethnic group may be different across countries. As Caldwell and Popenoe put it, “what is black to someone from the United States may be white to a Brazilian or a Caribbean islander.” It may be added that the authors of the present editorial, both of European descent and born and raised in Spanish-speaking countries, would probably be classified as “Hispanic” in the US, although neither is of Spanish descent. Obviously, there is no such thing as a “Hispanic” ethnic group in Spain or Latin America.

Ethnicity is not a dichotomous variable, such as gender. How black is black? How is a person classified whose father is “white” and mother “black”? What about “mixed” grandparents? How does one classify a phenotypically “black” (by US standards) Spanish-speaking national from Central America? How are his children classified? Finally, how white is white? Do a Scot from Edinburgh and an Italian from Milan belong to the same ethnic group?…

…To avoid the shortcomings linked to classification, it has been proposed (and is now used in many reports) that patients entering population studies “self-classify” their ethnicity, assuming that “racial and ethnic categories are understood by the populations questioned.”

However, misinterpretation, confusion, and self-reclassification have been found in these cases. One striking example is that the category “South and Central American” was thought by respondents in one census to refer to natives of the south and central United States!…

…The consequences of flawed ethnicity research may lead to the assumption that ethnic minorities are an unhealthy social burden, that there are “ethnic” diseases which separate specific groups from the general population, that consequently they do not merit any further attention, and that “whites” are the “gold standard” of health. All this could do nothing but fuel racial prejudice…

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Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled

Louisiana State University Press
1994
496 pages
6.00 x 9.00 inches
12 halftones
Paperback ISBN: 9780807120705

Thadious M. Davis, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought; Professor of English
University of Pennsylvania

Nella Larsen (1891–1964) is recognized as one of the most influential, and certainly one of the most enigmatic, writers of the Harlem Renaissance. With the instant success of her two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), she became a bright light in New York’s literary firmament. But her meteoric rise was followed by a surprising fall: In 1930 she was accused of plagiarizing a short story, and soon thereafter she disappeared from both the literary and African American worlds of New York. She lived the rest of her life—more than three decades—out of the public eye, working primarily as a nurse. In a remarkable achievement, Thadious Davis has penetrated the fog of mystery that has surrounded Larsen to present a detailed and fascinating account of the life and work of this gifted, determined, yet vulnerable artist. Davis deftly situates the writer within the broader politics and aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance and analyzes her life and work in terms of the current literature on race and gender.

The Beginning and End of Nella Larsen’s Passing

The Common Room: The Knox College Online Journal of Literary Criticism
Volume 8, Number 1 (Spring 2005)

Sarah Magin

Nella Larsen’s novel Passing is centered on the character Clare Kendry, a light-skinned, biracial woman living as a white woman.  She has married a white man who knows nothing of her race and enjoys all the social comforts of being white.  In this way, this novel breaks down the thematic binary of black and white with its depiction of racial passing.  In addition to the reconstructed as fluid binary of black and white, Larsen’s novel simultaneously explores the thematic binary of homosexuality and heterosexuality.  Deborah McDowell observes of the racial issues of Passing that  “underneath the safety of that surface is the more dangerous story–though not named explicitly–of Irene’s awakening sexual desire for Clare” (xxvi). Corinne Blackmer notes that the encounter between Irene and Clare “instigates a potent desire in her, described in an effusive letter intertwining romantic and racial longings for Irene” (52).  Thus, not only does Passing make fluid the binary of black and white, but also that of heterosexual and homosexual.  Further, the novel also renders fluid the apparently solid barrier of class.  Biman Basu observes that “Clare Kendry’s passing. . . is predicated on a crossing over into otherwise barricaded economic zones” (384).  Neil Sullivan summarizes, usefully, that “For Larsen”  “‘race’ is inextricable from the collateral issues including class, gender and sexuality, and rivalry-that bear upon the formation of identity” (373).  This introduces the concept that these fluid binary oppositions of race, sexuality and class are themselves interlinked under the larger rubric of identity formation…

Read the entire article here.

Nella Larsen’s ‘Passing’ and the Fading Subject

African American Review
Volume 32, Issue 3 (Fall 1998)
pages 373-386

Neil Sullivan

. . . Irene Redfield wished, for the first time in her life, that she had not been born a Negro. For the first time she suffered and rebelled because she was unable to disregard the burden of race. It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one’s own account, without having to suffer for the race as well. It was a brutality, and undeserved. Surely, no other people were so cursed as Ham’s dark children. (Passing 225)

Although many critics have accused Nella Larsen of using race as a pretext for examining other issues, Passing (1929), her second novel, is profoundly concerned with racial identity. In “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Barbara Smith cautions critics about the danger of ignoring “that the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of Black women writers” (170). For Larsen, too, “race” is inextricable from the collateral issues – including class, gender, sexuality, and rivalry-that bear upon the formation of identity. “Passing,” of course, alludes to the crossing of the color line that was once so familiar in American narratives of “race,” but in Larsen’s novel the word also carries its colloquial meaning – death. Thus Passing’s title, like the title of Larsen’s earlier Quicksand, hints at the subject’s disappearance in the narrative, or the possibility of aphanisis, which Jacques Lacan defines in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis as the disappearance of the subject behind the signifier. For Irene Westover Red field and Clare Kendry Bellew, the “twin” protagonists of Passing, the obliterating signifier is nigger, a word that comes to encapsulate their struggle with the conflicts of American racism and assimilation. The narrative representation of these conflicts also suggests at a symbolic level Larsen’s repetition and working through of her own anxieties about the rejection she experienced as a result of her racial identity.

Her hazy origins and almost traceless “disappearance” differentiate Larsen from the other authors of the Harlem Renaissance, but not from the characters of her own novels. Until the publication of the 1994 biography by Thadious Davis, Nella Larsen’s life was shrouded in silence; not even the year of her birth was certain. Davis’s project was “to remove the aura of mystery” from Larsen’s life (xix), an aura that often resulted in critics’ presentation of Larsen as inscrutable Other. But with the details unearthed in her extensive research, Davis reveals that Nella Larsen was deeply scarred by the reality of racism; her seeking of celebrity as a writer was in fact a symptom of the need for recognition and validation, something which she never received as a child and only tenuously as a young adult (Davis 10). As the daughter of the Danish immigrant Marie Hansen and the African American Peter Walker, Larsen was already doubly marginalized in American society, but when her mother remarried a white man (also a Danish immigrant), Larsen found herself so excluded from the family that her mother did not even report her existence to census takers in 1910 (Davis 27). The Larsens orchestrated their dark daughter’s absence from their Chicago home by sending her to the Fisk Normal School in Nashville when she was only fifteen, and when the money ran out a year later, Marie Larsen apparently asked the sixteen-year-old Nella (then Nellie) to make her own way in the world. Larsen vanished temporarily, resurfacing three years later at the Lincoln Training Hospital in New York City as a student nurse, where, according to Davis, she began her ascent into the black middle class all alone (66, 70-72).

Larsen’s childhood rejection was seemingly reiterated in her 1919 marriage to Elmer S. Imes, which ended in a much-publicized divorce in 1933. As Ann Allen Shockley explains, the deterioration of the marriage was accelerated by the overt antipathy felt by Larsen’s light-skinned mother-in-law and, significantly, by Imes’s indiscreet affair with Ethel Gilbert, a white staff member at Fisk University, where Imes taught physics (438). “He liked white women,” several of Imes’s friends remarked to Thadious Davis in explanation of his betrayal of Nella Larsen (362). It is hardly incidental in Larsen’s construction and subsequent dissolution of identity that the rivals for her husband’s affection were both “white” women, and that she could therefore attribute the second major rejection in her emotional life to her inability to be sufficiently white. Although there were many problems in the Larsen-Imes union, the divorce contains the hint of another command to “turn white or disappear,” the imperative that Frantz Fanon suggests is implicit in all interracial dialogue (100). In effect, the rejections by her family and by her husband, exacerbated by the “problem of authorship” stemming from charges of plagiarism in the “Sanctuary” affair (Dearborn 56), destroyed the identity Larsen consciously cultivated during the 1920s, and provoked her disappearance from public life.

Perhaps because Larsen discovered Imes’s affair with Ethel Gilbert during the composition of Passing (Davis 324), her desire for recognition and fear of rejection surface in the characters Clare Kendry and Irene Red field. In Passing, Irene and Clare are tyrannized by the Other’s desire, and though their relationship is complicated by issues of gender and sexuality, the dynamics of white racism and the demands of assimilation dictate the lives of the two women. White racism ultimately defines their lives in the word nigger, and that definition determines the limits of their lives; in other words, it over-determines their ends—narratively and otherwise…

Read the entire article here.

Against racial medicine

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 40, Numbers 4
/5 (2006), Special Issue: Race and Contemporary Medicine
pages 481-493
DOI: 10.1080/00313220601020189

Joseph L. Graves Jr., Dean of University Studies; Professor of Biological Sciences
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Greensboro

Michael R. Rose, Director of the University of California Network for Experimental Research on Evolution; Professor of Biological Sciences
University of California, Irvine

Some scholars claim that recent studies of human genetic variation validate the existence of human biological races and falsify the idea that human races are socially constructed misconceptions. They assert that analyses of DNA polymorphisms unambiguously partition individuals into groups that are very similar to lay conceptions of race. Furthermore, they propose that this partitioning allows us to identify specific loci that can explain contemporary health disparities between the supposed human races. From this, it appears that racial medicine has risen again. In this essay Graves and Rose construct a case against racial medicine. Biological races in other species are strongly differentiated genetically. Because human populations do not have such strong genetic differentiation, they are not biological races. Nonetheless, the lack of population genetic knowledge among biomedical researchers has led to spuriously racialized human studies. But human populations are not genetically disjoint. Social dominance may lead to medical differences between socially constructed races. In order to resolve these issues, medicine should take both social environment and population genetics into account, instead of dubious ‘races’ that inappropriately conflate the two.

Racial medicine has risen again

Charles B. Davenport, one of the most respected scientists of the first decades of the twentieth century, argued that laziness was a hereditary trait. Davenport claimed in particular that laziness was a heredity character of Southern Whites. Later epidemiological studies determined that ‘white trash’ laziness was actually the result of heavy infections caused by the nematode necator americanus.  But, for Davenport and many other biologists of his time, the phenotypic differences displayed by particular populations were proof positive of the existence of human races. They believed that these races differed in readily observable features, such as skin colour and body proportions, and also in those they could not directly observe, such as intellect, morality, character, disease predisposition and resistance. In 1921, for example, Ernest Zimmerman published a report on differences in the manifestation of syphilis in Blacks and Whites. Such thinking helped to sanction the now infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment.  Modern biologists recoil with horror when asked to revisit this sad episode in the history of science.

The rationale for the Tuskegee experiment was the underlying assumption that the Negro was genetically inferior to Whites. Thus, the perceived differences in incidence rates and progression of disease were thought to reside in characteristics intrinsic to the race, as opposed to the social conditions under which visibly darker-skinned persons of African descent lived in the United States. (It is significant that many ‘white Americans’ have African ancestors but ‘pass as white’, an anomaly to which we will return below.) Therefore, the Tuskegee experiment suffered not only from its moral shortcomings, but also from poor experimental design. The results of the experiment could not have distinguished between any genetically based difference in disease progression, since many environmental and social differences between African Americans and the Swedish cohorts with which they were to be compared were not properly controlled. With hindsight, the scientific problems of this experiment are obvious. What is not recognized is that modern discussions of race and medicine have not moved very far beyond the misconceptions that gave birth to the Tuskegee research programme...

…The identification of human races is not based on cogent biology

While humans have always recognized the existence of physical differences between groups, they haven’t always described those differences in racial terms. Racial theories of human differentiation were not a consistent theme of the ancient world, and really did not begin to flourish until after the European voyages of discovery in the fifteenth century. European naturalists of the eighteenth century were divided about the characterization of human differences. Almost all agreed that there was only one human species, yet they disagreed about whether there was a legitimate way to rank the various groups of humans hierarchically. For example, Carl Linneaus’s Systema Naturae (1735) classified human races partly on the basis of subjectively determined behavioural traits. It is not clear, however, what Linnaeus meant by the use of the term ‘race’. It seems that his classification scheme was describing subspecies of humans based on morphological features. According to it, European traits were clearly superior to others, and Africans were assigned the lowest rung in the hierarchy.

Such racist ideas were transplanted to America during colonial times, along with other biological absurdities. During American chattel slavery, the socially defined race of the offspring of slavemasters and slave women was ‘Negro’. Virginia law classified Eston Hemmings, who was 87.5 per cent European according to genetic ancestry, as ‘Negro’. Geneticists now suspect that Thomas Jefferson was his father, based on family genealogies and a genetic marker specific to the Jefferson family found in Eston’s descendants.

The one-drop rule (also called ‘hypo-descent’) in the United States differs from definitions of ‘blackness’ in Canada, Mexico, Britain and Brazil. Individuals, therefore, could move from one country to another and be classified differently according to the social custom. Indeed, in the United States, individuals have been born as a member of one race and died as a member of another. European ethnic groups, such as the Irish and Italians, did not become ‘white’ until the twentieth century. Such ‘races’ are clearly based on social conventions, as opposed to biological measures of genetic ancestry. Socially produced racial ideology from the very beginning influenced the collection and interpretation of data relating to human biological variation…

Read the entire article here.

Blood and stories: how genomics is rewriting race, medicine and human history

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 40, Numbers 4
/5 (2006), Special Issue: Race and Contemporary Medicine
pages 303-333
DOI: 10.1080/00313220601020064

Priscilla Wald, Professor of English and Women’s Studies
Duke University

In 2003 Howard University announced its intention to create a databank of the DNA of African Americans, most of whom were patients in their medical centre. Proponents of the decision invoked the routine exclusion of African Americans from research that would give them access to the most up-to-date medical technologies and treatments. They argued that this databank would rectify such exclusions. Opponents argued that such a move tacitly affirmed the biological (genetic) basis of race that had long fuelled racism as well as that the potential costs were not worth the uncertain benefits. Howard University’s controversial decision emerges from research in genomic medicine that has added new urgency to the question of the relationship between science and racism. This relationship is the topic of Wald’s essay. Scientific disagreements over the relative usefulness of ‘race’ as a classification in genomic medical research have been obscured by charges of racism and political correctness. The question takes us to the assumptions of population genomics that inform the medical research, and Wald turns to the Human Genome Diversity Project, the new Genographics Project and the 2003 film Journey of Man to consider how racism typically inheres not in the intentions of researchers, but in the language, images and stories through which scientists, journalists and the public inevitably interpret information. Wald demonstrates the importance of understanding those stories as inseparable from scientific and medical research. Her central argument is that if we understand the power of the stories we can better understand the debates surrounding race and genomic medicine, which, in turn, can help us make better ethical and policy decisions and be useful in the practices of science and medicine.

To understand how genomic research can reproduce racism, it is necessary to understand how racism is articulated through that research as it is practised in the context of particular social formations. The articulation is produced through stories of race and genomic research, which take many forms as they make their way from the scientific community to the general public. Stories about the research reach public consciousness through such controversial decisions as the NHGC databank as well as through the discoveries and innovations emerging from the labs of pharmaceutical companies, universities and federal institutions. Accounts of genomic research offer exciting promises, ranging from new explanations (and treatments) for some of the most feared medical problems, from cancer to avian flu, to new ways of understanding (and managing) human behaviour. They also capture the public imagination with claims of new discoveries that offer insight into the mysteries of human origins and human history, and the genealogies of individuals as well as groups. The claims and promises fuse in the stories of genomic research broadcast in the mainstream media, and they in turn influence policy and funding decisions and help to shape future research. These stories are fundamental in the production of scientific and medical knowledge and, therefore, as I argue in what follows, attention to them needs to be incorporated into scientific and medical research.

…Genomic information is notoriously difficult to interpret even by researchers in the field. The frequency of alleles that mark genetic drift—the the rate of genetic changes resulting from mutations, or divergent alleles, in relatively inbred populations—tells where and when there was a divergence within a group. Those alleles are used to mark ancestry. But, as Michael J. Bamshad and Steve E. Olson note, ‘how groups are divided depends on which genes are examined; simplistically put, you might fit into one group based on your skin-color genes but another based on a different characteristic’.  The DNA that yields information about one’s ancestry—typically mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA—in fact tells only part of the story of genetic ancestry. The complexity of nuclear DNA does not yield sufficiently clear information to complete it. Moreover, as Jay Kaufman has pointed out, Risch et al. ’s study relies on the dismissal of ‘intermediate groups’, such as ‘Hispanic Americans’, whom Risch et al. acknowledge could ‘aggregate genetically with Caucasians, Native Americans, African Americans or form their own cluster’ and are therefore ‘not easily classified’, but the size of those groups attenuates their claims. They are too large to be dismissed as an exception. Intermixture is increasingly the rule…

…Pointing an accusatory finger at ‘political correctness’ not only deflects the scientific dispute, but also ignores the medical importance of the social consequences of racism, measured in health outcomes. Drawing a stark contrast between medical science and social concerns, a distinction that Risch et al. ’s article itself troubles, that accusation renders social concerns suspect except as they provide epidemiologically useful information. Neither Wade nor Risch et al . address what constitutes epidemiologically useful information. Risch et al. dismiss potential abuses of genomic information (such as those that fuel racism) as unscientific, arguing

that identifying genetic differences between races and ethnic groups, be they for random genetic markers, genes that lead to disease susceptibility or variation in drug response, is scientifically appropriate. What is not scientific is a value system attached to any such findings.

But this assertion presumes that science and medicine can be divorced from their social contexts and that information circulates in value-neutral terms. History does not support that presumption, and calling racism ‘not scientific’ does not address the value system or alleviate the problems—including health outcomes—associated with it…

…Taking racism into account does not mean refusing to collect and classify data in medical research according to race and ethnicity. On the contrary, those classifications provide important epidemiological information, as Risch et al. maintain, about the impact of social and environmental factors—including socio-economic inequities and cultural biases—on the health of individuals and groups. As Troy Duster argues, the way to ‘recognize, engage, and clarify the complexity of the interaction between any taxonomies of race and biological, neurophysiological, society, and health outcomes’ is to consider ‘how science studies deploy the concept of race’. The story of how biotechnology is revolutionizing medicine has put genomic research very much into public consciousness and has made genetic explanations of health disparities among individuals and especially groups the ‘default position’. Distinguishing between genomic and social and environmental factors in disease susceptibility and drug response is notoriously difficult, especially since, as Keita et al. note, ‘some environmental influences can be so subtle and occur so early in life as to be missed . . . ’. Yet, that distinction determines how researchers and practitioners understand and address the problem of health disparities. ‘Race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are very different as surrogates for genomics and for social and environmental factors in the assessment of health outcomes, which is why the larger stories in which the research is embedded are scientifically and medically as well as socially relevant…

Read the entire article here.