Mixed Race Studies

Playing the Gene Card? A Report on Race and Human Biotechnology

Center for Genetics and Society
2009
95 pages

Osagie K. Obasogie, Associate Professor of Law
University of California, San Francisco
Also: Senior Fellow
Center for Genetics and Society

Preface by:

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Executive Summary

Race has become a prominent focus for human biotechnology. Despite often good intentions, genetic technologies are being applied in a manner that may provide new justification for thinking about racial difference and racial disparities in biological terms—as if social categories of race reflect natural or inherent group differences.

The Human Genome Project (HGP) and subsequent research showed that there is less than 1% genetic variation among all humans. Patterns of mating and geographic isolation over thousands of years have conferred genetic signatures to certain populations. Yet scientists have found little evidence to support lay understandings that social categories of race reflect discrete groups of human difference. While HGP findings initially led many to conclude that race (as it is commonly conceived and used) is not genetically significant, the hope that science would promote racial healing has largely not materialized.

In fact, trends in life science research have shifted the other way. There are increasing efforts to demonstrate the genetic relevance of race by mapping this less than 1% of variation onto social categories of race to find genetic explanations for racial disparities and differences.

From page 21

Figure 2: The essentialist and population concepts of race contrasted with the actual patterns of genetic variation (simplified to three geographic categories). Based on the work of Dr. Jeffrey Long at the University of Michigan and depictions created by the Race—Are We So Different? project of the American Anthropological Association.

A Essentialist concepts of race that were popular throughout the 19th and early 20th century held that the human species was divided into several mutually exclusive yet tangentially overlapping groups based largely upon physical features such as skin color and facial features.

B Population approaches treat race as clusters of local populations that differ genetically from one another, whereby each group is considered a race. As depicted, this concept suggests an outer periphery of unshared distinctiveness as well as substantial genetic similarity that is highlighted by the overlapping regions.

C Contemporary data on human diversity supports a “nested subset” approach to race. This reflects the fact that “people have lived in Africa far longer than anywhere else, which has allowed the population in Africa to accumulate more of the small mutations that make up [human] genetic variation. Because only a part of the African population migrated out of Africa, only part of Africa’s genetic variation moved with them. For this reason, most genetic variation found in people living outside Africa is a subset of that found among Africans.”

Many celebrate these developments as an opportunity to learn more about who we are and why certain groups are sicker than others. Yet some are struck by the extent to which these new conversations aimed at benefiting minority communities communities echo past discussions in which the science of biological difference was used to justify racial hierarchies.

Although this new research is rapidly evolving and is fraught with controversy, it is being used to develop several commercial and forensic applications that may give new credence to biological understandings of racial difference—often with more certainty than is supported by the available evidence. This unrestrained rush to market race-specific applications and to use DNA technologies in law enforcement can have significant implications for racial minorities:

• Race-based medicines have been promoted as a way to reduce inequities in healthcare and health outcomes. Yet the methodological assumptions behind them raise as many issues as the questionable market incentives leading to their development.
• Genetic ancestry tests rely on incomplete scientific methods that may lead to overstated claims. The companies that sell them often suggest that biotechnology can authoritatively tell us who we are and where we come from.
• DNA forensics have been used to exonerate those who have been wrongly convicted and can provide important tools for law enforcement. However, some forensic applications of genetic technologies might undermine civil rights—especially in minority communities.

While each of these applications has been examined individually, this report looks at them together to highlight a fundamental concern: that commercial incentives and other pressures may distort or oversimplify the complex and discordant relationship between race, population, and genes. Applications based on such distortions or oversimplifications may give undue legitimacy to the idea that social categories of race reflect discrete biological differences.

The concerns raised in this report should not be read as impugning all genetic research that implicates social categories of race. There is evidence that socially constructed notions of race may loosely reflect patterns of genetic variation created by evolutionary forces, and that knowledge about them may ultimately serve important social or medical goals. Yet, given our unfortunate history of linking biological understandings of racial difference to notions of racial superiority and inferiority, it would be unwise to ignore the possibility that 21st century technologies may be used to revive long discredited 19th century theories of race.

Advances in human biotechnology hold great promise. But if they are to benefit all of us, closer attention should be paid to the social risks they entail and their particular impacts on minority communities.

Contents

• Executive Summary
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Preface by Dorothy Roberts, Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law, Northwestern Law School
• Race Cards and Gene Cards: A Note About the Report’s Title
• Introduction | Are 21st Century Technologies Reviving 19th Century
  • Theories of Race?
  • How Have New Genetic Theories of Racial Difference Developed?
  • Context: After the Human Genome Project
  • Key Concern: Will Commercial and Forensic Applications Revive Biological Theories of Race?
  • In This Report
  • Sidebar: What Does It Mean to Say that Race Is Not Biologically Significant or that It Is a Social Construction?
• Chapter 1 | Race-Based Medicine: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back?
  • Pharmacogenomics: The Concept Behind Race-Based Medicine
  • First on the Scene: BiDil
  • Concerns about BiDil
  • Addressing Disparities in Health Through Race-Specific Pharmaceuticals
  • Conclusion: Evaluating Race-Based Medicine
  • Recommendations
  • Sidebars: Major Projects on Human Genetic Variation
    • Why Genetic Variations Matter
    • Top-Down Marketing to the Black Community
    • Historical Theories of Race
    • Are More Race-Based Medicines Around the Corner?
    • The Slavery Hypothesis
• Chapter 2 | Ancestry Tests: Back to the Future?
  • African American Ancestry
  • Context: Population Genetics
  • From Groups and Populations to Individuals
  • Techniques Used by Ancestry Tests
  • Concerns about the Genetic Ancestry Industry
  • Conclusion: Resisting Racial Typologies
  • Recommendations 30
  • Sidebars: Native Americans and Ancestry Tests
    • Race, Intelligence, and James Watson
    • Bioprospecting and Biopiracy
    • From Race to Population and Back
    • The Business of DNA Ancestry Testing
    • Special Types of DNA
    • Human Genetic Variation—A Work in Progress
• Chapter 3 | Race and DNA Forensics in the Criminal Justice System
  • How Does It Work?
  • How Reliable Are DNA Forensic Technologies?
  • DNA Databases
  • Cold Hits and Partial Matches
  • Whose DNA Is in These Databases?
  • Sifting DNA Databases to Catch Family Members
  • Predicting Criminality
  • Using DNA to Build Racial Profiles
  • Conclusion: Effects on Minority Communities
  • Recommendations
  • Sidebars: DNA Entrapment?
    • The Scandal in Houston
    • The Innocence Project
    • “The Informer in Your Blood”
    • Juking Stats
    • “The Birthday Problem” and the Limits of Forensic Database Matches
    • Minority Communities and the War on Drugs
    • Civil Liberties and DNA Databases
    • Phrenology, a Classic Pseudo-Science
• Conclusion
  • Racial Categories in Human Biotechnology Research
  • Race Impact Assessments
  • Responsible Regulation
• Endnotes
• About the Center for Genetics and Society

Read the entire report here.

A.C.T.O.R. presents Dorothy Roberts

Busboys and Poets
14th & V Streets, NW
Washington, D.C.
Langston Room
2012-10-07, 17:00-19:00 EDT (Local Time)

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Dorothy Roberts is author of “Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century.”

A.C.T.O.R. A Continuing Talk on Race – Open discussion. The A.C.T.O.R series is hosted by Busboys and Poets as a community service. This discussion  series provides the opportunity for people to come together and speak openly and honestly about issues of race.  The intent is that each person walks away from the discussion feeling something: challenged, educated, uncomfortable, enlightened, refreshed, reassured and hopefully inspired and moved to action!  Regular discussions take place the first Sunday  of each  month a new topic is discussed, with Busboys and Poets sponsoring a facilitator.

For more information, click here.

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

The New Press
Spring 2011
512 pages
6.125  x 9.25 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-59558-495-3

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

A powerful new argument from a leading intellectual that explores how today’s cutting-edge genetic science helps perpetuate inequality in a “post-racial” America

While embracing a racial ideology rooted in genetics, Americans are accepting a genetic ideology rooted in race that makes everyone responsible for managing their own lives at the genetic level instead of eliminating the social inequalities that damage our entire society.
—From Fatal Invention

A decade after the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes.

In this provocative analysis, leading legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts argues that America is once again at the brink of a virulent outbreak of classifying population by race. By searching for differences at the molecular level, a new race-based science is obscuring racism in our society and legitimizing state brutality against communities of color at a time when America claims to be post-racial.

Moving from an account of the evolution of race—proving that it has always been a mutable and socially defined political division supported by mainstream science—Roberts delves deep into the current debates, interrogating the newest science and biotechnology, interviewing its researchers, and exposing the political consequences obscured by the focus on genetic difference. Fatal Invention is a provocative call for us to affirm our common humanity.

Bodies with Histories: The New Search for the Biology of Race

Boston Review
May/June 2012

Anne Fausto-Sterling
Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Biochemistry, Program in Women’s Studies, and Chair of the Faculty Committee on Science and Technology Studies
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Richard C. Francis, Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance. W. W. Norton, $25.95 (cloth)

Ann Morning, The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference. University of California Press, $26.95 (paper)

Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. New Press, $29.95 (cloth)

Have you heard this one? A sociologist, a lawyer, and a biologist walk into a bar, scoot their stools up to the counter, order drinks, and begin to chat. Suddenly, a booming voice (God, the bartender?) envelops them. “What is the meaning of race?” the voice asks.

While the question may seem straightforward on its face, it quickly spawns further questions, often vexing. Is race purely a political construct, or is it biologically encoded? Certainly there are aspects of human biology—skin color, hair color, the presence or absence of epicanthic folds, etc.—that are commonly associated with racial differences, but is race just the sum of these physical features, with all of the overlaps, exceptions, and ambiguities they involve? How do genes factor into the story? And what connection—if any—is there between biological markers of race and the social experiences of racial groups?

Each of the three drinking buddies has a lot to say to God or Sam Malone, and, by the way, their responses don’t end in laugh lines. The biologist, Richard Francis, engages other issues, though his concerns directly affect how we answer the loud voice. But the sociologist, Ann Morning, and the lawyer, Dorothy Roberts, are narrowly focused on the science of race and how medicine mediates racial experience. And with good reason: in the United States people of a darker hue (on average) die sooner than pink-skinned people. They are afflicted with higher rates of particular diseases, such as high blood pressure, strokes, and kidney failure. So the race you’re born with, or, rather, which race you are born into, might mean a healthier, longer life—or not.

These days large numbers of medical research dollars are devoted to finding genetic differences between races that might explain health disparities. But many students of biology and race, and at least some of our bar mates, think that is a bad idea. They are not against medical research per se but against bad research. Instead of looking for genes that cause race and attending health outcomes (the standard approach) they point to evidence strongly suggesting that everyday events alter our bodies, making them sicker or more resistant to disease—events that the political economy ensures are more or less common depending on which racial categories one is assigned to. Indeed, it may be that biology doesn’t create race but that racial marking creates new biological states via processes that all three of these thinkers discuss in new books…

Read the entire review here.

Biologically, there is only one human race. Race applied to human beings is a social grouping; it is a system originally devised in the 1700s to support slavery and colonialism that classifies people into a social hierarchy based on invented biological, cultural, and legal demarcations.

Dorothy E. Roberts, “Breaking the Bonds of Race and Genomics,” GeneWatch, Volume 25, Issue 1 (January-February, 2012): http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/GeneWatch/GeneWatchPage.aspx?pageId=405.

Breaking the Bonds of Race and Genomics

GeneWatch
Volume 25, Issue 1 (January-February, 2012): Genetics in 20 Years

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Twenty years ago it appeared that mainstream science finally was abandoning the concept of biological human races. From 18th century typologists to 20th century eugenicists, scientists have always been instrumental in justifying the myth that the human species is naturally divided by race. But the rejection of eugenics after World War II and discoveries by human evolutionary biologists in subsequent decades brought hope that a new science of human genetic diversity would replace the old racial science. In 2000, the Human Genome Project, which mapped the entire human genetic code, confirmed the genetic unity of the human species and the futility of identifying discrete racial groups in the remaining genetic difference. Biologically, there is only one human race. Race applied to human beings is a social grouping; it is a system originally devised in the 1700s to support slavery and colonialism that classifies people into a social hierarchy based on invented biological, cultural, and legal demarcations.

But instead of hammering the last nail in the coffin of an obsolete system, the science that emerged from sequencing the human genome has been shaped by a resurgence of interest in race-based genetic variation. Some scientists claim that clusters of genetic similarity detected with novel genomic theories and computer technologies correspond to antiquated racial classifications and prove that human racial differences are real and significant. Others are searching for genetic differences between races that could explain staggering inequalities in health and disease as well as variations in drug response, with the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries poised to convert the new racial science into race-specific products. As we wait for the promise of gene-tailored medicine to materialize, race has become an avenue for turning the vision of tomorrow’s personalized medicines into today’s profit making commodities. While uncritically importing antiquated racial categories into research, the emerging racial science has a new twist—it claims to measure biological distinctions across races and “admixed” populations with more accurate precision, and without social bias…

Read the entire article here.

Dorothy Roberts Debunks Race as Biological in “Fatal Invention”

Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies
2012-01-15

Ytasha L. Womack, Contributor

Dorothy Roberts is author of the book Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New Press, 2011). She is also the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Northwestern University School of Law and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, with appointments in the departments of Sociology and African American Studies. Here she discusses the rise in identifying race as biological among some scientists.

Ytasha L Womack: Why did you write Fatal Invention?

Dorothy Roberts: I decided to write it because I have noticed resurgence in the use of the term race as a biological category. And also [I noticed] a growing acceptance among colleagues and speakers that race really is biological and somehow genomic science will soon discover the biological truths about race. The more I looked into it, I saw there were more scientists that said they discovered race in the genes, more products coming out showing that race is a natural division.

YLW: But race is not biological, it’s purely a political creation.

DR: I thought this trend [of race as biological] was supporting a false concept of race. But also, I was alarmed that knowing history; the biological construct of race has been used to obscure the political origin of racial inequality, to make it seem as if the reason people of color are disadvantaged in society is natural, as opposed to political and institutional.
It’s a very frightening development. We would accomplish so much more, if all the money that was going into race based genes were going into cleaning up the toxins in black neighborhoods that cause black people to get cancer and die, cleaning up education or basic health care for everybody.

YLW: Many people have a hard time accepting that race is a political creation and not biological, despite the years of proving otherwise…

…DR: There are studies to explain racial divisions in health that are actually caused by social inequalities. Yet you have researchers studying high blood pressure, asthma among blacks, etc. and looking for a genetic cause. However, research shows these [illnesses] are the effects of racial inequality and the stress of racial inequality.

YLW: So race based medicines, like a heart medicine for African Americans, are illogical, because since race isn’t biological, you can’t have a medicine targeting this group?

DR: Correct. Of those who say [race is biological], they usually point to sickle cell anemia, as proof that illnesses are race-based. Even if you look at these genetic diseases that seem to run along with race, it’s actually caused by environment. Sickle cell is an adaptation in areas with high rates of malaria. You find it in some areas of Africa, Asia and Europe. It’s not about race at all.

DR: To me it’s so obvious that race is a political category. Who is considered black, Asian, Indian, all these things changes depending on political circumstances and are determined by political markers. Yet people hold on to this idea that if scientist keep searching and searching they will find the divisions of a human species, and we’ve found it is a false pursuit…

Read the entire interview here.

Is Race-Based Medicine Good for Us?: African American Approaches to Race, Biomedicine, and Equality

The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics
Volume 36, Issue 3, September 2008
pages 537–545
DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-720X.2008.302.x

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

This article presents a preliminary framework for exploring the intersection of science and racial politics in the public debate about race-based pharmaceuticals, especially among African Americans. It examines the influence of three political approaches to race consciousness on evaluations of racial medicine and offers an alternative critique.

Read or purchase the article here.

Panel to discuss racism and medical issues

The Daily Bruin
University of California, Los Angeles
2012-02-10

Ariana Ricarte

The topic of racism in health care, genetics and other medical issues will be the central point of discussion at a panel in De Neve Auditorium on Saturday [13:00-15:00 PST].

The panel, called “Race in Medicine: A Dangerous Prescription,” will discuss disparities between people of different races in the health care system and the ways a patient’s ethnicity can affect decisions made by doctors and insurance companies. The event is hosted by UCLA’s Mixed Student Union, a student group founded in 2010 that aims to provide a safe and open environment for people of multiracial and multiethnic heritage, said chairwoman Camila Lacques.

The panel will go over topics such as the role of ethnicity in prescription medicine and bone marrow and stem cell transplants. When it comes to transplants, multiracial people have a more difficult time finding matches because of their unique genetic composition, said panelist Athena Asklipiadis…

[Note by Steven F. Riley: Everyone—except their identical twin—has an “unique genetic composition.”  Race is a social, not biological construction and as such, is not linked to genetics. Please read Dorothy Roberts excellent (and sobering) monograph on race and medicine titled, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century for more information.]

…G. Reginald Daniel, a panelist at Saturday’s event and a sociology professor at UC Santa Barbara, said he plans to focus on the positive and negative images applied to multiracial people, as well as talk about the issue in terms of genetic variety.

“I think people need to step out of mono-racial thinking,” Daniel said. “We need to see the connections we have with each other, whether we like it or not.”…

Read the entire article here.

Conference Keynote: White Privilege and the Biopolitics of Race

Understanding and Dismantling Privilege
Volume 1, Number 1 (2010)
16 pages
Online ISSN: 2152-1875

10th Annual White Privilege Conference Keynote Address
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Memphis, Tennessee

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Genomics has resurrected scientific interest in biological concepts of race by attempting to identify race at the molecular level. In that last decade, there has been an explosion of biotechnologies that use race as a biological category, such as race-specific pharmaceuticals, commercial genetic testing for determining racial identity and genealogy, egg donation and embryo selection involving race, and racial profiling with DNA forensics. These technological innovations are part of a new biopolitics of race that helps to maintain white privilege in the 21st century, post-civil rights era. We must contest both the persistent myth that race is natural and persistent injustices based on race.

…My question is: How is white privilege preserved yet made invisible in the twenty-first century? That’s the tricky thing about white privilege, right? It’s been imbedded in U.S. institutions for centuries and yet many people don’t see it. I think we always have to ask, how is it that white privilege persists today? What is the mechanism that obscures white privilege in our current day and age? What are the forces, the institutions, the ways of thinking that we have to contest? The White Privilege Conference quotes on its flier a brilliant observation by Martin Luther King Jr.: “The best way to solve any problem is to remove its cause.” But, of course, we can’t remove the cause of the problem if we misdiagnose it. One of the ways that white privilege is perpetuated in this country is by convincing people that it’s natural for white people to have a privileged position in society. That’s just the way it’s supposed to be.

Why do many people still believe that white privilege is natural? Why do they think it’s natural that our prisons are filled with black and brown people, that most of the children in foster care are black and brown, and that black and brown people die early deaths? How can all this inequality be natural? One way people are persuaded that inequality is natural is through a misunderstanding of genetics. On June 26, 2000, President Bill Clinton unveiled a working draft of the map of the human genome and famously announced, “I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that, in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.” We differ only in a very tiny percentage of our genes. This confirmed the American Anthropological Association statement that race is a social and cultural construction. I would say, race is a political construction. The human species cannot be divided into genetically distinct races. So many scientists and scholars believed that the misunderstanding of race as a biological category had ended. Everyone would realize that all human beings are fundamentally the same. White privilege would disappear because scientists had discovered that these divisions don’t exist at the genetic level. Well, what happened?…

…So what is the origin of race? Is it genetics or is it power? One way to think about it is to ask, is there a genetic test for whiteness? Many genetic researchers focus on people of color and what’s wrong with them. Why do they die at faster rates from so many diseases? Millions of dollars goes into this kind of research seeking the genetic cause for why different groups of people of color are so diseased. But there is not very much attention to this question: What’s the genetic test for white people? If the origin of race is in genetics, we should be able to tell this racial category by the genes.

Well, if there’s a genetic test for whiteness, then tell me who in Barack Obama’s family is white. A family photo from his childhood shows his mother, who is of Irish decent; the Indonesian man she married after she separated from Barack Obama’s father, who’s Kenyan; Barack Obama’s sister, whose parents are Barack Obama’s mother and his stepfather. Who in this picture is definitely white? Apparently, just his mother. But could you tell that from a genetic test? If you test them, Barack Obama and his little sister are the genetic children of a white mother. The only way you can determine that he is black or that she is Asian and not white is to use a political test; there is no genetic test that can decide it. More generally, the only way you can tell who is white is a political test because it is a political category: White means people who are entitled to white privilege. This is a contest that’s gone on in the United States for centuries—who will be included in this category? The answer has nothing to do with genetics. At one point Jewish people were not included in this category. Irish people were not included in this category (Painter, 2010)…

Read the entire keynote here.