Mixed Race Studies

How Not To Talk About Race And Genetics

BuzzFeed
2018-03-30

Micah Baldwin / Via Flickr: micahb37

Race has long been a potent way of defining differences between human beings. But science and the categories it constructs do not operate in a political vacuum.

This open letter was produced by a group of 68 scientists and researchers. The full list of signatories can be found below.

In his newly published book Who We Are and How We Got Here, geneticist David Reich engages with the complex and often fraught intersections of genetics with our understandings of human differences — most prominently, race.

He admirably challenges misrepresentations about race and genetics made by the likes of former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade and Nobel Laureate James Watson. As an eminent scientist, Reich clearly has experience with the genetics side of this relationship. But his skillfulness with ancient and contemporary DNA should not be confused with a mastery of the cultural, political, and biological meanings of human groups.

As a group of 68 scholars from disciplines ranging across the natural sciences, medical and population health sciences, social sciences, law, and humanities, we would like to make it clear that Reich’s understanding of “race” — most recently in a Times column warning that “it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races’” — is seriously flawed…

Read the entire letter here.

Technologies of Belonging: The Absent Presence of Race in Europe

Science Technology Human Values
Volume 39, Number 4 (July 2014)
pages 459-467
DOI: 10.1177/0162243914531149

Amade M’charek, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Katharina Schramm, Lecturer
Institute for Social Anthropology
Martin Luther Universität, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

David Skinner, Research Convener; Reader in Sociology
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, United Kingdom

In many European countries, the explicit discussion of race as a biological phenomenon has long been avoided. This has not meant that race has become obsolete or irrelevant all together. Rather, it is a slippery object that keeps shifting and changing. To understand its slippery nature, we suggest that race in Europe is best viewed as an absent presence, something that oscillates between reality and nonreality, which appears on the surface and then hides underground. In this special issue, we explore how race has been configured in different practices and how race-based identities and technologies are entwined in various European settings.

Read or purchase the article here.