Mixed Race Studies

Editorial: Implications of racial distinctions for body composition and its diagnostic assessment

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
Volume 71, Number 6 (June 2000)
pages 1387-1389
Print ISSN: 0002-9165; Online ISSN: 1938-3207

Noel W. Solomons, Scientific Director and co-Founder
Center for Studies of Sensory Impairment, Aging and Metabolism (CeSSIAM)

Shiriki Kumanyika, Professor of Epidemiology
University of Pennsylvania

In a truly just and equitable society, the welfare of all would be fulfilled. In a “colorblind” society, the health and nutritional needs of few would be satisfied. A conservative trend toward “colorblindness” in the public and political domain (eg, efforts to end affirmative action) emanates from tactics to hide the social stratification barriers that continue to preclude the full achievement of equity. Public health scientists and social epidemiologists entertain colorblindness as a defense against nonsensical ethnic comparisons that might, inadvertently, perpetuate rather than help to redress effects of racism (1). However, colorblindness denies the reality that people do come in different shades and that these shades have been a basis for much social stratification and discrimination—often with a premium on being lighter-skinned or white (2).

In their comprehensive review article in this issue, “Measures of body composition in blacks and whites: a comparative review,” Wagner and Heyward (3) have done a service for the readership by highlighting differences in various measures of body composition between people designated as ‘black’ or ‘white.’ By reviewing, accepting, and publishing the treatise, the Journal has also served its readers well with respect to fostering a continued discourse on this troublesome issue of how ‘race’ influences the science and applications of nutrition. “Race is inconvenient for objectivity-seeking scientists, because it is an ill-defined, misused, and politically-charged concept (2).” Nevertheless, as we noted previously (4–6), being able to entertain—with eyes wide-open and with rigorous methods—scientific hypotheses about differences between people of European and African heritage has important, enduring public health implications. Avoiding the issue of race or approaching racial issues timidly might make for convenient politics, but it may result in bad science and even worse policy.

Wagner and Heyward (3) portray the ambiguities in the interplay among evolving body-composition techniques and different amounts and densities of fat, muscle, and skeleton across ‘races’ in black and white relief. On close reading, their point is not so much that blacks and whites are different, but that the way that body-composition techniques are used requires more attention to human diversity. They acknowledge that the monolithic classifications of whiteness and blackness obscure biological experiences and differentiation, and that the concept of distinct (ie, genetically homogenous) racial subgroups among humans has now been rejected in the field of anthropology. It is worth commenting further on what these observed differences between blacks and whites might actually signify on a strictly biological level. For example, most of the studies reviewed by Wagner and Heyward contrast blacks and whites from North America, yet to generalize the findings from US black and white subpopulations to those of Europeans and Africans is too far a stretch of the scientific imagination. Cross-cultural studies within populations of African descent cited by Wagner and Heyward (3) show clearly that ‘black’ subjects in the United States are not identical to their contemporary Caribbean and West African brethren.

…The US Census Bureau once attempted to capture the reality of admixture between people of African and European descent by including the designation mulatto (a person who was three-eighths to five-eighths black), quadroon (a person who was one-quarter black), and octoroon (a person who was one-eighth black) (7). However, throughout most of American history, the conventional “racial” semantics have favored a binary schema in which people with any identifiable proportion of African ancestry were classified as ‘black’ and in which a rather heterogeneous set of light-skinned people were classified as ‘white’ (7). Thus, what began as the stark polarization of “freeman” or “slave” in colonial America has remained in binary terms throughout postbellum history. This lumping of all people with any African ancestry together as ‘blacks’—although not done universally, eg, in Brazil—has never been challenged successfully in the United States, perhaps because of a fundamental resistance to acknowledging that admixture has occurred between people of African and European descent from slavery onward. As a reminder, we have the recent controversy over whether Thomas Jefferson’s descendants from his slave consort should be admitted to the Jefferson family burial grounds to eternally rest beside descendants of his Anglo, patrician wife. The Howard University sociologist E Franklin Frazier, a prominent dissenter of binary polarization, proposed the 3 classifications black proletariat, brown middle class, and yellow aristocracy (8). This classification system, while capturing a real stratification within the African-American population, was also a not-so-subtle commentary on the direct relation of admixture with European blood to social status. The binary classification may be salient for describing the effective social meaning of ‘race’ in US society—privilege associated with not having and disadvantage associated with having African ancestry…

Read the entire editorial here.