Mixed Race Studies

The analysis of these examples from Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico reveals how crucial the nation is as a frame for understanding the way racialized concepts get reiterated and reworked in genomic science, in ways that make race both disappear and reappear. Public health, multiculturalism, and forensics are all political and policy domains that directly invoke the biopolitical nation and its people in terms of their well-being, their diversity and unity, and their biological relatedness in procreation, violence, and death. The governance of these domains is of central interest to the state. Genomics also intervenes in these domains, with the promise of better health for the nation’s people, representations of both diversity and unity, and techniques for connecting bodies in ways that, it is hoped, will lead to reconciliations and peace. The idea of race, in previous times, figured explicitly in the way all these domains were conceptualized in all three countries—los problemas de la raza, to recall the title of the 1920 Colombian book cited earlier on, concerned precisely health, progress, unity, diversity, and conflict in the nation. Race was of course not the only factor to be considered—violent conflict, for example, also followed cleavages of class, region, religion, or political faction—but it was an important way of thinking about difference and the problems it might cause within the nation. The demise of race as an explicit discourse for talking about these matters did not mean that racialized concepts disappeared. Geneticists and medics continued to be interested in the racial mixture of their national populations in relation to public health, cultural commentators continued to reflect on diversity in terms of black, indigenous, and mestizo cultural traits, and indeed forensic scientists continued to classify bodies in more or less explicitly racial terms. Genomics, characterized by its very detailed examination of the structure of DNA sequences, generally rejects a language of race, both biologically and, in Latin America, socially. Brazil, where color/race labels operate in some domains, is a partial exception, while also being the country where the most vocal rejection of race is to be found. Yet, as we have seen, racialized concepts continue to appear implicitly (and occasionally more explicitly) in genomic analysis and are frequently harnessed to the idea of the nation.

Peter Wade, Vivette García Deister, Michael Kent, María Fernanda Olarte Sierra, and Adriana Díaz del Castillo Hernández, “Nation and the Absent Presence of Race in Latin American Genomics,” Current Anthropology, 55, no. 5 (October 2014): 506. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/677945