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In Research Involving Genome Analysis, Some

See a 'New Racism'
The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2014
Byline: Paul Voosen
For a few years, the biological notion of race seemed dead and gone.
It was one of the high points of President Bill Clinton's speech in 2000 announcing the near completion of
research to sequence the structure of human DNA: "One of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant
expedition inside the human genome," he said that day in the East Room, "is that in genetic terms, all
human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same."
Yet just a few years later, genome scientists began to see that, while humanity's genome is deeply shared,
it is possible to group some DNA segments by their continental origin-African, European, Asian, Native
American. Such DNA biomarkers seemed useful in the hunt for the genetic basis of disease. It made little
sense for scientists, typically acting out of concern for health disparities, not to take those differences into
account to increase their studies' statistical power.
This awareness that DNA can be so sorted has prompted a crisis in the social sciences, however, where it's
a truism that race is entirely a social construct. The response has been mixed, only just beginning, and is
documented in Catherine Bliss's book Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice
(http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=20299) (Stanford University Press, 2012).
"The big irony here is that in trying to improve U.S. race relations and minority health, we've come full
circle," Bliss, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at San Francisco, said at the
American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in February. By using race-aware policies in
the hope of ending health disparities in the country, she said, scientists were unwittingly causing a "new
racism." The upshot, she contended, is that research on social and economic causes of health disparities
was not receiving enough attention.
Others have taken the argument further. Kathleen J. Fitzgerald, a sociologist at Loyola University New
Orleans, argues in a recent paper, (http://has.sagepub.com.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/content/38/1/49.abstract)
published in Humanity & Society, that the "resurgence of biological notions of race" is fueled by a "white
perception of a threat to their social dominance." Her case, however, is painted in broad strokes and
engages in a fair amount of mind reading when it comes to motives.
On the flip side, several researchers have taken up the challenge of more accurately describing what this
genomic information conveys. In the journal Race and Social Problems, Rick A. Kittles, an associate
professor of medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago, points out
(http://link.springer.com.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/article/10.1007%2Fs12552-013-9094-x) that race continues to
lack "biological integrity" in light of these discoveries, as most human genomes are made up of DNA
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segments that traveled across several continents, not just one. Far better to speak in terms of genetic
ancestry, he says. (That's the language used by Barnes, Hernandez, and other researchers mentioned in
the accompanying article.) A concept like that does not carry race's baggage, and points toward productive
areas of biological research.
You can go even further, (http://stx.sagepub.com.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/content/30/2/67.abstract) says Jiannbin
L. Shiao, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, in Sociological Theory. The social
sciences should replace their biology-based rejection of race "with a version of the feminist distinction
between biological sex and socially constructed gender," he writes. With several co-authors, he has
developed a concept called "clines," adapted from how economists talk about social class, which reflects
the continuous nature of human variation while allowing loose clusters to develop, depending on how you
zoom into the data.
Recognizing any biological notion of race is a risk, he adds, because it could present a back door to
biological racism. But it's one worth taking to explore the "thoroughly entangled" nature of culture and
biology.
Perhaps most helpful is a paper
(http://perspectivesinmedicine.cshlp.org.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/content/3/11/a008573.short) in Cold Spring
Harbor Perspectives in Medicine by Richard S. Cooper, a professor of community and family medicine at
Loyola University Medical School, detailing how the narrative of race has wandered "the border territory
between what we call science and what we recognize as history and politics." Africa, he reminds the reader,
is the source of all human genetic diversity; it is the reference population. All of humanity is a subset.
"Variation among geographic populations is real, and study of its origins can yield important biological
insights," he writes. "But there are no categories of race that segment human populations, and there are no
mysterious qualities 'in the blood' that justify the belief in racial superiority."
By Paul Voosen
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2014 Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc.
http://www.chronicle.com.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu

Source Citation
Voosen, Paul. "In Research Involving Genome Analysis, Some See a 'New Racism'." The
Chronicle of Higher Education 60.28 (2014). Biography in Context. Web. 17 Jan.
2016.
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