Continuing last week's discussion on race

      This article by Lee, Mountain, and Koenig picks off where Duana Fullwiley left off last week, continuing the discussion about the role of race in public health and medicine, and the impact of the Human Genome Project on this issue. Amusingly enough, I unwittingly outlined the authors' general argument in last week's blog post on The Molecularization of Race.
       The authors aren't disputing the fact - yes, fact - that there exist genetic differences between groups of people. This has been confirmed and reconfirmed time and again in genomic study. But careful study of the human genome has also lent an equal amount of support for the fact that there is no biological basis for what we call "race". Genomics has only recently allowed us to definitively make that conclusion, and it's interesting to see it used to argue the opposite.
        Race should not be used in the context of genetic research because it is first and foremost a social construction, and a horribly murky one at that. What determines what "race" you are? Who determines it? Why is Asian a "race", but Hispanic is an "ethnicity"? As the authors point out, labels of "race" are hardly consistently applied. In the US census, "Asian" refers to anyone from the continent of Asia, but in the British census "Asian" is taken specifically to mean peoples from the Indian subcontinent. As the article says, any group attempting to include race as a categorical label in their research should take note of the cultural, social, and political environment in which they're making this classification if they want their conclusions to have any significance.
       In genomics specifically, the use of race comes with certain false assumptions about how genes work. Most significantly, it implies that a group of peoples is homogeneous enough to be lumped together under a single classification. As previously stated, this is simply incorrect - Asians as a whole are, on average, the healthiest race in America, but the cervical cancer rates of Vietnamese women are five times higher than those of white women. This assumption of homogeneity extends not only across space but through time as well - when genetic researchers offered DNA analysis to African Americans as a way to discover their ancestry in Africa, they showed that the idea of race is contingent of denying the mixing of populations - that a race is a purebred line that extends backwards in time.
       My biggest worry is that, by linking specific genetic differences to specific racial groups, we'll be engaging in genetic reductionism; that we'll start explaining away real health disparities between racial groups as a result of differences in genetics instead of social, economic, and political factors that are very real but harder to identify. Genes are powerful, but I feel that sometimes people forget they aren't the whole story.


Lee, Sandra Soo-Jin, Joanna Mountain and Barbara Koenig. (2001) "The Meanings of Race in the New Genomics: Implications for Health Disparities Research." Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law and Ethics, Spring 1: 33-75.