How Culture and Science Make Race “Genetic”: Motives and Strategies for Discrete Categorization of the Continuous and Heterogeneous

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive on 2012-05-16 03:43Z by Steven

How Culture and Science Make Race “Genetic”: Motives and Strategies for Discrete Categorization of the Continuous and Heterogeneous

Literature and Medicine
Volume 26, Number 1 (Spring 2007)
pages 240–268
DOI: 10.1353/lm.2008.0000

Celeste Condit, Distinguished Research Professor
University of Georgia

Scientists, medical personnel, and others have recently re-asserted the equivalence of human genetic variation and social categories of “race”. This essay identifies strong cultural and scientific motives for creating, defending, and deploying that equivalence. However, the essay employs visual depictions of human genetic variation and critical analysis of scientific and lay vocabularies to show that human genetic variation has a complex structure that cannot be directly fit into a simple category set of race terms. The essay suggests that efforts to equate patterns of human genetic variation and social terms for “race” rely on the rhetorical strategies of casuistic stretching and the deployment of a mediating term through a two-step argumentative structure. The essay closes by discussing the difficulties involved in implementing social policies based on this procrustean category system, utilizing the case of the “race-based” heart disease drug Bi-Dil.

One of the most contentious issues in contemporary genetics is the status of the concept of “race.” Critics of the research program in human genomics regularly cite the historical and contemporary associations between racism and genetics as a reason to be suspicious or non-supportive of genetic research. These criticisms operate on varying underlying assumptions about the nature of science and its relationship to culture. The predominant account, however, holds that science is the handmaiden of the dominant forces in the culture. In this account, because genetic science is a tool of the dominant forces in society, which are structured in a racist fashion, genetic science is predetermined to support racism. Substantial research in science studies has complicated the account of the relationship between science and culture, but the topic of racism and genetics has only recently begun to receive similarly sophisticated attention. I wish to contribute to this on-going exploration by analyzing the processes by which and the motives for which race terms are fit to the patterns of human genetic variation by scientists and medical research personnel.

My essay presumes and shows that human genetic variation has a complex structure that cannot be directly fit into a simple category set of race terms. Nevertheless, the essay identifies strong cultural and scientific motives for creating, defending, and deploying such a set of terms to describe that variation. Given the tension between the nature of human genetic variation and the scientific vocabularies proposed to define it, the essay reveals two specific rhetorical strategies used by scientific proponents of such categorization: casuistic stretching and the deployment of a mediating term through a two-step argumentative structure.

The essay proceeds in five movements. The first briefly overviews the historical trajectory of the naming of race in the U.S. The second enumerates the diverse motive structures that drive the contemporary categorization of human genetic variation into “race” groups, focusing particularly on the work of Neil Risch and his colleagues. The next provides a conceptually- and visually-based depiction of the nature of human genetic variation that highlights its clinal and brecciated character.  The essay then offers an analysis of the rhetorical strategies by which these heterogeneous and continuous materials are organized into simple, discrete categories by the scientific proponents of a biological foundation for “race.” In the final movement, the essay discusses the difficulties involved in implementing social policies based on this procrustean category system. It examines the case of the “race-based” heart disease drug BiDil to suggest that the inherent slippages in the category system make proposed programs of race-based medicine unworkable, but that they will also mask the failures of such initiatives…

…This inherent variability suggests that programs in race-based medicine are doomed to failure, at least to the extent that they are presumed to be based on underlying genetics. Figures 1–3 remind us that genetic heterogeneity among people who have relatively recent African ancestry is greater than anywhere in the world. Although this heterogeneity may have been reduced in African Americans by geographically selective and forced migration, it is re-enhanced by admixture. The “Black” population in the U.S. is also continually diversifying, as recent migrants come from other parts of Africa or from the Carribbean, where different patterns of migration and admixture have existed. Consequently, it is not reasonable to expect that dark skinned people as a group will respond to a particular drug more uniformly than the broader population, based on their skin color alone. If BiDil really does work better for African Americans (in the narrow range of parts of the country where it has been systematically tested) its beneficial effects will more likely result from shared experience of social discrimination than from shared genes. But BiDil’s success will be used as evidence to support what everybody believes—or fears—that Black people are genetically different from White people, in ways that truly matter.

BiDil’s failures will also be masked by the ambiguities of language. Doctors will not know to which patients they should prescribe BiDil. How dark should your skin be before you are a candidate for this medicine? If you have brown skin, but self-identify as “African American,” do you get the drug? What if you are dark skinned, but self-identify as Caribbean? What if your grandfather was from Ireland but your other relatives were from Sierra Leone? What if you are a recent immigrant from Ethiopia? The genetic ambiguities are blackwashed with a simple label: “Black” (or is it “African American”?). The promoters of the idea that people can be grouped into genetically discrete piles called “races” will never have to face the fact that these clinical problems invalidate their views. Whether a drug does or does not work for an “African American” with an Irish grandparent will not be attributed to the fact that the labels don’t work. It will be dismissed as irrelevant on the grounds that no medication works all the time, even for a targeted group. Only if BiDil proves to have a relatively high rate of fatal or serious side effects will it face real scrutiny. Only then will the spectre of the Tuskegee Syphilis study return. Even its return, however, will probably further reify “Black” against “White” rather than call into question the underlying assumptions that human beings can be placed into discrete genetic categories and treated based on those categories instead of the unique genetic constellation that each person represents….

Read the entire article here.

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