Reflections on 'race' and the biologization of difference

Patterns of Prejudice

Volumn 40, Issue 4-5, 2006, Pages 353-379

  Azoulay, Katya Gibel ^a  

^a GRINNELL COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

Anthropology; Biomedicine; Genetic signature; Genetics; Identity; Medicine; Race; Racial categories; Scientific racism; Taxonomy

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845217900     PISSN: 0031322X     EISSN: 14617331     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00313220601020098     Document Type: Review

References (79)

1. V. Y. Mudimbe, 'The power of the Greek paradigm', South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 92, no. 2, 1993, 361-86.
2. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press 1967).
3. Ashley Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (New York: Columbia University Press 1942).
4. John Berger and Frantz Fanon offer very different but equally provocative explications of the social construction of seeing: John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin 1972);
5. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.
6. Mireya Navarro, 'Going beyond black and white, Hispanics in Census pick "Other"', New York Times, 9 November 2003, 1. Academic research and media analyses that explore the relationship of physical appearance (skin colour) and class to perceptions of racial identity within Latin America (including Brazil) report that, although colour prejudice and racism exist, it is conceptualized and articulated differently than in the United States. Consequently, immigrants to the US have to learn a new vocabulary, new ways of seeing and new ways of thinking that, in turn, impact on social interactions within immigrant communities as well as between immigrants and with Americans.
7. Patricia Williams, Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (New York: Noonday Press 1998), 52.
8. Barbara Jeanne Fields, 'Slavery, race and ideology in the United States of America', New Left Review, no. 181, May-June 1990, 95-118 (101).
9. See Fields's article on 'ideology' as a reference point for deeply rooted commonsense thinking; for a more comprehensive examination of the concept, see Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso 1991).
10. Barbara Jeanne Fields, 'Categories of analysis? Not in my book', in Viewpoints: Excerpts from the ACLS Conference on Humanities in the 1990s, American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper, no. 10 (New York: ACLS 1989), available online at www.acls.org/op10fields.htm (viewed 26 July 2006).
11. Appearance (phenotype), geography (continent and nationality) and invisible markers (genotype) all serve as surrogates for 'race' while, in turn, 'race' is used as a surrogate for biology. This underlines the question of whether purported correlates between genes and human population groups are based on prescriptive research in which researchers who identify these correlations are merely confirming, rather than casting doubt on, their expectations. In a special issue on race, the academic journal Nature Genetics included articles in which, as New York Times journalist Nicholas Wade reported, 'several geneticists wrote that people can generally be assigned to their continent of origin on the basis of their DNA, and that these broad geographical regions correspond to self-identified racial categories, such as African, East Asian, European and Native American. Race, in other words, does have a genetic basis, in their view.' That view was challenged by several Howard University scholars who countered that 'there was no biological basis for race and that any apparent link between genes and disease should be made directly, without taking race into account'. Nicholas Wade, 'Race-based medicine continued ...', New York Times, 14 November 2004.
12. Thomas Barfield (ed.), The Dictionary of Anthropology (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell 1997).
13. Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer (eds), Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology (London: Routledge 1996).
14. Focusing on Asian Americans, Susan Koshy persuasively argues that racial vocabularies shift to ethnic ones as class mobility emerges, proving the elasticity of whiteness. Susan Koshy, 'Morphing race into ethnicity: Asian Americans and critical transformations of whiteness', boundary 2, vol. 28, no. 1, Spring 2001, 153-94.
15. For the alchemy of race, a process of whitening Irish, Eastern and Southern European immigrants initially perceived as inferior races polluting the white Anglo-Saxon racial integrity of the nation, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1998). Note as well the absence of uniformity in legal definitions of who was a 'Negro' or 'colored person', as these were determined by state, not federal statutes.
16. Within the discipline of anthropology, racial categories were challenged in the early twentieth century as Euro-American nativism and European antisemitism gathered force, and scrutiny of Jewish difference, in particular, ceased to be perceived as a matter of benign scientific interest. For instance, Franz Boas spent considerable time evaluating the relationship between environment and biology in order to prove that nurture, not nature, was responsible for differences between new immigrants and white Euro-American citizens. His studies of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and their children provided-unsurprisingly, with hindsight-clear evidence that a changed social environment, including new occupations, diets and new patterns of exercise, altered the bodies (physical type) of the newcomers from impoverished backgrounds as characterized by prevailing stereotypes in their countries of origin. There is no reason to obscure the obvious: Boas, however discretely and with whatever degree of self-consciousness, also had a personal stake in establishing legitimacy among colleagues who were quite open about their animosity towards Jews. See G. M. Morant, 'Racial theories and international relations', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 69, no. 2, 1939, 151-62, for a stringent critique of the imprecision of the race concept, its abusive contribution to racist propaganda and the irresponsible silence of anthropologists.
17. For one late nineteenth-century review of contemporary research on 'the races of Europe', see Carlos C. Closson, 'The races of Europe', Journal of Political Economy, vol. 8, no. 1, 1899, 58-88.
18. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color.
19. Katya Gibel Azoulay, 'Outside our parents' house: race, culture and identity', Research in African Literature, vol. 27, no. 1, 1996, 129-42.
20. K. Amudha, L. P. Wong and A. M. Choy, 'Ethnicity and drug therapy for hypertension', Current Pharmaceutical Design, vol. 9, no. 21, 2003, 1691-701 (1691).
21. K. Amudha, L. P. Wong and A. M. Choy, 'Ethnicity and drug therapy for hypertension', Current Pharmaceutical Design, vol. 9, no. 21, 2003, 1691-701 (1691) Ibid.
22. K. Amudha, L. P. Wong and A. M. Choy, 'Ethnicity and drug therapy for hypertension', Current Pharmaceutical Design, vol. 9, no. 21, 2003, 1691-701 (1691) Ibid.
23. K. Amudha, L. P. Wong and A. M. Choy, 'Ethnicity and drug therapy for hypertension', Current Pharmaceutical Design, vol. 9, no. 21, 2003, 1691-701 (1691) Ibid.
24. Consider the 1928 conclusions of anthropologist Melville Herskovitz who estimated that, contrary to 'the general belief that the "pure" Negroes were the majority ... almost 80% show mixing with White or American Indian, or both stocks', while, in terms of ethnic diversity, a blending of African groups had occurred among the slave population in the United States. Melville J. Herskovitz, The American Negro: A Study in Racial Crossing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1928), 10;
25. see also Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper 1944), 1205
26. and August Meier, 'The racial ancestry of the Mississippi College Negro' [1949], in A White Scholar and the Black Community, 1945-1965: Essays and Reflections (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1992).
27. Despite public rhetoric against miscegenation, sexual relations between Anglo-American men and black slave women were tolerated throughout the slave period since they added to the slave population, as evidenced by statutes regulating the status of children of slave women; see Sidney Kaplan, 'The miscegenation issue in the election of 1864', Journal of Negro History, vol. 34, no. 3, 1949, 274-343.
28. Consider the clarification of terminology in the ruling issued in The People of the State of California v. George W. Hall (1854). George Hall, 'a free white citizen' of California convicted of murder on the testimony of a Chinese witness, successfully appealed its admissibility before the Supreme Court of California. Judge Charles Murray delivered the opinion of the court: 'The word "Black" may include all Negroes, but the term "Negro" does not include all Black persons. ... In using the words, "No Black, or Mulatto person, or Indian shall be allowed to give evidence for or against a white person," the Legislature, if any intention can be ascribed to it, allowed the most comprehensive terms to embrace every known class or shade of color, as the apparent design was to protect the white person from the influence of all testimony other than of persons of the same caste. ... We are of the opinion that the words "White," "Negro," "Mulatto," "Indian," and "Black person," wherever they occur in our Constitution and laws, must be taken in their generic sense, and that ... the words "Black person" ... must be taken as contradistinguished from White and necessarily excludes all races other than the Caucasian.' The Chinese witness, Judge Murray concluded, was generically 'black'; therefore, his testimony was deemed inadmissible.
29. On three different visits to the pulmonary clinic at the University of Iowa Medical Center, the registration clerks entered 'White' or 'Other' into their database for my white-looking daughter despite the fact that I had written 'Black/African-American' on the registration form. Evidently the information I initially supplied was invariably edited after we left, for at each visit we repeated the same ritual of clarifying the race-category information. The irony is that the asthmatic symptoms for which my daughter was then being monitored were inherited from my Ashkenazi Jewish grandmother and/or my Afro-Cuban Jamaican father. The claim for scientific merit in a multiracial category in medical research ignores the reality that the genealogy of most human beings reflects diverse geographical and national points of origin, each of which have their own racializing inscriptions of difference. See Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge 1995).
30. Amy Barrett, 'Color-blind drug research is myopic', Business Week, 27 June 2005, 44 (emphasis added).
31. A relatively banal instance appears in a project on sensitivity to pain in which the researchers note the prevailing hypothesis that genetic factors contribute to pain. They organize their research according to pre-existing social categories of ethnicity in order to compare the effects of stimuli on different groups. The project involved 'a total of 500 normal participants (306 females and 194 males)', comprised of '62.0% European American, 17.4% African American, 9.0% Asian American, and 8.6% Hispanic, and 3.0% individuals with mixed racial parentage'. Not only are each of these social categories treated as discrete genetic entities, but even 'Hispanic' is treated as a generic race category. Predictably, the conclusions conform to and confirm the racial typology: 'Our observations demonstrate that gender, ethnicity and temperament contribute to individual variation in thermal and cold pain sensitivity. K. Hyungsuk, John K. Neubert, Anitza San Miguel, Ke Xu, Raj K. Krishnaraju, Michael J. Iadarola, David Goldman and Raymond Dionne, 'Genetic influence on variability in human acute experimental pain sensitivity associated with gender, ethnicity and psychological temperament', Pain, vol. 109, no. 3, June 2004, 488-96.
32. Race: The Floating Signifier, video recording, featuring Stuart Hall, produced, directed and edited by Sut Jhally (Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation 1996).
33. Unsuccessful efforts to find substantive differences between racial groups, where 'race' is defined by skin colour, have not led researchers to conclude that this kind of enquiry should be abandoned. In an article reviewing findings on racial differences in skin pathophysiology, the authors conclude that more-not less-research is needed because 'we still cannot answer the question, "how resistant is black skin compared with white?"'; Enzo Berardesca and Howard Maibach, 'Racial differences in skin pathophysiology', Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, vol. 34, no. 2, 1996, 667-72.
34. Hu et al. claim evidence for their conclusion that 'difference in the incidence of uveal melanoma between each racial/ethnic group was highly statistically significant, with the exception of the black versus the Asian population in which there was no statistically significant difference'; D. N. Hu, G. P. Yu, S. A. McCormick, S. Schneider and P. T. Finger, 'Population-based incidence of uveal melanoma in various races and ethnic groups', American Journal of Ophthalmology, vol. 140, no. 4, October 2005, 612-17.
35. See also Melbourne Tapper's study of the tenacity with which scientists correlated sickle cell anaemia with ethnological categories, characterizing the medical disorder as a 'black disease'. Confronted by evidence to the contrary, explanations were offered linking patients to migrations from Africa that occurred several centuries earlier; Melbourne Tapper, In the Blood: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1999).
36. On the variety of courtroom arguments and legal strategies used to control racial ambiguity and maintain racial difference, see Ariela J. Gross, 'Litigating whiteness: trials of racial determination in the nineteenth-century South', Yale Law Journal, vol. 108, no. 1, October 1998, 109-80;
37. Michael Elliott, 'Telling the difference: nineteenth-century legal narratives of racial taxonomy', Law & Social Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 3, 1999, 611-36;
38. and John Tehranian, 'Performing whiteness: naturalization litigation and the construction of racial identity in America', Yale Law Journal, vol. 109, no. 4, January 2000, 817-46.
39. M. Yokota, 'Head and facial anthropometry of mixed-race US Army male soldiers for military design and sizing: a pilot study', Applied Ergonomics, vol. 36, no. 3, May 2005, 379-83 (emphasis added).
40. Stephen Jay Gould, 'The geometer of race', Discover, vol. 15, no. 11, November 1994, 64-9.
41. Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Joanna Mountain and Barbara A. Koenig, 'The meanings of "race" in the new genomics: implications for health disparities research', Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law and Ethics, vol. 1, Spring 2001, 33-75.
42. Sharon B. Wyatt, David R. Williams, Rosie Calvin, Frances C. Henderson, Evelyn R. Walker and Karen Winters, 'Racism and cardiovascular disease in African Americans', American Journal of the Medical Sciences, vol. 325, no. 6, June 2003, 315-31;
43. Jules P. Harrell, Sadiki Hall and James Taliaferro, 'Physiological responses to racism and discrimination: an assessment of the evidence', American Journal of Public Health, vol. 93, no. 2, February 2003, 243-8.
44. The CSI script reinforces the misuse of 'Hispanic' as a racial term. In fact, as the only official 'ethnic' category on the US Census, 'Latino/Hispanic' registers the population of Mexico, Central and South America The official, though informal, recognition of the diverse mix of African, indigenous and European ancestries in Spanish-speaking countries disappears when 'Latino/Hispanic' is treated as a generic race category. Moreover, as David Hayes-Bautista points out in relation to academic research, definitional differences and confusion of terminology have led to inconsistent or conflicting research methodologies and conclusions. As a political issue, this confusion has significant consequences for policy, especially in terms of access to benefits guaranteed under remedial civil rights legislation. David E. Hayes-Bautista, 'Identifying "Hispanic" populations: the influence of research methodology upon public policy', American Journal of Public Health, vol. 70, no. 4, April 1980, 353-6.
45. Cautioning that conclusions based on current methods of collecting race/ethnicity data are inconsistent because of a 'lack of consensus and inadequate definitions for terminology; and misclassification or miscounting of patients', two researchers argue for a more detailed set of categories, including 'mixed-heritage', an example of the persistent effort to improve rather than invalidate racial taxonomies. P. Davis and L. Rubin, 'Obstruction of valid race/ethnicity data acquisition by current data collection instruments', Methods of Information in Medicine, vol. 37, no. 2, June 1998, 188-91.
46. 'Mission statement', available on the Project Race website at www.projectrace.com/aboutprojectrace/ (viewed 11 September 2006).
47. 'The health status of multiracial Americans fact sheet', available on the Project Race website at www.projectrace.com/urgentmedicalconcern/ (viewed 11 September 2006).
48. Davis and Rubin, 'Obstruction of valid race/ethnicity data acquisition by current data collection instruments'.
49. Homepage of MatchMaker, a MAVIN project, at www.mavin.net/Matchmaker.html (viewed 29 July 2006).
50. Ibid. MatchMaker was founded in 2001 by two interns to address the 'chronic shortage of multiracial donors on the NMDP [National Marrow Donor Program]'.
51. US Census Bureau, Office of Management and Budget, 'Revisions to the standards for the classifications of federal data on race and ethnicity', 30 October 1997 (last modified 2 November 2000), available at www.census.gov/ population/www/socdemo/race/Ombdir15.html (viewed 29 July 2006) (emphasis added).
52. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. from the French by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1991).
53. A. Leon Higgenbotham, Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980), 44.
54. On predominantly servant immigration from Europe, comprised of convicts and indentured servants, and their visibility within the colonies, see Aaron S. Fogleman, 'From slaves, convicts, and servants to free passengers: the transformation of immigration in the era of the American Revolution', Journal of American History, vol. 85, no. 1, June 1998, 43-76.
55. Certainty of the relation between colour and status was disrupted in the years before the Civil War when an increasing presence of white-skinned slaves who looked like their owners (and thus revealed paternity) testified to discrepancies in which visible markers might not be readily apparent. Note as well W. E. B. Du Bois's disparaging remark: 'The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millions of mulattoes and written in ineffaceable blood' (quoted in Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 1187n14).
56. See also Kaplan, 'The miscegenation issue in the election of 1864'.
57. 'Presentation given by historian Barbara J. Fields at a "school" the producers of RACE', March 2001, available under 'History' in 'Background Readings' on the website for the PBS series Race-The Power of An Illusion at www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm (viewed 11 September 2006).
58. Young, Colonial Desire, 65.
59. The ubiquitous connection between culture and colour is pronounced when the social vocabulary of race and socially defined racial markers of identity coincide and a social formation is identified and defined as 'cultural'. There is no better example, at least in the United States, to the way reference to 'culture' reinscribes boundaries than the essentialist ideas of what constitutes 'blackness' and 'whiteness'.
60. Paul Root Wolpe, 'If I am only my genes, what am I? Genetic essentialism and a Jewish response', Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, vol. 7, no. 3, September 1997, 213-30.
61. Kendra Lee, 'New drug may get to the heart of the problem', The Crisis , vol. 112, no. 1, January/February 2005, 12;
62. David Rotman, 'Race and medicine', Technology Review, vol. 108, no. 4, April 2005, 60-5;
63. D. R. Rutledge, Lavoisier Cardozo and Joel Steinberg, 'Racial differences in drug response: isoproterenol effects on heart rate in healthy males', Pharmaceutical Research, vol. 6, no. 2, February 1989, 182-5.
64. Like the current socially relevant categories on the US Census, 'African American' is used interchangeably with 'Black', 'Caucasian' is synonymous with 'White', and the geographical label of 'Asian' relies on the assumption of regional distinction as well as appearance. While some authors note in passing that racial categories are problematic, they nevertheless identify race as a credible factor to be examined in relation to other physiological and environmental variables. The most undefined and ambiguous category is 'Latino', a late twentieth-century renaming of 'Hispanic'; see Hayes-Bautista, 'Identifying "Hispanic" populations'.
65. Consider one recent abstract for a report on the outcome of a research project that not only conflates the terms 'ethnicity' and 'race' but includes 'Hispanic' as one of four racial categories: 'Although osteoporosis is a worldwide health problem, there are many differences in ethnic groups regarding disease morbidity and drug treatment efficacy. This review analyzed clinical response data of two major osteoporotic treatments (vitamin D and estrogens) regarding four major human races (Asian, Caucasian, Hispanic and Negroid)'; F. Massart, 'Human races and pharmacogenomics of effective bone treatments', Gynecol Endocrinol, vol. 20, no. 1, January 2005, 36-44 (emphasis added).
66. See Ian Haney-López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press 1996) on the terminological confusion that figured in two 1922 US Supreme Court appeal decisions for naturalization. Takao Ozawa, a Japanese applicant, successfully appealed, on scientific grounds, that he had white skin but was rejected as not being 'Caucasian' and therefore not 'white'. Three months later, Bhagat Singh Thind, a Hindu Asian petitioned for citizenship and, taking his cue from the earlier decision, argued that, according to science, Hindu Indians were of the 'Aryan' or 'Caucasian' race and, therefore, 'white'. The same judge who relied on science in his ruling in the Ozawa case, rejected Thind's claim on the basis of common sense.
67. Grattan C. Woodson, 'Risk factors for osteoporosis in postmenopausal African-American women', Current Medical Research and Opinion, vol. 20, no. 10, October 2004, 1681-7 (1686).
68. Sander L. Gilman, The Jew's Body (New York and London: Routledge 1991).
69. Writing in the New York Times last summer, Amy Harmon reported: 'Some African-Americans, more interested in searching out recent relatives who in many cases can be dependably identified with a DNA match, are asking whites whom they have long suspected are cousins to take a DNA test. And in a genetic bingo game that is delivering increasing returns as people of all ethnicities engage in DNA genealogy, some are typing their results into public databases on the Internet and finding a match that no paper trail would have revealed'. Amy Harmon, 'Blacks pin hope on DNA to fill slavery's gaps in family trees', New York Times, 25 July 2005.
70. The 'Cohen modal haplotype' (CMH) was 'discovered' among some members of the Buba, the Lemba's senior clan somewhat analogous to the kohen (or Cohen) priestly clan. The sensational news of a genetic connection to Jewish ancestry was augmented as much by the fact that the Lemba are black Africans as by the lack of any reference to them in literature in any field. Mark G. Thomas, Tudor Parfitt, Deborah A. Weiss, Karl Skorecki, James F. Wilson, Magdel le Roux, Neil Bradman and David B. Goldstein, 'Y chromosomes traveling south: the Cohen modal haplotype and the origins of the Lemba-the "black Jews of Southern Africa"', American Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 66, no. 2, February 2000, 674-86.
71. Avshalom Zoosmann-Diskin, 'Are today's Jewish priests descended from the old ones?', Homo: Journal of Comparative Human Biology, vol. 51, nos 2-3, 2000, 156-62.
72. Hillel Halkin, 'Wandering Jews-and their genes', Commentary, vol. 110, no. 2, September 2000, 54-61.
73. Judiciously, in this context, the authority of science was invoked to silence sceptics of the Lemba's claims to Jewish ancestry although it also invited speculation on whether the Lemba qualified for immediate Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Carl Elliott and Paul Brodwin, 'Identity and genetic ancestry tracing', British Medical Journal, vol. 325, 21 December 2002, 1469-71;
74. Paul Brodwin, 'Genetics, identity and the anthropology of essentialism', Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 2, Spring 2002, 323-30.
75. Most significantly, the manner in which the issue of the Lemba was articulated introduced a political dimension that necessarily, given the politics of race and racism in the United States, insinuated and instantiated a racial inflection, such as in newspaper headlines like 'DNA Backs South African Tribe's Tradition of Early Descent from the Jews', 'The Black Jews of Southern Africa' and 'Jewish Roots in Africa'. Perhaps because the information was less sensational, the popular media were silent on the absence of evidence for a kohen genetic variant among the Jews of Ethiopia. M. F. Hammer, A. J. Redd, E. T. Wood, M. R. Bonner, H. Jarjanazi, T. Karafet, S. Santachiara-Benerecetti, A. Oppenheim, M. A. Jobling, T. Jenkins, H. Ostrer and B. Bonné-Tamir, 'Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations share a common pool of Y-chromosome biallelic haplotypes', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 97, no. 12, 6 June 2000, 6769-74.
76. Nancy Leys Stepan, 'Race and gender: the role of analogy in science', in Sandra Harding (ed.), The 'Racial' Economy of Science: Toward A Democratic Future (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1993), 359-76.
77. Precisely for this reason, genes are irrelevant to religious deliberations on the question of who is a Jew although they may be invoked in appeals for state recognition and immediate Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return.
78. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press 2000), 29.
79. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line 2000, Ibid., 40-1.