Mixed Race Studies

How Not To Talk About Race And Genetics

BuzzFeed
2018-03-30

Micah Baldwin / Via Flickr: micahb37

Race has long been a potent way of defining differences between human beings. But science and the categories it constructs do not operate in a political vacuum.

This open letter was produced by a group of 68 scientists and researchers. The full list of signatories can be found below.

In his newly published book Who We Are and How We Got Here, geneticist David Reich engages with the complex and often fraught intersections of genetics with our understandings of human differences — most prominently, race.

He admirably challenges misrepresentations about race and genetics made by the likes of former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade and Nobel Laureate James Watson. As an eminent scientist, Reich clearly has experience with the genetics side of this relationship. But his skillfulness with ancient and contemporary DNA should not be confused with a mastery of the cultural, political, and biological meanings of human groups.

As a group of 68 scholars from disciplines ranging across the natural sciences, medical and population health sciences, social sciences, law, and humanities, we would like to make it clear that Reich’s understanding of “race” — most recently in a Times column warning that “it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races’” — is seriously flawed…

Read the entire letter here.

Genetic Approaches to Health Disparities

Chapter in Genetics, Health and Society (Advances in Medical Sociology, Volume 16) (2014)
pages 71-93
DOI: 10.1108/S1057-629020150000016003

Catherine Bliss, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of California, San Francisco

Purpose

This chapter explores the rise in genetic approaches to health disparities at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Methodology/approach

Analysis of public health policies, genome project records, ethnography of project leaders and leading genetic epidemiologists, and news coverage of international projects demonstrates how the study of health disparities and genetic causes of health simultaneously took hold just as the new field of genomics and matters of racial inequality became a global priority for biomedical science and public health.

Findings

As the U.S. federal government created policies to implement racial inclusion standards, international genome projects seized the study race, and diseases that exhibit disparities by race. Genomic leaders made health disparities research a central feature of their science. However, recent attempts to move toward analysis of gene-environment interactions in health and disease have proven insufficient in addressing sociological contributors to health disparities. In place of in-depth analyses of environmental causes, pharmacogenomics drugs, diagnostics, and inclusion in sequencing projects have become the frontline solutions to health disparities.

Originality/value

The chapter argues that genetic forms of medicalization and racialization have taken hold over science and public health around the world, thereby engendering a divestment from sociological approaches that do not align with the expansion of genomic science. The chapter thus contributes to critical discussions in the social and health sciences about the fundamental processes of medicalization, racialization, and geneticization in contemporary society.

Read or the purchase the chapter here.

The Marketization of Identity Politics

Sociology
Volume 47, Number 5 (October 2013)
pages 1011-1025
DOI: 10.1177/0038038513495604

Catherine Bliss, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of California, San Francisco

Sociology has begun to question how new genetic sciences affect older ways of constructing and contesting social identity, including forms of identity politics that have brought women and minorities significant gains. This article presents US debates on genetics, identity politics, and race in order to theorize emergent transformations in light of the genomic revolution. Examining recent developments in the realms of pharmaceuticals and ancestry estimation, I argue that traditional forms of identity politics are still actively at work, though they are being marketized in novel ways. This article combines theories of racialization and medicalization to detail how genomics ushers in a subtle new version of identity politics: a pharmaceuticalized citizenship wherein health rights and political participation are co-envisioned in individualistic molecular terms.

Read the entire article here.

Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice

Stanford University Press
April 2012
280 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780804774079
Paper ISBN: 9780804774086
E-book: ISBN: 9780804782050

Catherine Bliss, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of California, San Francisco

Winner of the 2014 Oliver Cromwell Cox Award, sponsored by the ASA Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities.

In 2000, with the success of the Human Genome Project, scientists declared the death of race in biology and medicine. But within five years, many of these same scientists had reversed course and embarked upon a new hunt for the biological meaning of race. Drawing on personal interviews and life stories, Race Decoded takes us into the world of elite genome scientists—including Francis Collins, director of the NIH; Craig Venter, the first person to create a synthetic genome; and Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence, among others—to show how and why they are formulating new ways of thinking about race.

In this original exploration, Catherine Bliss reveals a paradigm shift, both at the level of science and society, from colorblindness to racial consciousness. Scientists have been fighting older understandings of race in biology while simultaneously promoting a new grand-scale program of minority inclusion. In selecting research topics or considering research design, scientists routinely draw upon personal experience of race to push the public to think about race as a biosocial entity, and even those of the most privileged racial and social backgrounds incorporate identity politics in the scientific process. Though individual scientists may view their positions differently—whether as a black civil rights activist or a white bench scientist—all stakeholders in the scientific debates are drawing on memories of racial discrimination to fashion a science-based activism to fight for social justice.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The New Science of Race
• 2. Making Science Racial
• 3. The Sociogenomic Paradigm
• 4. Making Sense of Race with Values
• 5. Everyday Race-Positive
• 6. Activism and Expertise
• 7. The Enduring Trouble with Race
• Notes
• Index

Racial Taxonomy in Genomics

Social Science & Medicine
Volume 73, Issue 7, October 2011
pages 1019–1027
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.07.003

Catherine Bliss, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Race and Science Studies
Department of Africana Studies
Brown University

This article examines the reflexive, biosocial nature of genomic meaning making around race, drawing on discourse analysis of 732 articles on genomics and race published from the years 1986 to 2010, in-depth interviews with 36 of the world’s most elite genomics researchers, interviews with 15 critics, policymakers, and trainees involved in debates over race, and participant observation at a core genotyping facility that specializes in ancestry estimation. I reveal how biomedical researchers identify with, value, and make sense of the taxonomies they construct. My analysis goes beyond a consideration of instrumental rationales to analyze the experiential and political motivations that shape how researchers get involved in racial ethical dilemmas. I theorize taxonomic practice as a reflexive form of biosociality, a conscious shaping of social notions about biology and race to produce a future that researchers themselves want to live in. I demonstrate how reflexive biosociality paradoxically leads researchers to advance social explanations for race while investing in genomics as a solution to racial quandaries.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mapping Race through Admixture

The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society
Volume 4, Issue 4 (2008)
pages 79-84

Catherine Bliss, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Race and Science Studies
Department of Africana Studies
Brown University

Mapping Admixture Linkage Disequilibrium (MALD) is a technology that separates genomic ancestral lineages to identify disease genes. In the U.S., where a significant segment of the population has unknown ancestral origins, researchers use MALD to tease out continental haplotypes and (re)assign ancestry to disease samples. While MALD is fast-becoming a primary medical genetic technology, its publicly known uses lie in the service fields of recreational DNA genealogy and forensic profiling. Here, private companies use MALD to tell clients where their ancestors likely came from or to advise law enforcement on what kind of racially-defined features to look for in a suspect. This paper looks at the practical assemblage of MALD applications and its effects in defining ancestry in terms of race. Through this assemblage, society produces the genome as racial and race as genetic. Moreover, identity is refashioned through a genomic knowledge of self.

Purchase the article here.