{"id":26068,"date":"2012-10-18T21:29:16","date_gmt":"2012-10-18T21:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=26068"},"modified":"2017-06-15T15:35:41","modified_gmt":"2017-06-15T15:35:41","slug":"the-meaning-of-race-in-the-dna-era-science-history-and-the-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=26068","title":{"rendered":"The Meaning of Race in the DNA Era: Science, History and the Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Meaning of Race in the DNA Era: Science, History and the Law<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Temple Journal of Science, Technology & Environmental Law<\/a>
\nVolume 27, Number 2 (Fall 2008)
\npages 231-265<\/p>\n

Christian B. Sundquist<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of Law
\nAlbany Law School<\/em><\/p>\n

INTRODUCTION<\/strong><\/p>\n

What is \u201crace\u201d? Does the concept of race represent a natural and inevitable understanding of human difference? Does race have any biological meaning, or is it merely an artificial construct employed by society and political bodies? If race is the former, then how can modern society avoid a rebirth of racial eugenics? And yet if race is an arbitrary tool of social organization without genetic content, then how should we interpret purported forensic racial determinations based on DNA<\/a> analyses?<\/p>\n

Race is biology. Race is ancestry. Race is genetic.<\/em><\/p>\n

The meaning of \u201crace\u201d is constantly questioned yet rarely understood. Early theories of race assigned social, intellectual, and moral values to perceived differences among groups of people. The perception that race should be defined in terms of genetic and biologic difference fueled the \u201crace science\u201d of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during which time geneticists, physiognomists, eugenicists, anthropologists and others purported to find scientific justification for denying equal treatment to non-\u201cwhite\u201d persons.<\/p>\n

Part I of this article thus examines the provenance of the \u201crace\u201d concept. The categorization of humans into \u201cracial\u201d groups was neither natural nor inevitable. The initial separation of humans into \u201cracial\u201d categories was understood to simply reflect inherent biological differences between groups of people. These differences supposedly accounted for natural variances in intelligence, morality, and physical and sexual prowess. As such, these pseudo-biological differences were used to justify and explain power differentials between \u201craces\u201d of people.<\/p>\n

Race is constructed. Race is biologically meaningless. Race is power.<\/em><\/p>\n

The pseudo-scientific understandings of race supplied by nineteenth-century geneticists and biologists were applied by Nazi Germany<\/a> in a manner that shocked the world. As a result, the concept of race following World War II<\/a> increasingly was understood as a socio-political construction with no biological meaning. Modern sociological theories thus uniformly understand race as a social grouping of persons necessary to preserve unbalanced relationships of power. Part II of this article examines this post-war refutation of nineteenth-century \u201crace science,\u201d as well as the core assumptions underlying modern racial theory.<\/p>\n

Race is phenotype. <\/em>Race is color. Race is language. Race is citizenship. Race is class. Race is culture. Race is assimilation. Race is law.<\/em><\/p>\n

Reducing race to a single critical \u201cessence\u201d is an impossible endeavor. While one\u2019s phenotype and color may contribute to racial categorization, so can one\u2019s national origin, social class and language. As a result, race has a complex social meaning that depends in part on the prevailing \u201ccommon understanding and meaning\u201d of society. Not-so-antiquated notions of race once deemed Italian, Irish and Southern European immigrants and their descendants as \u201cnon-white\u201d and cursed with inferior genetic stock. These groups eventually obtained \u201cWhiteness\u201d based on changing social understandings of their assimilatory potential, and the formation of a racial identity defined in opposition to \u201cBlackness.\u201d The elusive nature of race is similarly illustrated by the conflict between the legal racialization of Middle Eastern and Mexican persons as \u201cwhite\u201d during certain historical periods, and the social racialization of these persons as \u201cnon-white\u201d and racially distinct during other times.<\/p>\n

Race is subjective. Race is objective. Race is whiteness. Race is blackness. Race is fixed. Race is malleable. Race is performance.<\/em><\/p>\n

Race is constantly in flux depending on one\u2019s baseline understanding of the nature of race. I am black according to certain understandings of race, while other interpretations may render me white. I am Latino, Creole, Egyptian, and \u201cother\u201d according to some outsider interpretations of race, yet I can also be reduced to \u201cmixed\u201d by utilizing an alternative understanding of race. Outsider perceptions of race in turn may change according to my performance of race, and how race is performed around me.
\nRace is biology.<\/p>\n

Race is ancestry. Race is genetic.<\/em><\/p>\n

Notwithstanding the post-war rejection of a biological interpretation of race, modern genetic science has increasingly claimed the ability to identify \u201crace\u201d through the biological analysis of DNA samples. Law enforcement agencies in the United States and elsewhere analyze individual DNA samples to identify the likely \u201crace\u201d of a criminal suspect, while courts in the United States increasingly admit expert testimony stating the statistical probability that a criminal suspect belongs to a specific race based on such DNA analyses. Such a re-biologicalization of race clearly contradicts the classical post-war theory of race as a social construct. Part III of this article examines the contemporary re-interpretation of race as having some biologically traceable genetic essence.<\/p>\n

Race is constructed. Race is biologically meaningless. Race is power.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The claims of modern genetics notwithstanding, race remains a biologically meaningless concept of human categorization. Race simply has no traceable genetic essence, and the proliferation of racial DNA testing represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of race rather than the neutral application of scientific principles.<\/strong> Part IV of this article argues that contemporary genetics has misapprehended the elusive nature of race in a manner strikingly similar to that of the nineteenth-century race science…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is \u201crace\u201d? Does the concept of race represent a natural and inevitable understanding of human difference? Does race have any biological meaning, or is it merely an artificial construct employed by society and political bodies? If race is the former, then how can modern society avoid a rebirth of racial eugenics? And yet if race is an arbitrary tool of social organization without genetic content, then how should we interpret purported forensic racial determinations based on DNA analyses?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2039,459,1467,8],"tags":[12517,12518,27140,27139,12520],"class_list":["post-26068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","tag-christian-b-sundquist","tag-christian-sundquist","tag-technology-environmental-law","tag-temple-journal-of-science","tag-the-temple-journal-of-science-technology-environmental-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26068"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54237,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26068\/revisions\/54237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}