{"id":46197,"date":"2016-03-24T01:52:53","date_gmt":"2016-03-24T01:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=46197"},"modified":"2017-06-27T14:02:14","modified_gmt":"2017-06-27T14:02:14","slug":"taking-race-out-of-human-genetics-and-memetics-we-cant-achieve-one-without-achieving-the-other","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=46197","title":{"rendered":"Taking race out of human genetics and memetics: We can\u2019t achieve one without achieving the other"},"content":{"rendered":"

Taking race out of human genetics and memetics: We can\u2019t achieve one without achieving the other<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

OUPblog: Oxford University Press\u2019s Academic Insights for the Thinking World<\/a>
\n2016-03-23<\/p>\n

Carlos Hoyt<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Carlos Hoyt explores race, racial identity and related issues as a scholar, teacher, psychotherapist, parent, and racialized member of our society, interrogating master narratives and the dominant discourse on race with the goal of illuminating and virtuously disrupting the racial worldview. Carlos holds teaching positions at Wheelock College, Simmons College, and Boston University in Boston Massachusetts, and has authored peer-reviewed articles on spirituality in social work practice and the pedagogy of the definition of racism. He is the author of <\/em>The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race<\/a>, published by Oxford University Press.<\/em><\/p>\n

Acknowledging that they are certainly not the first to do so, four scientists, Michael Yudell<\/a>, Dorothy Roberts<\/a>, Rob Desalle<\/a>, and Sarah Tishkoff<\/a> recently called for the phasing out of the use of the concept\/term \u201crace\u201d in biological science<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Because race is an irredeemably nebulous, confused, and confusing social construct, the authors advocate for replacing it with \u201cancestry.\u201d \u201cAncestry,\u201d they say, is a \u201cprocess-based\u201d concept that encourages one to seek information about genomic heritage, while race is a \u201cpatternbased\u201d concept that induces one to organize individuals into preconceived hierarchical groupings based on shifting, murky, and contradictory combinations of appearance, geography, ability, worth, and the like.<\/p>\n

If biological science seeks and relies on valid and maximally precise population level comparisons between groups, and race is an irrefutably imprecise proxy for consistent and concordant biological\/genetic comparison, then of course we should stop using it in biology and switch over to \u201cancestry,\u201d \u201cgenetic heritage,\u201d or some other term that actually gets at what\u2019s real, reliable, and useful. It doesn\u2019t feel like a rocket-science proposition. And yet biological science hasn\u2019t been able to heed the call and make the shift. And I sadly forecast that the shift won\u2019t soon \u2013 or ever \u2013 be made \u2013 unless and until we take the step that even the well-meaning authors of this call for stop short of taking…<\/p>\n

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

Acknowledging that they are certainly not the first to do so, four scientists, Michael Yudell, Dorothy Roberts, Rob Desalle, and Sarah Tishkoff recently called for the phasing out of the use of the concept\/term \u201crace\u201d in biological science…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2039,8,26,394],"tags":[3236,1272,3414,18209,18208,11000,22898],"class_list":["post-46197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","tag-carlos-hoyt","tag-dorothy-roberts","tag-michael-yudell","tag-oupblog","tag-oupblog-oxford-university-presss-academic-insights-for-the-thinking-world","tag-rob-desalle","tag-sarah-tishkoff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46197","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=46197"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54309,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46197\/revisions\/54309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}