{"id":5985,"date":"2010-03-14T18:49:03","date_gmt":"2010-03-14T18:49:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=5985"},"modified":"2020-02-24T18:48:41","modified_gmt":"2020-02-24T18:48:41","slug":"race-in-a-genetic-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=5985","title":{"rendered":"Race in a Genetic World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Race in a Genetic World<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Harvard Magazine<\/a>
\nVolume 110, Number 5<\/a>
\nMay-June 2008<\/p>\n

\"hosptial\"<\/a>
\nDuana Fullwiley<\/a>
\nPhotograph by Stu Rosner<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

\u201cI am an African American,\u201d says Duana Fullwiley<\/a>, \u201cbut in parts of Africa<\/a>, I am white.\u201d To do fieldwork as a medical anthropologist<\/a> in Senegal<\/a>, she says, \u201cI take a plane to France<\/a>, a seven- to eight-hour ride. My race changes as I cross the Atlantic<\/a>. There, I say, \u2018Je suis noire<\/em>,\u2019 and they say, \u2018Oh, okay\u2014m\u00e9tisse<\/em>\u2014you are mixed.\u2019 Then I fly another six to seven hours to Senegal, and I am white. In the space of a day, I can change from African American, to m\u00e9tisse<\/em>, to tubaab<\/em> [Wolof<\/a> for \u201cwhite\/European\u201d]. This is not a joke, or something to laugh at, or to take lightly. It is the kind of social recognition that even two-year-olds who can barely speak understand. \u2018Tubaab<\/em>,\u2019 they say when they greet me.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Is race, then, purely a social construct? The fact that racial categories change from one society to another might suggest it is. But now, says Fullwiley, assistant professor of anthropology and of African and African American studies, genetic methods, with their precision and implied accuracy, are being used in the same way that physical appearance has historically been used: \u201cto build\u2014to literally construct<\/em>\u2014certain ideas about why race matters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Genetic science has revolutionized biology and medicine, and even rewritten our understanding of human history. But the fact that human beings are 99.9 percent identical genetically, as Francis Collins<\/a> and Craig Venter<\/a> jointly announced at the White House<\/a> on June 26, 2000, when the rough draft of the human genome was released<\/a>, risks being lost, some scholars fear, in an emphasis on human genetic difference.<\/strong> Both in federally funded scientific research and in increasingly popular practice\u2014such as ancestry testing, which often purports to prove or disprove membership in a particular race, group, or tribe\u2014genetic testing has appeared to lend scientific credence to the idea that there is a biological basis for racial categories.<\/p>\n

In fact, \u201cThere is no genetic basis for race,\u201d<\/strong> says Fullwiley, who has studied the ethical, legal, and social implications of the human genome project with sociologist Troy Duster<\/a> at UC [University of California], Berkeley. She sometimes quotes Richard Lewontin<\/a>, now professor of biology and Agassiz professor of zoology emeritus, who said much the same thing in 1972, when he discovered that of all human genetic variation (which we now know to be just 0.1 percent of all genetic material), 85 percent occurs within geographically distinct groups, while 15 percent or less occurs between them. The issue today, Fullwiley says, is that many scientists are mining that 15 percent in search of human differences by continent…<\/p>\n

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

\u201cI am an African American,\u201d says Duana Fullwiley, \u201cbut in parts of Africa, I am white.\u201d To do fieldwork as a medical anthropologist in Senegal, she says, \u201cI take a plane to France, a seven- to eight-hour ride. My race changes as I cross the Atlantic. There, I say, \u2018Je suis noire,\u2019 and they say, \u2018Oh, okay\u2014m\u00e9tisse\u2014you are mixed.\u2019 Then I fly another six to seven hours to Senegal, and I am white. In the space of a day, I can change from African American, to m\u00e9tisse, to tubaab [Wolof for \u201cwhite\/European\u201d]. This is not a joke, or something to laugh at, or to take lightly. It is the kind of social recognition that even two-year-olds who can barely speak understand. \u2018Tubaab,\u2019 they say when they greet me.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,2039,8,394,25],"tags":[2084,2468,2470,2469],"class_list":["post-5985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-women","tag-duana-fullwiley","tag-harvard-magazine","tag-richard-lewontin","tag-troy-duster"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5985","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=5985"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59566,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5985\/revisions\/59566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}