{"id":62298,"date":"2021-11-19T20:56:12","date_gmt":"2021-11-19T20:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=62298"},"modified":"2021-11-19T20:59:05","modified_gmt":"2021-11-19T20:59:05","slug":"race-is-real-but-its-not-genetic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=62298","title":{"rendered":"Race Is Real, But It\u2019s Not Genetic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Race Is Real, But It\u2019s Not Genetic<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Sapiens<\/a>
2020-03-13<\/p>\n

Alan Goodman<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Biological Anthropology
Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts<\/em><\/p>\n

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

For over 300 years, socially defined notions of \u201crace\u201d have shaped human lives around the globe\u2014but the category has no biological foundation.<\/em><\/p>\n

A friend of mine with Central American, Southern European, and West African ancestry is lactose intolerant<\/a>. Drinking milk products upsets her stomach, and so she avoids them. About a decade ago, because of her low dairy intake, she feared that she might not be getting enough calcium, so she asked her doctor for a bone density test<\/a>. He responded that she didn\u2019t need one because \u201cblacks do not get osteoporosis<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

My friend is not alone. The view that black people don\u2019t need a bone density test is a longstanding and common myth. A 2006 study<\/a> in North Carolina<\/a> found that out of 531 African American and Euro-American women screened for bone mineral density, only 15 percent were African American women\u2014despite the fact that African American women made up almost half of that clinical population. A health fair in Albany, New York<\/a>, in 2000, turned into a ruckus<\/a> when black women were refused free osteoporosis screening. The situation hasn\u2019t changed much<\/a> in more recent years.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, FRAX, a widely used calculator<\/a> that estimates one\u2019s risk of osteoporotic fractures, is based on bone density combined with age, sex, and, yes, \u201crace.\u201d Race, even though it is never defined or demarcated, is baked into the fracture risk algorithms.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s break down the problem…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For over 300 years, socially defined notions of \u201crace\u201d have shaped human lives around the globe\u2014but the category has no biological foundation.<\/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],"tags":[3627,32417,12542,32112],"class_list":["post-62298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","tag-alan-goodman","tag-frax","tag-osteoporosis","tag-sapiens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62298","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=62298"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62301,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62298\/revisions\/62301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}