-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Race against History
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:29:49 -0400
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Why genes don't determine race.
Race Against History
by Merlin Chowkwanyun
Only at TNR Online | Post date 06.13.07
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w070611&s=chowkwanyun061307
It seemed like just another harmless moment on daytime
TV: Oprah Winfrey began an "Ask Dr. Oz" segment with
the physician Mehmet Oz, and the two arrived at the
subject of excessive sweating. Oz cited high blood
pressure as a major cause and then asked Winfrey if she
knew why black Americans experienced hypertension at
disproportionate rates.
No problem so far. But then Winfrey answered Oz's
question by reviving what scholars have called the
"slavery hypothesis" of hypertension. Black Americans,
that thesis holds, experience greater rates of
hypertension today because those slaves most likely to
survive the brutal journey to the New World had bodily
constitutions that retained higher amounts of sodium;
with more sodium, they were likelier to survive
ailments related to salt- and water-deprivation that
often resulted in death. But, while sodium-retention
became an adaptive trait that helped many slaves
survive, it also imperiled them and their descendants,
since sodium is a major risk-factor for hypertension.
Oz approved Winfrey's summary of her ancestors' "unique
ability," in his words.
There was just one problem. The thesis is bunk. Since
its heavy promotion in the 1980s by Thomas W. Wilson
and Clarence Grim, the slavery hypothesis has steadily
been demolished on theoretical and evidentiary grounds,
most notably by the distinguished historian Philip D.
Curtin in a 1992 American Journal of Public Health
article. Curtin argued that Wilson and Grim had
sloppily handled statistical data, made inexact
citations to prior articles, and neither showed that
salt was actually scarce on the voyages nor proved
significant numbers of deaths had occurred due to salt
depletion. Meanwhile, as Curtin also pointed out, other
researchers found that blacks in other former slave
societies, like much of the West Indies, did not have
uniformly high hypertension. (For a thorough overview,
see also epidemiologist Jay Kaufman's contribution to
an excellent symposium on the new science of race.) In
short, the case for salt-retention as a race-specific
genetic trait is incredibly weak. But these rebuttals
are not just esoteric academic arguments. Without more
reflection on why they keep resurfacing, the
assumptions behind the slavery hypothesis and other
notions of genetic determinism will hinder racial
equality, and they could even imperil people's lives.
Here's why. First, by claiming an innate link between
race and a chronic health condition, the hypothesis
shifts the focus away from the external factors that
public health researchers have identified as
contributors to hypertension. A 1996 study by Nancy
Krieger and Stephen Sidney, published in the American
Journal of Public Health, explored links between victim
responses to racial discrimination and high blood
pressure. And a report this year by the city of New
York found that the percentage of fast food restaurants
in overwhelmingly minority (and low-income) East and
Central Harlem is four times that of the white (and
wealthy) Upper East Side. Two out of three grocers in
Harlem are bodegas, compared with only one of three on
the Upper East Side, which also has an extra
supermarket per 10,000 people. Minority neighborhoods
offer diets that cause not only hypertension, but also
related problems like diabetes, obesity, and other
conditions.
Second, the slavery hypothesis assumes a long
discredited biological basis for "races." Such
biologically-based racial essentialism has been
rebutted by scientists like the late Stephen Jay Gould,
Richard Lewontin, and Jonathan Marks. In 1998, the
American Anthropological Association issued a statement
that concluded: "[P]resent-day inequalities between so-
called 'racial' groups are not consequences of their
biological inheritance." Yet some folks clearly cling
on to a link between a person's race and her health. In
2002, for instance, Sally Satel--a Brown University-
trained psychiatrist--penned an eye-catching New York
Times opinion piece titled "I Am a Racially Profiling
Doctor." In it, she describes how she gives different
initial dosages of medicine to black patients, because
"blacks metabolize antidepressants more slowly." This
goes beyond just the sloppy historical demography of
Wilson and Grim. It's denial of equal treatment based
on a shaky proxy--race--that has no true meaning beyond
ideology. (And it's also wrong, as even Satel admits:
"To be sure, not every African-American is a slow
metabolizer of antidepressants; only 40 percent are.")
It's not hard to see how dangerous this can be. Imagine
being denied the treatment given to other patients
because your physician believes that, occasionally,
some members of your race respond differently.
Oz and Satel are not fringe oddities. The racial
assumptions behind their claims seem to be coming back,
and not just in medical quarters. In 2005, Roland
Fryer, a black assistant professor of economics at
Harvard University and the associate director of its
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-
American Research, received a glowing profile in The
New York Times. In it, he advanced a version of the
slavery hypothesis and suggested that exploring innate
connections between race and intelligence ought to be a
viable research premise:
I want to have an honest discussion about race in a
time and a place where I don't think we can. ...
Blacks and whites are both to blame. As soon as you
say something like, 'Well, could the black-white
test-score gap be genetics?' everybody gets tensed
up. But why shouldn't that be on the table?
Why? Because it has been roundly debunked from multiple
disciplinary angles, most recently after the 1994
publication of The Bell Curve, the infamous neo-eugenic
tome of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein that
proposed an innate link between race and intelligence.
The Bell Curve (an adaptation of which ran alongside
more than a dozen responses in The New Republic in
1994) resulted in not just one but at least two major
anthologies in which scholars from a variety of fields
and political orientations almost unanimously disputed
its premises and conclusions. And, yet, sloppy
connections between biological conceptions of race,
health, education, and other social phenomena aren't
going away.
We really ought to ask why, even after the Bell Curve
debate, racial determinism anchored in biology has come
back as a respectable idea. One possible reason is that
there are huge institutional and financial interests in
such explanations. The science of finding genetic
solutions to medical and social problems is booming.
So-called genomics is a big business with billions in
venture capital and university research centers at
stake. And the FDA's 2005 approval of NitroMed's
BiDil--a heart drug that claims to have racially
particular benefits for black heart patients
(controversially, the core clinical trial that earned
BiDil FDA approval was performed only on black
patients)--suggests we'll see more and more attempts to
extend the grandiose (but as yet largely untested)
promises of genomics to race.
But it's not just self-interest fueling the boom in
genomics. There's an element of techno-utopia as well,
especially with all the undeniable strides in DNA
testing and the Human Genome Project of the past
decade. As the political scientist Adolph Reed puts it
in a recent Journal of Race and Policy article, these
new "innovations in medical genetics have given race a
new central place in medical research and debate." He
continues,
Genomic research holds out promises to enable
design of more finely tailored diagnostic and
treatment regimes than ever before. As in earlier
moments, these new research technologies have
encouraged exuberance for biological determinist
perspectives, which appeal to an enduring fantasy
of millennial discoveries that will provide clear
technical solutions to vexing social problems.
What's ironic, too, is that, when it comes to mixing
race and genomics together, the strongest proponents
are hardly the overt racists of the early twentieth
century. And they definitely aren't the ones behind the
Pioneer Fund, the notorious eugenic foundation that
funded much of the research in The Bell Curve (the
Pioneer Fund declares on its website that its origins
are in the "Darwinian-Galtonian evolutionary
tradition," a reference to Francis Galton, the
intellectual father of nineteenth-century eugenics).
Fryer comes off in his Times profile as someone
sincerely interested in studying and dismantling racial
inequality. And BiDil won the endorsement of the
Association of Black Cardiologists. There's no reason
to doubt the good intentions.
But that doesn't mean there's no road to hell. It's
worth also recalling the essayist C.P. Snow's worries,
in 1956, about the growing separation of the sciences
and the humanities into "two cultures" oblivious to the
insights each could offer the other. Many of those who
take race as a fixed biological category would do well
to review the work of scholars in the humanities who
have shown how the numbers, names, and members of
respective races are always in flux. Go somewhere else
on the planet or step back a century, and you'll likely
encounter a different racial schema all together.
Just look, for example, at the Dillingham Commission of
the United States Congress, which, a century ago, began
studying immigration from Europe. In one of its many
publications, the bizarre Dictionary of Races or
Peoples, the Commission summarized the state of
thinking on race as follows: "Some writers have reduced
the number of such basic races to 3, while others have
proposed, 15, 29, or even 63." The Commission went with
five.
Indeed, race will always be a byproduct of context--
especially in an age when scientific advances claim to
pinpoint racial differences (and the health conditions
tied to them). In this way, we've changed little since
1916, when Madison Grant's bestselling eugenic tome,
The Passing of the Great Race, contained a chapter
called the "The Physical Basis of Race" that detailed
the exact skull, nose, eyes, body posture, and hair
characteristics that fit its racial types. (In 1917,
Franz Boas trashed the book in these pages in one of
the few major negative reviews.) However
technologically precise current attempts at biological
determinism may appear, they inevitably rest on the
same fallacy as their antecedents--the fact that race
is too intellectually murky and fluid to anchor a
theory in the first place.
It's time we stop and really consider C.P. Snow's
brilliant insight and think about the underlying tenets
behind the new racial science, often presented as
value-free. It'd be especially sad if those who act out
of serious concern for black Americans' health end up
embracing ideas of racial particularity not too distant
from those underlying the Dillingham Commission,
Madison Grant, The Bell Curve, and other sorry chapters
in the history of American thought.
------------------
Merlin Chowkwanyun is a PhD student in history at the
University of Pennsylvania.
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