Race: not the best, but it’ll work for now
JC
Poor race. Must feel bad that everyone just keeps it around until we can figure out a better way. 
This is another example. From The Economist, a good article about how race is being used to predict the frequency of health problems within a certain race. I put predict in bold because the article points out the importance of thinking about it in those terms. People don’t want to necessarily point to genetics/race as the cause of certain diseases, but here you are, giving percentages of Alzheimers’ occurrences among the different races. What is this trying to do? Predict so that people can keep an eye out…. (this is a long post, but I think that the ways in which it asks questions about race are good, so I include quite a bit of it. Thanks to Francis for the heads-up!)
ApoE4 is relatively common in most racial groups. About 9% of Japanese Americans have it, 14% of white Americans and 19% of black Americans. But the impact of ApoE4 differs significantly between these groups. Individuals of Japanese descent who have two copies of ApoE4 (one from each parent) have a 33-fold increased risk of contracting Alzheimer’s disease compared with those who have other versions of ApoE. Those of European descent have a 15-fold increased risk. Blacks, by contrast, have a mere six-fold increase in their risk. “Whether it is due to differences in genetic background or environment, who knows? But if you ignore race, you would never know,” says Dr Risch. Moreover, if the American population was sampled for ApoE4 and Alzheimer’s risk without regard for ethnicity, the risk would resemble that of whites, because their numbers would overwhelm the data from the other racial groups. As Dr Risch says, “I think these categories are useful as long as they are predictive. That doesn’t prove that the difference is genetic.”
And another example of hypocrisy in the ways we talk about blacks and whites (similar to the previous post on how white victims vs. black victims of rape are handled):
For example, according to Richard Cooper, a professor of medicine at Loyola University in Chicago, talking about black people having a gene that predisposes them to some disorder or another “feeds a social process” that is deeply negative. As he observes, black Americans suffer more from high blood pressure than white Americans. “We don’t know why, but everyone says it is genetic. But if you look around the world, by far the highest hypertension rates are in Poland, Finland and Russia. Much higher than black Americans. The average difference in blood pressure between blacks and whites is about 4mm of mercury, the difference between whites in the US and Russia is about 20mm. No one has ever said that these white people are genetically predisposed to hypertension: it must be their diet. But when they talk about blacks, it has to be genetics. That, in a nutshell, is the whole problem with this whole way of thinking.”
It is as pervasive and pervasive gets. Anyway, this article goes back and forth, clearly struggling to figure out whether it makes sense to link race with health issues and medicine. At the end, it all falls apart, with the question of “how, scientifically do you define someone’s race?”
This sort of work raises another question, with its own set of sensitivities: how, scientifically, do you define someone’s race? In studies such as Dr Cohen’s this question is fudged, because people defined themselves. That is a reasonable starting point. But America’s population is descended mainly from immigrants and those ancestors have been meeting and mating for centuries. Few native-born Americans trace all of their ancestors back to the same part of the world, so how closely are genes affecting disease linked to genes affecting racial self-identification?
I was impressed with this article in that it basically concluded with the idea that using race has tons of holes in it, but until we have a better system, this is it:
Perhaps the last word should go to Francis Collins, who led America’s contribution to the Human Genome Project, and thus helped to open the debate. “The downside of using race, whether in research or in the practice of medicine,” he says, “is that we are reifying it as if it has more biological significance than it deserves. Race is an imperfect surrogate for the causative information we seek. To the extent that we continue to use it, we are suggesting to the rest of the world that it is very reliable and that racial categories have more biological meaning than they do. We may even appear to suggest something that I know is not true: that there are bright lines between populations and that races are biologically distinct.”
Eventually, the technology developed to carry out the Human Genome Project, and the science it has made possible, will make the whole question redundant. It will be possible to look at the genes of each person as an individual. But until that time race, used sceptically, does have value. And unlike previous attempts at racial science, this one could actually do people some good.
It’s very good to see these ideas reinforced!
Unlisted wrote:
One little problem with racial medicine. How does a multi-racial person fit into these “predictors”?
Multi-racial people would throw a monkey wrench into the entire concept
Posted 22 Apr 2006 at 7:35 am ¶
Adrianna wrote:
I don’t understand why these scientist are using the term race. There is only one race the human race. even Darwin knew. Biologically are we not 99% the same. Unless some of us are Aliens. We have to start debunking the myth that there is different races.
Posted 22 Apr 2006 at 3:15 pm ¶
Jeremy Pierce wrote:
Just so you know, commenting doesn’t work on this blog with the Firefox browser. That’s not good, because it’s becoming one of the most popular web browsers.
I have a little quibble with your reference to hypocrisy. I’m not going to disagree with the content of your criticism, but I think you’re mislabeling it. What you’re talking about is an inconsistency. Someone treats one group one way and another group a different way. There’s no consistency to how they treat different groups. It’s not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is when someone tells others to do something but then won’t do it themselves. This can occur with politicians or other public figures who run on a certain message and then turn out to act opposite in private. But what you’re talking about here isn’t some private violation of public views. It’s simply not recognizing that one way of acting toward one group is different from how you act toward another group. There’s still something bad about it (though I think it’s not exactly voluntary in many cases). But it’s not hypocrisy.
Posted 22 Apr 2006 at 6:50 pm ¶
Jeremy Pierce wrote:
Adrianna, there are clearly identifiable characteristics that are biological differences between one group identified as a racial group and any other group identified as a racial group. These features are pretty insignificant biologically speaking, so it’s kind of strange if someone takes these features to be indicative of anything besides themselves, which is just coloring, bone structure, hair type, and similar externals. But they are indeed differences, and even if arbitrary social practices have determined the way we classify people we still need to acknowledge that these classifications occur, that because of the classifications whole groups are mistreated (and to name that mistreatment you have to use the names of racial groups), and that social categories (whether they rely on biological features or not) are still social categories. There’s nothing that biologically determines who is a Republican or who is a Democrat, but those are real categories nonetheless. The argument against talking about race at all is just a philosophical mistake. That doesn’t mean we should desire to keep these terms the way they are. I would love for there to be no racial categories. But they’re there, and pretending they’re not there actually causes more problems in being unable to call a spade a spade, so it’s worth using the labels.
Posted 22 Apr 2006 at 6:54 pm ¶
Lyonside wrote:
Adrianna:
We are one SPECIES. But within the human genome, there is a lot of diversity, some of which pertains to medical background. Now, because prehistorically-into-historically phenotypes have been concentrated in geographic areas (the “races” we use as a nasty little shortcut), and those phenotypes/geographies are sometimes associated with genetic tendencies, I do think that ethnic origin has a place for concern with SOME diseases and vectors.
Sickle-cell anemia is a recessive trait that can be debilitating (but not as debilitating as chronic malaria). A mixed recessive/dominant individual is protected from malaria and does not get sickle cell. Therefore, the sickle cell gene has concentrated in people from equatorial regions. In the US, that usually means African-Americans, but it’s global. It makes sense in the US to test African-Americans. It makes less sense to test an Irish dude w/ no known African ancestry.
Other genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs are also found in specific ethnic groups, but don’t confer any known benefit.\
But the problem is when we have very complicated diseases that may or may not be affected by genetics, or rather are a combination of genetics, environment (diet, exposure to toxicants and pollutants, lifestyle, other complications caused by other diseases (here I’m thinking HPV’s link to cervical cancer, and other viruses that may be linked to colon cancer, etc.)
I’m not in favor of throwing ALL ethnic data out in regards to medicine. However, I think medical science must be sceptical and never deny treatment or testing based on ethnicity alone.
Posted 22 Apr 2006 at 6:58 pm ¶
Unlisted wrote:
“Race” is a concept that has been over simplified.
Traditional defintion of race has meant that Derek Jeter and Manute Bol are from the same “race”
However, people are clearly different and have different tendencies. “Race” could be more accurately defined as an extended family.
Dr C Loring Brace said:
“Yes, we can recognize people from a given area. What we are seeing, however, is a pattern of features derived from common ancestry in the area in question, and these are largely without different survival value. To the extent that the people in a given region look more like one another than they look like people from other regions, this can be regarded as “family resemblance writ large.” And as we have seen, each region grades without break into the one next door”
So when we look at people, we see a more gradual fade from one set of features to the next and not a “bright line” where this “race” stops here and that one starts there.
People like Derek Jeter, Jason Kidd, Kristen Kruek, et al have thrown a wrench into the entire concept…and DNA shows us that all of us are mixed to large degrees. However, the fact that we can even see that we ARE mixed shows that some differences DO exist though
Posted 22 Apr 2006 at 9:06 pm ¶
Legos wrote:
Unlisted:
There’s an article in The Sum of Our Parts: Mixed Heritage Asian Americans by Cathy Tashiro that addresses how such decisions affect Mixed Race people.
Jeremy:
I agree with you on the word choice, but quibble a bit with your comment at the end. The heart of the problem is that these sorts of decisions are made based on unconscious racial assumptions, which you excuse as involuntary. Because so many doctors make these assumptions, they are failing to provide optimum service. If it was a conscious decision, that would be easily rectified. Attempting to change these subtler symptoms of America’s racial thinking is a much more difficult job. I’m guessing, hopefully incorrectly, that you are one of the people that decries arguments such as Adrianna’s regarding the term “race” as PC bullshit. Well in order to change these sort of unconscious decisions, especially in essential areas such as medicine, we need a serious effort to make people aware of their assumptions, in large part by questioning their use of language. Not saying they should throw out the data they have or stop using it, it’s fucked but it’s better than nothing, but they do need to keep questioning their assumptions, like any scientific profession, in order to maintain the forward momentum the field has built up over the last two hundred years. Of course they were probably doing this and the journalists may have just thrown out all the caveats with regards to terms such as race. Cause journalists are kinda slow on the uptake, and editors are even worse.
Also, speaking of poor word choice, “calling a spade a spade?”
And just a general comment:
Are they getting their shit together regarding better genetic indicators related to more precise region of origin type data? If they can help some idiot on Oprah figure out that he’s “1/32 African American,” can’t they figure out some meaningful charts related to region of origin that’ll be more precise than “Hmmm, Black fella eh? Maybe you got the Sickle cell.” C’mon Oprah, you got the technology use it for something that actually matters for once.
Posted 23 Apr 2006 at 11:40 am ¶
Jeremy Pierce wrote:
“Calling a spade a spade” is a standard idiom going back to ancient Greece for referring to the willingness to be accurate when there’s a trend to be inaccurate. When I saw your puzzling statement, I googled the expression and found this discussion that informed me that some people have been spreading an urban legend that “calling a spade a spade” has something to do with black people. I’ve never heard that suggestion before, but I think it’s obviously false and reminds me of the ‘niggardly’ incident in D.C. a while back. Given this usage of the term ’spade’ for a black person (which I have absolutely never heard of before this moment), I can understand how someone who is ignorant of the background to the idiom might think something of it in this context, but I think it’s also worth keeping in mind that I wasn’t saying to call black people spades. I was saying to call racism racism, which requires calling white people white, black people black, mixed people mixed, Filipinos Filipino, and so on.
I never excused the origins of racial categories as involuntary. Several voluntary acts of intellectuals in the 18th-20th centuries gave us most of the racial concepts and terms we now have, going back at least to Immanuel Kant, whose language and views were even in direct contradiction to his official ethical theory about the equality and full moral autonomy of every human being. That inconsistency is certainly something he can be blamed for. The willingness to allow all sorts of evidence against that brain-measuring stuff 100 years ago to count as experimental error is certainly inexcusable. The history of slavery and segregation isn’t exactly blameless. The origins of our racial concepts and terms is in no way excused. But the terms are there, and I didn’t invent them. I have to make a choice about whether I’m going to refer to racism as racism (which requires some concept of race) or whether I’m going to ignore racial realities due to real social practices.
The second sort of policy is truly harmful, and that’s why I think those who want to remove all talk of race immediately are advocating something dangerous. It leads to the kind of color-blind ideal of contemporary liberalism that thinks that all you need to do is talk about how we see everyone the same and then you can pretend that the problems don’t exist. After all, if you think of blacks as the same as whites, then you don’t have any obligation to do anything to overcome the racial problems. In this way modern liberalism has distanced itself from doing anything about anything bad related to race, because if we ignore race we don’t have to think about it. This criticism is offered against liberalism from the radical left and the mainstream right, and I think there’s something to it at least to whatever extent liberalism is trying to act as if there’s no reality to race.
So while I agree that the racial categories have an immoral origin, and I agree that they’re not going to do justice to some of the important genetic and ancestral facts about people who don’t fit well into the categories as they are often construed, I think it’s immoral to pretend that such social categories don’t exist. I don’t think the categories are as bad as putting Derek Jeter in the same category as Manute Bol, however. Derek Jeter, to someone who doesn’t know anything about his ancestry (including me, as it happens), looks to be either Latino or mixed race. Most Americans have those categories at this point. What they don’t have is gradations between black and white other than mixed race, and they don’t have any sense of how people who normally fit well into the categories of black and white (especially black) are often mixed themselves to the point of being only 40-60% African in ancestry. So the categories aren’t fine-grained enough,, there are people who don’t fit well into any of them, there are real problems with the way they’re formulated and relate to each other, and they often carry connotations that are simply false, but none of that means that the categories don’t exist or that there aren’t people who are clear examples of their relevant groups.
Posted 23 Apr 2006 at 1:59 pm ¶
Unlisted wrote:
Jeremy Pierce:
Great Points.
Derek Jeter is biracial (black father/white mother). That being the case, my point is that according to traditional racial categories, he and Manute Bol are the same “race”.
According to traditional racial categories Alicia Keyes and Alek Wek are the same “race”.
I brought that example to illustrate how silly it is to OVERSIMPLIFY this. You are what your mother and father are, and to a lessor extent your extended family. THAT is a “race” (if you want to call it that). It is also silly to imply that there are absolutely NO differences in different people as well. Break all this down to the extended family level instead of making it overly broad and all this medical data will make sense. FAMILIES have certain medical histories. But when you try to apply is across the board to others of the same skin tone, all the data gets thrown out of wack.
And finally, again, your point about ignoring racism is well taken. It is real
Posted 23 Apr 2006 at 7:10 pm ¶