Bodies with Histories
The New Search for the Biology of Race

Anne Fausto-Sterling
www.bostonreview.net

Richard C. Francis, Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of
Inheritance. W. W. Norton, $25.95 (cloth)

Ann Morning, The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and
Teach about Human Difference. University of California
Press, $26.95 (paper)

Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics,
and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first
Century. New Press, $29.95 (cloth)


Have you heard this one? A sociologist, a lawyer, and a
biologist walk into a bar, scoot their stools up to the
counter, order drinks, and begin to chat. Suddenly, a
booming voice (God, the bartender?) envelops them. "What
is the meaning of race?" the voice asks.

While the question may seem straightforward on its face,
it quickly spawns further questions, often vexing. Is race
purely a political construct, or is it biologically
encoded? Certainly there are aspects of human biology
--skin color, hair color, the presence or absence
of epicanthic folds, etc.--that are commonly associated
with racial differences, but is race just the sum of these
physical features, with all of the overlaps, exceptions,
and ambiguities they involve? How do genes factor into the
story? And what connection--if any--is there between
biological markers of race and the social experiences of
racial groups?

Each of the three drinking buddies has a lot to say to God
or Sam Malone, and, by the way, their responses don't end
in laugh lines. The biologist, Richard Francis, engages
other issues, though his concerns directly affect how we
answer the loud voice. But the sociologist, Ann Morning,
and the lawyer, Dorothy Roberts, are narrowly focused on
the science of race and how medicine mediates racial
experience. And with good reason: in the United States
people of a darker hue (on average) die sooner than
pink-skinned people. They are afflicted with higher rates
of particular diseases, such as high blood pressure,
strokes, and kidney failure. So the race you're born with,
or, rather, which race you are born into, might mean a
healthier, longer life--or not.

These days large numbers of medical research dollars are
devoted to finding genetic differences between races that
might explain health disparities. But many students of
biology and race, and at least some of our bar mates,
think that is a bad idea. They are not against medical
research per se but against bad research. Instead of
looking for genes that cause race and attending health
outcomes (the standard approach) they point to evidence
strongly suggesting that everyday events alter our bodies,
making them sicker or more resistant to disease--events
that the political economy ensures are more or less common
depending on which racial categories one is assigned to.
Indeed, it may be that biology doesn't create race but
that racial marking creates new biological states via
processes that all three of these thinkers discuss in new
books.

* * *

In The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach
about Human Difference, Morning gleans the meaning of race
from interviews with university students and their
professors and from close reading of high school
textbooks. She presents detailed information with great
care and enlivens the discussion with hilarious
tongue-tied statements from students and professors as
well as personal anecdotes. When she takes her
two-week-old daughter for a doctor's visit, the hospital
admissions clerk won't allow the baby to be seen without
first having a racial designation. When Morning suggests
"multiracial"--she usually identifies as black; her
husband is Italian--the clerk replies, "That's not an
option" and settles instead for "race unknown," as if that
could offersignificant clinical information.

Race is engrained in American medical practice. Sometimes
beliefs about racial difference are even wired into
medical diagnostic machines. For example, you can't get a
bone scan evaluated without designating a race, because
the formulae programmed into bone densitometers use
different standards for assessing bone thinning in white,
Asian, Hispanic, and African American women. The evidence
supporting different standards is rarely questioned and
certainly unknown to the technicians who operate the
machines. Often even the radiologists who evaluate the
results don't know much about the differing standards.

Or consider spirometers, which measure lung function. The
normal functioning of black people's lungs is typically
presumed to be 10-15 percent below that of white people's.
As Lundy Braun, who studies the intersection of race and
medical science and technology, has shown, the presumption
stems from a poorly supported idea that blacks inherently
have lesser lung capacities than whites. Yet spirometers
are calibrated to account for this difference. Some
machines actually have a "race" switch built into them,
which technicians flip depending on what race they believe
the patient to be. Pegging the lung function of blacks at
a lower level means, among other things, that they have to
be sicker than whites in order to qualify for worker's
compensation or other insurance for lung-related illness.

In The Nature of Race Morning uses the lenses of biology
and medicine to isolate several conceptualizations of
race. She finds that there is no consensus among either
social or biological scientists and groups her respondents
into three general categories: essentialists,
anti-essentialists, and constructivists.

It may be that biology doesn't create race but that racial
marking creates new biological states.

Essentialists propose that there are biologically grounded
human races that share some more or less immutable
essence. In modern terms the essence is usually understood
to be specific genes or groups of genes, or to result from
evolutionary processes that have acted on genetically
isolated populations.

Here is how one of Morning's interlocutors, a biologist
whom Morning classifies as an essentialist, chews over the
definition of race:

	Well, I think the textbook will say that there are
	three major races--Negroid, Caucasian, and Asian or
	Mongoloid . . . . So I guess in the old definition
	they're like you would imagine they are: the edges are
	a little blurred, but the old classical definition of
	race is a lot clearer. And don't we kind of look at
	people today [like that].
	
Referring to Morning, this scientist continues:
	
	I said you're part Caucasian and part black, so I'm
	taking two of the standard races, and I'm mixing them
	in some proportion, and that's probably the best I
	could do in terms of race: three races . . . blurring
	at the edges.

But this blurring is a problem for anti-essentialists, who
see the fuzziness of racial categories as a sign that they
can't be rigorously connected to particular genes.
Anti-essentialists either emphasize the genetic unity of
humans in a single race or highlight how difficult and
arbitrary it is to draw biologically based racial boundary
lines. Anti-essentialists agree that there is wide
biological variation in human traits, but because groups
of traits don't link and vary together, this variation
can't be used to set up clear racial categories.

So anti-essentialists open the door to human agency in
organizing racial groupings, but they don't explain just
how humans might construct and maintain racial groups.
Enter the constructivists. Not only do they argue that
race is a social category, but they also maintain that the
science that produces claims of biological difference is
itself shaped by social forces. One constructivist tells
Morning the point

	is not to . . . say it's all cultural, it's not
	biological, but rather to say that constructions of
	difference, be they characterized as cultural or
	biological . . . really operate in a sociopolitical
	framework that is about relations of inequality.

If the science and social science faculty at major
universities sound confused or at odds on the question of
race, where does this leave the students? In Morning's
study, they reflect some of the same divisions found among
faculty but also worry that they not offend peers by
appearing racist. Many express genuine concern about
racial inequality. Here is how one student tries to
combine views about difference and equality:

	So the genes make them different, but, because they
	look different--we look different--the environment is
	going to play a role. People have darker skin; they
	might be less prone to skin cancer because they have
	that protective layering. But it doesn't make them
	different people, so . . . I don't think people
	act--if 	you just take the U.S. and different races
	here, and if they were born here, and they're
	different races, I 	don't think that makes them act
	differently, makes them any different.

Morning is surprised by the enduring strength of the
biological view of race, given that many social scientists
and some biologists still think that the biological
concept of race disappeared after World War II, with the
revelation of the horrific consequences of Nazi racial
beliefs. She devotes considerable thought and analysis to
the social and structural forces undergirding the idea
that biology offers a good basis on which to construct our
understanding of race. Morning believes that by moving
from a view of race based on how we look (skin color, hair
texture, etc.) to one based on genes, a biological
explanation of human difference has been made suitable for
the post-racial era in which we supposedly live.
Essentialism has held its own against constructivism and
anti-essentialism.

for the rest of this review, go to
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.3/anne_fausto-sterling_biology_race.php

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