What's Real about Race?: Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society (A Norton Short)
“What’s Real About Race? explores the race concept as a powerful socio-political construction and as an equally empty one from the perspective of the biological sciences.”
What’s Real About Race? explores the race concept as a powerful socio-political construction and as an equally empty one from the perspective of the biological sciences. How can there be such a massive mismatch? one might justifiably ask. Rina Bliss takes on this important, knotty question that has particular resonance in today’s discourse and actions on issues of human diversity.
The book begins by providing the historical context for the emergence of the concept. It is striking that such a pervasive, powerful, and pernicious idea has such a shallow timeline and flimsy intellectual foundation. The term emerges as a systematic intellectual pursuit out of the Enlightenment. It was coined in 1665 by Franciose Bernier who lays the tripartite scaffolding that becomes a throughline for a biological/scientific notion of race, (1) Races were divided into ranked, geographically distinct continental groupings, (2) Populations were thought to be biologically distinct and mutually exclusive (i.e., continental species). (3) There was one fundamental telltale marker of biological difference: skin color.
How was the ranked racial hierarchy arranged: European were at the pinnacle and everyone else was inferior. As Bliss notes, European features often took on a religious glow (divine ideal), while others were profanely animalistic (human or not). These foundational ideas carry forward robustly into the modern era and are, importantly, grounded in little more that anecdotal observation and hunches. They did not have the faintest notion of what would become modern genetics.
Why has the concept and its supposed features had such tenacity and stickiness? It fits squarely with and became a rationale for the Western colonial project, and beyond.
As the concept moves forward it is further refined by such figures as Carl Linnaeus; George-Luis Leclerc; David Hume; Georges Cuvier; Immanuel Kant; and Charles Darwin. Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, adds a further entailment to the race concept with the notion of eugenics. Namely that when the inferior/weak interbreed it leads to species degeneration. In all, pseudo-scientific assertions about race crystallized into “fact” and “common wisdom.”
That common wisdom manifested itself in the United States through the “one drop rule,” which asserted that any trace of non-white ancestry/blood assigned an individual to non-white minority status. U.S. racialized ideas, policies, and laws were famously influential in Adolf Hitler’s understanding of racial purity.
There was pushback on this racialized common wisdom. For example, anthropologist Franz Boas developed a counter-hegemonic scientific anti-racism. His research demonstrated that there were no significant differences between supposed races. Rather, cultural and environmental factors were fundamental to understanding and explaining human difference.
Bliss notes that the genetic unity of humanity is clearly mapped out through the Human Genome Project of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Nevertheless, the race concept is so deeply woven into thought that it manages to continue to work its way into genetics research.
While Bliss does not pivot to population biology, it is a very useful complement to her genomic discussion. Here we have to focus on the distribution and variability of genetic traits within a population. Descriptive traits are genetic characteristics that are phenotypic. The race concept suggests that these descriptive, genetic traits are homogeneous within a population.
A population biologist would say that a biological race would have to be a relatively stable breeding population that persists through time. To achieve this, genetic traits must be fixed and stable. Next, boundaries between human populations must be hard and immutable.
None of those conditions holds true for supposed races. Human populations are constantly interacting with one another across fuzzy boundaries while trading genetic material back and forth. Thus, human populations never achieve broad suites of stable gene frequencies over time (even if one trait—say blood type—is modestly stable at least at the populations center).
In other words, differences in physical traits (phenotypes) are little more than superficial variability. As Bliss underscores, “Genetic diversity does not equal racial diversity.” Prophetically, Bliss tells a story about a Chinese genomic researcher who “[in] the United States . . . had to start seeing skin color, and to prioritize doing so, because race was so politically charged in day-to-day life there.” In contrast, in China he had focused on such things as facial contours and earlobe length as key markers of difference.
Yet the concept of biological race remains firmly entrenched in American thought and practice. As Bliss notes, you can definitely have racialism and racism without race. Elsewhere this has been dubbed “social race”: a construct crafted by a constellation of historical, cultural, political factors rather than one defined by biology. Thus, as she notes, race becomes a sliding signifier and intersects with other social categories (e.g., gender, age, or class). It is also prejudicial (a bias held by individuals) and structural (it permeates institutions through their policies and practices).
Bliss, then, turns to the monetization of race, primarily though the multi-billion-dollar DNA testing business. Typically, these tests will provide a general notion of ancestry along with other noteworthy genetic markers (often for various diseases). These tests, she notes, furthers a form of genomic racialism.
Until recently, it was thought that all DNA alone shaped our biological diversity. Researchers have now begun to focus on epigenetics as well. This is a level of activity above the gene—various environmental factors that effect a gene’s expression. Epigenetic factors adjust a gene’s expression like a dimmer switch without altering the gene itself. Though Bliss seems to suggest this is settled science, it is still certainly still controversial. It is, however, a truly exciting and dynamic area of emergent research with tremendous potential.
These are challenging times for anyone who is a champion of human diversity and its value to society. Bliss has given us a very accessible and concise analysis of the race concept from the pseudoscience of the Enlightenment to its modern misuse in genomics. As she so thoughtfully concludes, “Race is a complicated combination of social, structural, and material factors, and must be viewed as such. If we view race as a genetic category and ignore the many social factors that construct our differences, we perpetuate an inaccurate view of what’s real about race. Race isn’t in our DNA.”
The publication of this book comes at a time of deep political polarization stoked by culture wars that, among other things, are targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that are central to her work. How this book will resonate in the current echo chamber of cultural revanchism remains to be seen. But universities and the professoriate, especially in the social sciences and humanities, is being cast as “the enemy.” This framing calls into question the viability of academic freedom and the very future of higher education in America.