Racialized futures

Our DNA holds perhaps the most intact record of our family, our lands, our language, tribes, customs and
traditions. It would be soul satisfying to know that our children can grow up with a strong sense of identity
and heritage by being able to unravel that time, that we thought was going to be lost forever.

it is estimated that about 10% of white Americans have similar genetic links to Africa.

Genetic accounts of ‘who we really are’ are just one of a number of important ways in which contemporary
biology is part of changes in how racial differences are represented and lived.

‘Racialization’ refers to the social and political processes whereby racially distinct groups are constituted.
Before:
science’s involvement in racialization has long passed, its outdated formulations living on only in the
misguided and ill- informed assumptions of the prejudiced.

Now:
science has continued to be implicated in the construction and play of racialized social divisions. Most
significantly, it considers how recent technoscientific developments may be contributing to important
realignments in race thinking.

The paper is structured around three moments in the development of public discourse on ‘race’ and
biology

1. history of scientific racism. This reflects the foundational status that accounts of this history have come
to have both in the politics of science and in anti-racism.
2. passing of the era of scientific racism: from the 1930s onwards science was put in the service of anti-
racism. The notion that new scientific knowledge could undermine racism rested on questionable
simplifications about the character of race thinking and the direction of scientific thought. Nonetheless,
we can identify a second moment following World War II where, in the public domain at least, explicit
talk of race as biological difference was marginalized, and racialized science was deemed dangerous
and in need of careful management. Science was again important in that context for characterizing
racism as ignorance or false ideology, and recasting variations between populations as cultural rather
than biological.
3. notion that racism was simply bad science seemed at odds with racism’s apparent resilience in the
face of scientific critique, and the way its assumptions and pronouncements could be easily translated
from a biological to a cultural idiom.

‘Race’ With and Without Biology: The Rise and Fall of Scientific Racism

accepted view that ‘race’, as it is commonly understood today, emerged out of the social, political and
intellectual conditions of early modernity
development and usage can be linked to new problems of managing populations, societies and states

19th century and early 20th century: scientific knowledge, techniques and methodologies established
‘race’ as the pre-eminent means of making sense of difference
The influence of biological accounts of life and humanity – seen in, for example, the new science of
biology’s preoccupations with species types and with the inheritance of physical, mental and moral
capacities – is undeniable.
notions of human difference and inferiority existed previously in connection with, for example, notions of
lineage, science helped to cast divisions between peoples as natural, fixed and absolute.

It would, however, be simplistic to see ‘race’ as an invention of science. The relationship between
scientific, policy and public discourse on race was and is complex and varied.

Races are socially constructed when people believe that different categories of people have essential,
heritable differences. Racial essentialist thought should not be reduced to being only biological
essentialism. Racial ideologies are complex and can take many different forms, and therefore the specific
criteria for racial assignment are also multiple.
Phenotype is certainly one criterion, but ancestry in many social contexts is another and geographic
background yet another. Rather than trying to make an a priori determination of legitimate criteria for
defining races, scholars need merely to pay attention to the type of difference constructed by people’s
beliefs and practices.

Racism Without Biology?

The vision epitomized by the UNESCO statements was of scientific knowledge and scientific education
curing racism.

Anti-racist science became an important (but not the only) touchstone in discussions of race.
A number of commentators have rightly linked anti-racist science to the policy climate that developed in
the post- war era, one that was characterized by faith in science’s ability to solve social problems and by
official adherence to the inclusive values of the welfare state
racism could thrive alongside formal adherence to the tenet of biological unity of all peoples. In analysis of
media and political discourse, these commentators identified a ‘new racism’ in which talk of biological
superiority had been replaced by claims about the incompatibility of different cultures

it is natural and inevitable that people feel affinity with those with whom they are genetically similar and
hostility towards those with whom they differ

Racialized Futures: Scientific Racism Returns?

The development of scientific racism and the later association of science with anti-racism can be seen as
two distinct confluences between scientific activity and its political setting.

Molecular genetics, behavioural genetics, neurobiology, and sociobiology have provided a language
through which group differences can be interpreted as biologically determined.

Molecular genetics, behavioural genetics, neurobiology, and sociobiology have provided a language

There may be no way to ask about the inherent biological differences between groups of human beings
without constructing race, and no way to construct race without invoking racism

both utopian and dystopian visions, each suggesting that the growing ascendancy of biological accounts of
human life will transform the ways in which ‘race’ is understood and acted upon, is significant. Predictions
of this kind are – in Michael & Brown’s (2003) phrase – ‘present futures’ – sites for constructing, debating
and challenging race identities.

New settings new science

Biologism contribute to some significant shifts in how people think about themselves and their relations to
others - 5 dimensions of this changes:
1. re-essentializing of identity in biologically based accounts of behaviour and group. uncertainty
about identity and difference
2. undermine ‘any fantasy of organic integrity’
3. Understanding people in molecular terms and the impact of new reproductive technologies has
recast the body not as a given, but as a potential object for re-engineering.
4. notions of race and ethnicity have rested on a fundamental distinction between nature and culture.
a. Biology is no longer simply about knowing natural processes, but is itself an enterprise of
invention
b. nature can no longer be seen as prior to culture, nor is it a simple cultural construction
c. ‘However culture is redefined, its distinctive characteristic as human enterprise working
against the givens of nature seems already to belong to the past’
5. Reassessment of the meaning of kinship and ancestry - foundational elements of many
manifestations of race thinking. genetic testing for propensity to disease force people to confront
and consider their biological relations with others.
 . Potential for the assertion of the primacy of biologycal ties above all else.
a. Sperm donation, raise questions about what constitutes “natural” kinship links

Biology is used to answer questions about who we are

think of differences between people and the relationships between them in biological terms
public expression and debate around “race”
by raising questions about self and kindship, these new forms of knowledge and practice have the potential
to undermine existing categories and assumptions and also lead to their “vigorous reinstatement”

new biological knowledge challenge conformist assump-tions and existing divisions with an account of
material heterogeneity and contingency (Hird, 2002, 2003a).
Biology reject the language of crude determinism (“a gene for”)
As a consequence, far from detecting a new reductionism, some suggest that the public may now have and
exaggerated view of the manner and extent to which genes are open to manipulation.
excessive sense of the malleability of genes might present its own, quite different, risks in an era where
simplistic understanding of genes is being transformed into visions of readily available genetically-based
products.

Do not understand evolution, inheritance or difference in purely genetic terms.

To label scientific work ‘racist’ or ‘eugenicist’ is immediately to condemn it as morally and intellectually
unacceptable.

A limitation of the dystopian view is that it often fails to include the influence of a powerful critique of race
science in discussions of the contemporary situation.

we must question the assumption that any more general move towards biological accounts of social
behaviour will inevitably imply a resurgence of essentialist or deterministic race thinking

An Emerging Biopolitics of Racialized Identity: Some Examples

There are signs of the emergence of just such a new ‘biopolitics’ around race and ethnicity. Notions of
similarity and difference are being developed, represented and lived in new biological terms.

Biology – both bodily knowledge and bodily material – has become an object of negotiation and struggle.

Central to this new politics of race and biology is the concept of ‘identity’. This term is unavoidable in the
contemporary setting, where its usage has been stretched to encompass external categorizations, subjective
experiences and accounts of social location.

Identity is nonetheless a key category of practice in a contemporary race politics, which assumes that all
peoples seek, express and negotiate identities, and which places an identity-owning individual at the centre
of the political field.

‘identity’ is frequently used to imply an appealing but ultimately unsustainable synergy between issues of
self, community and solidarity.

Struggles of similarity and difference

 that races do not exist ‘from a purely genetic standpoint’, but that there are significant variations
that allow scientists to distinguish between large ‘populations’ according to their ancestral
geographic origin.
 Racial genetic difference: science says
o the language emphasis is of breakthrough, of knowledge triumphing over prejudice, but
the truth is messy and debated.
o biology inspiring both racialized utopias and racialized dystopias points a tension
running through it between an insistence on the ultimate similarity of all humans and a
focus on variations between populations.
o Enthusiasts suggest that its findings are a potent weapon against racism
  genetic differences between populations are minimal. The discovery that all
peoples share a common origin – expressed crudely in the idea that we are all
descended from an ‘African Eve’ – is seen as a counter to notions of essential
differences between apparently distinct groups
 Science now tells us that all human populations are 99.99% genetically similar.

 Our DNA records the evolution of an African ape that began walking on two
legs more than 4 million years ago. It documents the emergence of modern
humans on the savannahs of eastern Africa about 7,500 genera- tions ago. It
chronicles the diversification of modern humans into ‘races’ and ‘ethnic groups’
that we recognize today. (Olson, 2002: 4)
 the importance of notions of shared ancestry in constructions of ethnic group
membership, this approach does not go uncontested.
 Evidence of shared genetic heritage can, in certain circumstances, be taken as
powerful evidence of group membership.
`

Responses have been strong and varied to suggestions that ethnic groups have different inherited
propensities to genetic disorders, have different risks in relation to particular diseases, or may metabolize
drugs differently. In some cases group spokespersons assert similarity with other groups, reject biological
accounts of difference (as masking the impacts of racism and social inequalities) and/or to raise fears about
resulting discrimination or stigmatization. In other cases groups embrace and organize around biological
difference in order to seek special medical treatments and tests.19 In all cases there is an active process of
group construction and mobilization at work. This fits with a wider message from the literature on biologism:
‘Re-cataloguing illness and pathologies along a genetic axis does not generate fatalism. On the contrary, it
creates an obligation to act in the present in relation to the potential futures that now come into view’ (Novas
& Rose, 2000: 486). Ethnic groupings can thus become renewed as active genetic networks and
communities of risk. As such they are part of the trend Paul Rabinow (1996: 99) terms ‘biosociality’ – the
increasing identification with group through biology.

A striking feature of recent discussions of reproduction, disease and genetic disorder are the growing
ambiguities surrounding the distinction between culturally defined ethnicities and biologically defined races.

The argument is that self-assigned labels have more explanatory power than objective measures of
population clustering, because they encompass environmental factors missed by genetic approaches

Our DNA It chronicles the diversification of modern humans into ‘races’ and ‘ethnic groups’ that we recognize
today.

The idea that our history is written in our genes, that the truth of similarity or difference can be revealed by
science, is a seductive one.

Such groups continue to fight for control over membership and founda- tional narratives. Other interests –
for example in the USA and in Brazil – seek to mobilize genetic testing (of living and long dead bodies) in
order to limit access to special rights. To members of the groups in question, such tests can be threatening:
potentially usurping their right to define who does or does not belong the group and, in the case of tests on
long dead remains, undermining foundational narratives that portray them as direct descendants of the
original occupiers of their lands.

hgdp:

For some, the worry was of biocolonialism and exploitation of genetic heritage. For others, the concern was
that political claims would be undermined if they were shown not to be genetically distinct from the wider
population.

this is not the reduction of social categories to genetic ones; instead it is a matter of co-production: ‘cultural
and social categories reduced to genetic ones at the same time as genetic categories reduced to social and
cultural ones. In other words, these reductions and categories emerged in a process of co production
DNA and the Narration of a Racialized Self

Access to a genetic account of our ‘ethnic’ origins further confuses any distinction between ethnicity and
race, but, in doing so, it opens up some interesting possibilities for change. Some commentators highlight
the potential for a re-essentializing of identity by an emphasis on biological connection:

The result of such a shift in which identity is no longer a product of self- definition, but rather, is ascribed by
science, has serious implications for how race and ethnicity will be conceived. Critical to this shift in identity
politics is the explanatory power of genetic discourse in its ‘appearance and allure of specificity’ in classifying
individual identity.

Users of this new genetic information seem to be able to manage the apparent contradiction between treating
biology as a source of truth about ancestry and viewing themselves as active constructors of their own
identities. There are important links here to changing values around consumption, personal development
and individuality. Part of the appeal of these forms of genetic testing is the way that they appear to provide
a means of reconciling increasingly individualized accounts of self-identity and the constitution of political
communities in racialized form

Anti-racism becomes a struggle over biology rather than a rejection of it.

The challenge is for social studies of science to direct its considerable analytical sophistication to
understand, first, the ways in which debates about race and ethnicity are played out within the new biology
as it moves into the world, and, second, to consider the wider impact of this trend on public and popular
discourse on difference.