What's the use of race? Modern governance and the biology of difference

What's the use of race? Modern governance and the biology of difference, edited by Ian Whitmarsh and David S. Jones, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2010, 296 pp., £16.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-262-51424-8

The purpose of this edited collection is to interrogate how genomics is used by scientists to understand human variation, how genomic technologies may invoke biological and essentialist conceptions of racial differences, and how claims to difference may be embraced and fostered by minority groups as a basis for mobilizing identity politics and asserting citizenship rights. The product of three conferences held at MIT, the book consists of 10 empirical case studies. With the exception of two chapters by current or past UK scholars, the book leans heavily towards empirical work from North America and Canada. In this sense, it is a North American text but its many virtues will warrant a wide international readership.

The book has a helpful tripartite structure – Ruling (law and regulation), Knowing (science), and Caring (medicine), described in the introduction as mutually constitutive domains, such that, “knowing is a kind of ruling, caring is a kind of regulating, and ruling is framed in how a population is known” (p. 10). The first section on “Ruling” contains three chapters. Chapter 2 by Kahn, examines the forensic use of DNA as evidence in criminal cases. It describes the problematic evidential basis of racially identified forensic DNA databases for calculating the odds that DNA left at a crime scene might be that of the defendant. It brings to attention the likelihood of associating defendants with alleged crimes through stereotypical links between race, genes and violence. Sankar in Chapter 3 looks at the use of ancestry and phenotypic profiling to construct predictive racial identities of suspects; that is, the assumption that geographic origins or ancestry can be deduced from genes and the information used to assign race and predict appearance. Chapter 4 by Epstein explores the obligation on federally funded researchers to include all groups in clinical trials, and the tensions that arise between this emphasis on inclusion and managing difference as social constructs. The section on “Knowing” addresses large-scale biological research projects and the durability of constructs of race/ethnicity in genomic science despite apparent efforts to move away from orthodox uses and interpretations of race/ethnicity. In Chapter 5, Outram and Ellison describe how scientists traverse ambiguous racial definitions through selective engagement with racial categories which preserve biological interpretations of difference. This theme of ambiguity is also addressed in Chapter 6 by Tutton et al., in which they examine the tensions between practices of self-identification and bio-medical categories of race/ethnicity in large-scale population bio-banks in the UK. They recount scientists' concerns about standardization and interpretation of self-ascribed identities as “genetic ethnicities” or “ancestry.” Hinterberger in Chapter 7 engages with the Canadian government's inclusion of indigenous populations in national genomic projects, the appropriation of colonial histories to inform constructions of genomic identities, and the use by indigenous groups to make claims on the nation state to inform their own bio-social citizenship. In Chapter 8 Fujimara et al. examine how race does, or does not, get used in human genomic studies of disease. They describe how scientists have attempted to use technologies for finding disease related genetic markers without using the limiting constructs of race/ethnicity. They look at population geneticists' claims to be “accounting for” populations rather than “assessing” differences between racial groups and the possibility of searching for genetic markers without relying on racial/ethnic categories.

The section on “Caring” describes the challenges posed by the constructs of race/ethnicity when attempts are made to describe epidemiological profiles to diagnose and treat patients within clinical contexts. Kaufman and Cooper, in Chapter 9, show how variations at population level are wrongly translated into decisions at the clinical level of treatment, in particular, the irrationality of using race/ethnicity to make medical decisions. Drawing on sickle cell anemia, for example, the authors show that diagnosis of this disease is of limited help, and more likely to exaggerate presumed associations, when using race as a screening device. In Chapter 10, Jenks describes the challenges of using cultural competency to offset the iniquities of race/ethnicity discourses which often give rise to the reification of culture. Krieger, in Chapter 11, provides a persuasive defense of how and why race/ethnicity should be deployed to tackle very real health inequalities using data on self-reported experiences of discrimination and disparities in health outcomes.

This is an excellent collection of empirical case studies on the use of race/ethnicity and there is little to bemoan. There are occasional references to authors' conceptual allegiances as they frame and contextualize matters of governance and difference, and this context is fleshed out briefly in the introduction and final chapter. Thus, references to bio-politics, bio-sociality, and bio-citizenship are sprinkled throughout the text and are testimony to the influence of Foucault's work. I would have found it helpful if there were a final chapter at the end of each section which engaged with how the issues and questions raised in each of the three parts resonated with conceptual conundrums in science and technology studies. There are, for instance, important discussions to be had about the implications of a materialist sociology, the philosophy of science, and emerging post-race discourses, for thinking about this kind of empirical research on a wider canvas. Perhaps, this absence accounts, in part, for the lack of authorial and methodological reflexivity in various undefined uses of the term “racialized” or “racialization” because it is not always clear whether racialization is used in a descriptive, conceptual, or explanatory (explanandum and/or explanans) sense to engage with the issues at hand (it does not even appear as an index entry). It is a term whose meaning appears to have become more elusive the more it is used. It has come to stand for many different things (Murji and Solomos 2005): “a problematic, a process, a concept, a theory, a framework and a paradigm” (Small 1994). An alternative title for the book could have been, What's the use of racialization in understanding race?