Can We Understand Race In Terms of Medicine?

(Image by Taylor Dave used under CC license 2.0 via)
 
Leaving you this Valentine’s Day with the urging to go read an excellent discussion at NPR titled “Is It Time to Stop Using Race in Medical Research?”

Then go read Alva Noë’s essay, “Can You Tell Your Ethnic Identity from Your DNA?” He writes:

…even if, in the ideal case, we find meaningful clusters of similarity in the space of genetic variation, there is no reason to think that these will map onto ethnicity or other categories in terms of which we understand our own identity. Identity, after all, varies non-continuously. French and German villages may be separated by the smallest of geographic distances. Genetic variation, on the contrary, so far as we now know, varies continuously. DNA is just not going to carve up groups at their culturally significant “ethnic” joints.

This interests me personally because any sort of categorizing of humans ends up being far more complicated than our everyday discourse would have us believe. Race, gender, and disability are so often thought to be concretely definable through bodily indicators, yet our categories for these identities—black/white/Asian, male/female, healthy/disabled—often fail fantastically to represent a good portion of humanity. As I’ve shown before, dwarfism itself is a social construct. All identities are to some extent.

Tags: Genetics, medicine, Race, Social Construct