What's the Use of Race?

by Whitmarsh, Ian; Jones, David S.

• ISBN13: 9780262514248
• ISBN10: 0262514249
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-04-16
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

The postcivil rights era perspective of many scientists and scholars was that race was nothing more than a social construction. Recently, however, the relevance of race as a social, legal, and medical category has been reinvigorated by science, especially by discoveries in genetics. Although in 2000 the Human Genome Project reported that humans shared 99.9 percent of their genetic code, scientists soon began to argue that the degree of variation was actually greater than this, and that this variation maps naturally onto conventional categories of race. In the context of this rejuvenated biology of race, the contributors to What's the Use of Race?investigate whether race can be a category of analysis without reinforcing it as a basis for discrimination. Can policies that aim to alleviate inequality inadvertently increase it by reifying race differences? The essays focus on contemporary questions at the cutting edge of genetics and governance, examining them from the perspectives of law, science, and medicine. The book follows the use of race in three domains of governance: ruling, knowing, and caring. Contributors first examine the use of race and genetics in the courtroom, law enforcement, and scientific oversight; then explore the ways that race becomes, implicitly or explicitly, part of the genomic science that attempts to address human diversity; and finally investigate how race is used to understand and act on inequities in health and disease. Answering these questions is essential for setting policies for biology and citizenship in the twenty-first century. Contributors:Richard Ashcroft, Richard S. Cooper, Kjell A. Doksum, George T. H. Ellison, Steven Epstein, Joan H. Fujimura, Amy Hinterberger, Angela C. Jenks, David S. Jones, Jonathan Kahn, Jay S. Kaufman, Nancy Krieger, Paul Martin, Pilar N. Ossorio, Simon Outram, Ramya Rajagopalan, Dorothy Roberts, Pamela Sankar, Andrew Smart, Richard Tutton, Ian Whitmarsh

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Governance and the Uses of Race	p. 1
Ruling
What's the Use of Race in Presenting Forensic DNA Evidence in Court?	p. 27
Forensic DNA Phenotyping	p. 49
Reinforcing Race in Law Enforcement
Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Difference	p. 63
The Biopolitics of Health
Knowing
Arguments against the Use of Racialized Categories as Genetic Variables in Biomedical Research	p. 91
What Are They, and Why Are They Being Ignored?
From Self-Identity to Genotype	p. 125
The Past, Present, and Future of Ethnic Categories in Postgenomic Science
The Genomics of Difference and the Politics of Race in Canada	p. 147
Race and Ancestry	p. 169
Operationalizing Populations in Human Genetic Variation Studies
Caring
Use of Racial and Ethnic Identity in Medical Evaluations and Treatments	p. 187
What's the Use of Culture?	p. 207
Health Disparities and the Development of Culturally Competent Health Care
The Science and Epidemiology of Racism and Health	p. 225
Racial/Ethnic Categories, Biological Expressions of Racism, and the Embodiment of Inequalityùan Ecosocial Perspective
Looking Forward
Race and the New Biocitizen	p. 259
About the Contributors	p. 277
Index	p. 281
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