Notes for What's Real About Race? - Introduction & The Genomics of Race
Introduction
Narrator’s childhood in Los Angeles, a highly diverse city, and the mixed heritage at home: Bahasa Indonesia (mother from Jawa Timur) and Yiddish (father from Ashkenazi Jewish family from New York).
Home as a tapestry of languages and cultures (Bahasa Indonesia, Yiddish, batiks, Wayang puppets, Star of David).
Outside the home, the family is seen as a mixed or heterodox unit in a society increasingly celebrating multiracial identities credited to Latinx culture and civil rights history.
Personal identity conflict: the narrator felt their blending was “utterly wrong.”
Preschool bullying: peers mocked the mother’s culture and accent; narrator noticed peers’ preference for Spanish/Spanglish and ostracization of those speaking less familiar languages.
Internalized global bias against people of color: belief that dark skin is worse than light skin, even in diverse LA.
Early friendship with Naomi, a dark-skinned classmate; Naomi’s family moves to the Bahamas in kindergarten; narrator experiences ongoing rejection and humiliation.
Internalized sense of immutable inferiority: narrator believed they deserved poorer treatment due to race.
Elementary school: race taught as biological and hereditary (you are born into a race; you inherit it from parents; it’s in your blood).
Race framed as constant performance: different races are expected to talk/act a certain way and be destined for specific futures; friendship and neighborhood determined by race; parental occupation and wealth tied to race.
Mixed kids face extra complexity: teachers label narrator as Pacific Islander; doctors/school forms often use the same label; peers label narrator as Asian; close friends see narrator as mixed.
The narrator toggles between racial roles depending on audience: in class, Pacific Islander; on playground, a general “person of color.”
Insider/outsider tensions within racial groups: narrator felt Brown but alien to mixed or Latinx Brown peers; alien to East Asian, South Asian, and Ashkenazi Jewish kids; forced to embody liminal positions and glimpse racialization across groups.
Observes that negative stereotypes are often tied to dark skin (e.g., Naomi’s group), while some lighter-skinned mixed peers are stereotyped differently.
Racial performance includes shifting between “nonthreatening light-skinned girl” and “bold Brown girl” depending on context.
Realization of others’ code-switching: example of Daniel, a White friend who concealed a White Pride persona around peers of color but adopted it in White supremacist contexts; Kaiya and narrator discuss this exhaustion of living multiple personalities.
Desire to leave home for college to find a more enlightened environment.
Both Kaiya and narrator apply to Northern California schools and are accepted at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).
UCSC freshman seminar in Race, Class, and Gender becomes a turning point; learning that race has no basis in genetics.
Race as a Social Construct: The Theoretical Framework
At UCSC, exposure to a paradigm shift: race is not biologically based but a social invention used to classify and separate groups.
The 1990s onward bring broader media recognition of multiracial experiences; race is argued as a social construct rather than a fixed genetic reality.
Clinton’s 2000 White House speech: the Human Genome Project reveals humans are 99.9\% genetically identical, reinforcing that race is not a genetic fact; race is a social construct.
The collaboration of geneticists and political leaders in rejecting genetic determinism of race, while acknowledging social impacts of race on life chances.
The phrase “race is a social construct” rises to prominence, but it raises questions: if not genetic, what is real about race?
The narrator’s experiences reveal the tension between social theories and everyday lived racism; social constructs can still have material, real-world consequences.
A synthesis: race is both a fictive idea and a social reality that shapes identity, opportunity, and power dynamics.
Aim of the book: elucidate how race emerged, how it’s used in science, the ethical implications, and how to redefine race away from genetic determinism toward a humane understanding.
Personal Narrative Continuation: College and Beyond
In college, easier to engage with race critically while studying under scholars who challenge biological notions of race.
UCSC freshman seminar fosters critical inquiry into race, class, and gender, aligning with the broader shift in academia away from genetics to sociocultural explanations.
The Emergence of Race Concepts: Enlightenment to Modern Race
Early origin: race as a concept arises during European explorations and data influx from global travel.
Bernier (1665): first use of the term race to describe continental groups; he classified humans into four races (European, African, Asian, Lapp) and emphasized continental “species” with visual markers like skin color; Eurocentric superiority to be assumed; Lapps described with derogatory terms.
Key conventions established by Bernier:
Continental race as distinct, mutually exclusive species.
Skin color as a defining indicator of true race.
Europeans portrayed as supreme; others depicted with negative traits.
European features framed as ideal; others as profane or animalistic.
Linnaeus (1735): adds social/behavioral traits to racial categories, linking physiology with character; Homo europaeus as “white, wise, inventive” and others with negative traits.
Buffon and Blumenbach (late 18th century): debate about variation within species; Blumenbach’s Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian, American categories map onto current US government/biomedical categories; Europeans posited as civilizers.
Kant, Hume, Cuvier, and other Enlightenment thinkers argue for innate inferiority or superiority based on race, influencing science, psychology, and politics.
Enlightenment Race (continental varieties) becomes a framework within which colonialism and slavery are rationalized.
Darwin (1859, On the Origin of Species): evolution and natural selection introduce the idea that all humans are related; all races are capable of procreation within a single species. Yet Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) still ranks races, placing Europeans at the top and portraying Africans as inferior or closer to apes; he supports ideas of eugenics.
Francis Galton (Darwin’s cousin): develops eugenics; introduces the concept of measuring racial differences and the idea that selective breeding could improve humanity; coinage of the term eugenics; advocates for segregation and racial hierarchy based on purported genetic fitness.
Modern Race (late 19th century): combines continental taxonomy with genetic determinism; emphasizes supposed genetic differences and intellectual disparities across races; links biology to social outcomes.
Polygeny: some scholars argued multiple independent origins for different races; used to justify racial hierarchies and governance.
American context: census evolution from limited categories to more nuanced ones; 1790 census categories (free White, slaves, other free persons) evolve with Darwinian ideas; blood quantum and one-drop rule emerge in US policy to regulate citizenship and labor.
Eugenics and State Policy in the Early 20th Century
The eugenics movement grows globally, with societies in Britain, the United States, and Germany promoting selective breeding and policies to manage human populations.
1912 International Conference of Eugenics (London): broad collaboration among eugenics leaders; later gatherings and diplomacy (New York, 1921) expand influence.
Positive eugenics vs negative eugenics: policies encouraging desirable breeding vs sterilization, internment, and extermination of those deemed inferior.
US policy: blood quantum and one-drop rules shape citizenship and racial classification; eugenics informs immigration and domestic policy.
Social scientists and policymakers link intelligence to race via biased lineages and “bell curve” arguments; Down’s classification of “Mongolian Imbecility” and the racialized IQ discourse influence policy.
The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and broader immigration restrictions reflect racialized fears of non-European populations; eugenics theory provides justification.
Eugenics remains popular into the WWII era, with some scientists opposing Nazi policies but still supporting racial classifications and segregation; public opinion shifts only with exposure to Nazi atrocities and postwar human rights commitments.
The wartime and postwar period contrasts: while Allies fight a genocidal regime, eugenics remains a political force in many countries prior to a broader ethical reckoning.
The UNESCO Race Debates and Civil Rights Era
Postwar governance and science lead to UNESCO’s race-related statements (1950, 1951) aiming to promote racial equality while still acknowledging biological distinctions.
UNESCO Race (1950): early statements struggle with definitions of race and whether biology underpins racial differences; some ambiguities link race to biology, undermining a purely social interpretation.
UNESCO Race statements (1951) attempt to define race in zoological terms as groups with heritable differences but claim equal fitness across races; paradoxically acknowledges biology while promoting equality.
UNESCO’s stance: to address origins of racial inequality, focus on history and social science rather than biology/genetics; but the statements still oscillate between recognizing races biologically and promoting equality.
Civil rights advances in the United States: shifting from negative rights to positive rights and equal access, driven by federal policy.
Executive orders and acts:
Executive Order 10925 (1961) bans employment discrimination by race, creed, color, or national origin.
Civil Rights Act (1964) and Executive Order 11246 (1965) promoting affirmative action and equal opportunity in federal agencies.
Voting Rights Act (1965); Hart-Celler Immigration and Naturalization Act (1965) reforming immigration law and desegregating institutions.
Fair Housing Acts follow, expanding anti-discrimination protections.
The 1974 Committee on Racial and Ethnic Definitions defines four races for data collection and usage for government purposes (White, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaska Native) but cautions these are not scientific definitions of race.
Office of Management and Budget Directive No. 15 (OMB Directive 15) codifies a racial taxonomy for public data: four races, plus the designation of Hispanic as ethnicity, to be tabulated as White or Black; effectively enshrines the one-drop rule for public administration.
The UNESCO Race framework persists in shaping policy, creating a tension between social realities and biological classifications, and influencing government data collection and civil rights policies.
The Genomics of Race and Sociogenomics
Late 20th century shift to genetic science and genomics: high-resolution DNA mapping enhances the study of human variation.
The Office of Management and Budget’s data standards intersect with genomics and population genetics in policy and research settings.
The Human Genome Project (HGP) culminates in a startling biologically-based claim: humans are about 99.9\% alike at the genetic level, challenging racial classifications as biologically meaningful.
Clinton’s 2000 White House remarks publicize the HGP data to argue against a genetic basis for race, reinforcing the view that race is a social construct.
Despite this, genomic data and technologies are used in ways that can reenforce racialized thinking:
Sociogenomics: a field exploring the connections between social behavior and genetics; leaders aim to separate biological determinism from social determinants but often end up reinforcing racial distinctions through data categorization.
Many sociogenomic projects rely on datasets stratified by race, potentially reinforcing stereotypes about intelligence, criminality, and behavior.
Socio-political stakes; as U.S. population forecasts project a “minority majority” by 2044 (over 51%), researchers race to include more minorities in genetic studies, highlighting the tension between anti-determinism and the continued use of race as a proxy in data analyses.
The author’s experience at Brown University, UCSF, and Rutgers University: teaching about racial identity, genetics, and society, and examining how genome editing interacts with race.
CRISPR technology (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats): a primary genome-editing tool with ethical implications for race, cognition, and enhancement.
Definition: ext{CRISPR} stands for the sequence features that enable targeted genome edits.
The entanglement of genome editing with racialized assumptions: risks include using racially stratified data to select for cognitive traits or to justify differential treatment, and potential misuse in embryo selection or enhancement.
Ethical caution: shifting from claims that intelligence is encoded in DNA to recognizing intelligence as a social process that emerges from environment and learning, while acknowledging the social harms created by misused genetic research.
The author’s conclusion: there is a need for a deeper understanding of the fluidity of genetics and race, and for scrutiny of how modern technologies perpetuate old racial harms in new forms.
Core claim: Race matters in social life even if it is not a biological reality; race is real in its social consequences, while it is a fiction in its biological meaning; science can illuminate its materiality but must avoid genetic determinism.
Definitional and Conceptual Synthesis: What Do We Mean by Race?
The sentence “race is a social construct” is unpacked sociologically:
Social: exists because people participate in social life; it is created through interactions and belonging in society.
Constructed: exists because people collectively make it real; malleable and shaped by shared ideas.
The claim is both redundant and paradoxical: something constructed exists because people collaborate to make it real, and yet constructs are real in their effects.
The birthday analogy: birthdays are socially constructed yet real through social practices; their meaning varies across cultures and times, yet they are a real social phenomenon.
Race as a symbol system: racial categories function like conceptual eyeglasses that shape what we notice (skin color, hair texture) and how we assign meaning to differences.
Cross-cultural variability: different societies assign different meanings to similar phenotypes; Indonesians and Americans differently frame race and skin color; hair texture, color, and facial features have different social relevance across contexts.
Reality and illusion interplay: race is not purely fake nor purely true; its social reality is real in lived experiences, discrimination, and life chances, while its genetic basis is a historical fiction.
Language and reference: the words we use to describe race are symbolic references to real bodies, yet the categories themselves are invented constructs.
Practical implication: we must analyze race as a social reality to understand how it structures life chances and inequality, even as we challenge false claims of biological races.
Spatial and cultural relativism: identity and classification shift across countries (e.g., Indonesia vs. the United States) due to different cultural reference points and color hierarchies.
A Brief History of Race (Chapter 1)
Race as a concept emerges to interpret and manage human diversity based on observations from explorers and colonizers.
Nativism antecedents: ancient civilizations (Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese) distinguished between native-born and foreign populations, often basing distinctions on ancestry and perceived civility rather than continental biology.
Before global travel, differences were framed around culture and civility rather than continental racial categories.
Marco Polo era and the Scientific Revolution broaden European awareness of non-European populations; “human kinds” concept begins to emerge, laying groundwork for racial classifications.
Bernier (1665): first to use the term race in a structured way to describe continental differences; introduced four races (European, African, Asian, Lapp) and established conventions like visual color as a defining trait and European supremacy in the hierarchy.
Linnaeus (1735): adds social/behavioral traits to race classifications, suggesting inborn mental and moral qualities; European traits praised, others pathologized.
Buffon and Blumenbach (late 18th century): shift toward viewing races as variations within one species; Blumenbach’s taxonomy influences later racial categories in science and policy; European civilizational mission linked to “degenerate” non-European races.
Enlightenment Race: a paradigm that becomes embedded in politics, colonial policy, and the justification of domination; though framed as scientific, it served racialized power structures.
Darwin (1859): On the Origin of Species introduces common ancestry and interbreeding across humans yet still allows for hierarchical racial rankings;
In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin describes Africans as evolutionarily situated between Europeans and apes; supports eugenic ideas and selective breeding in some discussions, contributing to later racial science.
Francis Galton (Darwin’s cousin): pioneers eugenics; develops measurement science (statistics, case histories) to support racial hierarchies; coins the term eugenics and advocates for selective breeding and segregation to improve human populations.
Modern Race (late 19th century): consolidates racial taxonomy with genetic determinism; emphasizes supposed innate differences and uses them to justify White supremacy and state policies.
US census and legal codification: evolving racial categories; one-drop rule; blood quantum concepts shape citizenship and land rights.
Immigration policies and global trends: racialization of immigration policies; eugenic arguments influence laws and social policy worldwide.
The Science of Race in the Early 20th Century and Its Aftermath
The early 20th century sees a collision of science and policy: eugenics-inspired governance influences sterilization, internment, and immigration law in many countries.
The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) by Franz Boas challenges rigid racial hierarchies but does not fully reject the existence of racial categories; some followers still supported eugenics.
Eugenics networks and conferences produce a global discourse on “racial betterment” that informs state policies despite ethical concerns.
Notable events include the 1912 International Eugenics Conference and the cross-Atlantic exchange of ideas among policymakers, scientists, and political actors.
The United States enacts immigrant bans (e.g., Chinese Exclusion Act 1882; Johnson-Reed Act 1924) motivated by racial pseudoscience and public labor concerns.
Nazi Germany’s racial program (Holocaust) marks a brutal apex of racial science misuse, with estimates of exterminations in the tens of millions and widespread sterilization campaigns; global condemnation follows WWII.
The postwar era sees a reckoning with eugenics and race science, culminating in human rights frameworks and UNESCO’s Race statements across the 1950s and beyond.
UNESCO Race and Civil Rights: Postwar Shifts
UNESCO emerges to promote human rights and reject racial hierarchies while engaging with the science of race.
UNESCO Race (1950): attempts to articulate a synthesis between biology and social equality, but initial statements are ambiguous about the biological status of race.
UNESCO Race (1951): defines race as groups with well-developed, heritable physical differences, framed as a zoological concept; still posits racial differences as biologically real, but asserts equal fitness across races.
The UNESCO approach emphasizes that social policy and environment determine human outcomes, not biology, even while maintaining a biological frame for race.
Civil rights momentum grows, with key legal and policy milestones in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s to desegregate and promote equal opportunity.
The UN and international bodies issue declarations (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Genocide Convention) to ban harm to groups defined by race or ethnicity and to curb state-sanctioned discrimination.
The Enduring Tension: Biology, Society, and Policy
Postwar shifts reduce explicit biological claims about race in mainstream science, but social and political implications persist.
The tension between seeing race as a real social category with consequences and denying any biological basis continues to shape policy, medicine, education, and social discourse.
The ongoing challenge is to disentangle genetic research from racial classifications while acknowledging race’s real social effects.
Chapter 2: The Genomics of Race (Opening Section)
The federal government codifies racial and ethnic data through OMB race categories (1977): White, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaska Native.
UNESCO Race framework influenced by government data practices, reinforcing continental racial classifications in official statistics, science, and policy.
Genomics era accelerates: genetics shifts from studying pedigrees to mapping entire genomes; the promise and perils of using genomic data to explain human differences.
The movement from Darwinian perspectives to genomics introduces the possibility of rethinking race in light of genetic similarity and diversity across populations.
The emergence of genomics raises questions about how to study race ethically, how to analyze race in light of population genetics, and how to avoid reifying racial categories in research and public policy.
The text foreshadows a broader discussion of how genome editing, data collection, and sociogenomics intersect with race, power, and justice.
Key Concepts, Definitions, and Formulas
Race as a social construct: a phenomenon created and maintained through social interactions, institutions, and shared meanings, not a fixed biological fact.
Race as social reality: despite lacking a biological basis, race profoundly shapes life chances, access to resources, and social outcomes.
Genetic sameness: the claim that humans are 99.9\% genetically identical, underscoring the non-biological basis of racial categories.
Sociogenomics: an interdisciplinary field examining how social behaviors and environments intersect with genetics, and how data can inadvertently reinforce racial narratives.
CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats): a genome-editing technology used to make precise genetic modifications.
One-drop rule: a policy/idea used historically in the United States to classify individuals as Black if they had any non-European ancestry.
Blood quantum: a policy measure used to determine racial classification based on ancestry and lineage.
Four mutual categories used in U.S. federal data (OMB Directive No. 15): White, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaska Native.
Minority majority projection: demographic forecast that the United States would become a non-White majority by around the year 2044\, (\text{over } 51\%)\n.
Real-World Relevance and Implications
Ethical: how to study race in genetics without reifying racial categories or enabling discrimination.
Policy: balancing the use of race in data collection with the goal of reducing racism and promoting equal opportunities.
Medical: understanding how genetic data intersects with social determinants of health and the risk of misinterpreting race as a proxy for biology.
Social justice: recognizing both the constructed nature of race and its real consequences to design fairer institutions and interventions.
Connections to Earlier and Later Material
Continuity with foundational ideas from the Enlightenment about race as a category used to justify power, but revised in light of modern genetics and social science.
The shift from “race as inherent differences” to “race as social reality” mirrors ongoing debates in ethics, public policy, and biomedical research.
The tension between scientific findings (genetic similarity) and societal realities (racism, discrimination) informs current discussions about CRISPR, gene editing, and health disparities.
The narrator's experience as a mixed-heritage individual in Los Angeles highlighted early identity conflict and the social complexities of race, intensified by bullying and internalized biases. This contrasted with the later realization, during a UCSC seminar, that race is a social construct rather than a biological reality, a concept bolstered by the Human Genome Project's finding that humans are 99.9\% genetically identical.
Historically, the concept of race emerged during European exploration, with figures like Bernier (1665) and Linnaeus (1735) categorizing humans based on continental origin and assigning social/behavioral traits, often portraying Europeans as superior. Enlightenment thinkers further embedded these hierarchical ideas, rationalizing colonialism and slavery. Even Darwin, while positing common ancestry, engaged in racial rankings in works like The Descent of Man (1871). His cousin, Francis Galton, then pioneered eugenics, advocating selective breeding and segregation based on supposed genetic fitness, combining taxonomy with genetic determinism to justify racial hierarchies.
The global eugenics movement profoundly influenced early 20th-century state policies worldwide, leading to sterilization, internment, and discriminatory immigration laws. In the U.S., policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), blood quantum, and the one-drop rule codified racial discrimination. The atrocities of Nazi Germany, however, led to a postwar reckoning and a global shift towards human rights frameworks.
Post-WWII, UNESCO's statements on race (1950, 1951) attempted to define race and promote equality, though they controversially still acknowledged some biological distinctions while emphasizing social causation of inequality. Concurrently, the U.S. Civil Rights era saw landmark legislation (Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act) to dismantle segregation and promote equal opportunity. OMB Directive No. 15 (1977) later codified specific racial and ethnic categories for government data collection, reinforcing continental classifications for administrative purposes.
The advent of genomics, despite the Human Genome Project's evidence of genetic similarity, introduced new complexities. Fields like sociogenomics, while aiming to explore social determinants, sometimes reinforce racial distinctions by stratifying data by race, leading to ethical concerns. CRISPR technology further amplifies these risks, potentially perpetuating old racial harms through embryo selection or enhancement.
Ultimately, race is understood as a social construct
Social: exists due to human interaction and societal participation.
Constructed: collectively made real, malleable, and shaped by shared ideas.
While race lacks a biological basis, it is a powerful social reality that profoundly shapes identity, opportunity, and life chances. The challenge lies in analyzing race's social reality and consequences without reifying false biological claims, ensuring that scientific advancements are not misused to perpetuate discrimination or racial hierarchies.