February 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Constructs of Race Difference

Ruth Hubbard is co-founder of the Council for Responsible Genetics and Professor Emerita of biology at Harvard University. This article was originally printed in Profitable Promises: Essays on Women, Science, and Health, Common Courage Press, 1995.

Since its beginnings, the science of genetics has been caught up in the dialectic between likeness and difference. When people think about heredity, what they hope scientists will explain is how it is that Johnny has grandpa's nose and aunt Mary's chin. But they also want to understand how come little Susie doesn't look like anyone else in the family.

And scientists have put a good deal of effort into examining the biological basis of various characteristics that have cultural and political significance, including differences between so-called races, as well as between women and men. In doing so, they have often made it appear as though differences in power between individuals or groups of people were the inevitable and natural results of biological difference, and hence of genes.

This became critically important in the eighteenth century, when support for the aims of the revolutions fought for liberty, equality, fraternity, and for the Rights of Man needed to be reconciled with the obvious inequalities between nations, races, and the sexes. It is well to realize that as late as the sixteenth century, authors described the peoples of Africa as superior in wit and intelligence to the inhabitants of northern climes, arguing that the hot, dry climate "enlivened their temperament," and two centuries later Rousseau still rhapsodized about the Noble Savage. The industrialization of Europe and North America depended on the exploitation of the native populations of the Americas and Africa. So it became imperative to draw distinctions between that small number of men who were created equal and everyone else. By the nineteenth century, the Noble Savage was a lying, thieving Indian, and Africans and enslaved African Americans were ugly, slow, stupid, and in every way inferior to Europeans or Euro-Americans. Distinctions also needed to be drawn between women and men, since irrespective of class and race, women were not included among "all men" who were created equal.

Historical evolution of scientific racism

The writer Allan Chase dates scientific racism from the publication of Malthus's Essay on Population in 1798 and argues that it focused on class distinctions among Europeans rather than on distinctions between Europeans and their descendants and the peoples native to Africa, America, and Asia. On the other hand, Stephen Jay Gould attributes the first scientific ranking of races to Linnaeus some forty years earlier. Linnaeus went further and arranged the races into different sub-species. He also wrote that Africans, whom he called Homo sapiens afer, are "ruled by caprice," whereas Europeans (Homo sapiens europaeus) are "ruled by customs," and that African men are indolent and African women are shameless and lactate profusely. Both Linnaeus and Malthus did their work more than two centuries after the beginning of the European slave trade, which became an important part of the economies of Europe and the Americas.

But their work was contemporary with the intellectual and civic ferment that led to the American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789 and to the revolution that overthrew slavocracy in Haiti in 1791. As the Guyanan political thinker and activist Walter Rodney pointed out, it is wrong to think "that Europeans enslaved Africans for racist reasons." They did so for economic reasons, since without a supply of free African labor, they would not have been able "to open up the New World and to use it as a constant generator of wealth.... Then, having become utterly dependent on African labor, Europeans at home and abroad found it necessary to rationalize that exploitation in racist terms."

Physicians and biologists helped to legitimate such rationalizations by constructing criteria, such as skull volume, brain size, and many others, by which they tried to prove scientifically that Africans are inferior to Europeans. Gould's Mismeasure of Man describes some of these measurements and documents their often patently racist intent. Gould also illustrates the ways in which, for example, the distinguished nineteenth-century French anatomist Paul Broca discarded criteria by which white men could not be made to rank highest. And he shows how Broca and the American craniometer Samuel George Morton fudged and fiddled with their data in order to make the rankings come out as these men knew they must: Euro-American men on top, next native American men, and then African-American men. Women presented a problem: though clearly Euro-American women ranked below Euro-American men, were they to be above or below men of the other races? A colleague of Broca's addressed this conundrum in 1881. "Men of the black races," he wrote, "have a brain scarcely heavier than that of white women."

In 1854, Dr. Samuel Cartwright, an American physician, wrote an article entitled "Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro," in which he asserted that a defect in the "atmospherization of the blood conjoined with a deficiency of cerebral matter in the cranium...led to that debasement of mind which has rendered the people of Africa unable to take care of themselves." And racialist biology did not end with slavery. Writing during World War II, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal marveled that the American Red Cross did not accept African Americans as blood donors. "After protests," he wrote, "it now accepts Negro blood but segregates it to be used exclusively for Negro soldiers. This is true at a time when the United States is at war, and the Red Cross has a semi-official status." The American Red Cross continued to separate the blood of African and European Americans until December 1950, when the binary classification into "Negro" and "white" was deleted from the donor forms. Howard Zinn has pointed out the irony that, in fact, an African-American physician, Charles Drew, developed the blood banking system in the first place.

A biological concept with no meaning

What can we say now about the biology of race differences? Looking at all the evidence, there are none. Demographers, politicians, and social scientists may want to continue using "race" to sort people, but as a biological concept it has no meaning. Human beings (Homo sapiens) are genetically a relatively homogeneous species. If Europeans were to disappear overnight, the genetic composition of the species would hardly change. About 75 percent of known genes are the same in all humans. The remaining 25 percent are known to exist in more than one form, but all the forms can be found in all groups, though sometimes in different proportions. Another way to say this is that, because of the extent of interbreeding that has happened among human populations over time, our genetic diversity is pretty evenly distributed over the entire species. An occasional, relatively recent mutation may still be somewhat localized within a geographic area, but about 90 percent of the variations known to occur among humans as a whole occur also among the individuals of any one national or racial group.

Another important point is that for any scientific measurement of race differences, we first have to construct what we mean by race. Does the least trace of African origins make someone black, or does the least trace of European origins make someone white? The former definition is more widely accepted in the United States, but it is a social con-vention and not a fact of biology.

The US census for 1870 contained a third category, "Mulatto," for "all persons having any perceptible trace of African blood" and warned that "important scientific results depend on the correct determination of this class." The US census for 1890 collected information separately for "quadroons and octaroons"--people one in four of whose grandparents or one in eight of whose great-grandparents were African, "while in 1930, any mixture of white and some other race was to be reported according to the race of the parent who was not white." Finally, in 1970 the Statistical Policy Division of the Office of Management and the Budget warned that racial classifications should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature.

Understanding statistics

How, then, should we interpret such statistics as that "black men under age 45 are ten times more likely to die from the effects of high blood pressure than white men," that "black women suffer twice as many heart attacks as white women," and that "a variety of common cancers are more frequent among a blacks...than whites," especially when some scientists and the media keep stressing the genetic origin of these conditions? Does not that prove that there are inherent, biological differences between blacks and whites, as groups?

The fact is, it doesn't. It is unfortunate and misleading that US health statistics usually are presented in terms of the quasi-biological triad of age, race, and sex, without providing data about employment, income, housing, and the other prerequisites for healthful living. Even though there are genetic components to skin color, as there are to eye or hair color, there is no biological reason to assume that any one of these is more closely related to health status than any other. Skin color ("race") is no more likely to be biologically related to the tendency to develop high blood pressure than eye color is.

To come up with rational explanations, we need to take account of the fact that the median income of a African Americans since 1940 has been less than two-thirds that of Americans of European descent. Disproportionate numbers of African Americans live in more polluted and run-down neighborhoods, work in more polluted and stressful work places, and have fewer escape routes out of these living and work situations than Euro-Americans have. Furthermore, African Americans at all levels of society experience stress arising from their history and day-to-day experience of discrimination. It is not surprising to find consistent discrepancies in health outcomes between "blacks" and "whites."

The physician Mary Bassett and the epidemiologist Nancy Krieger, looking at mortality risks from breast cancer, have found that the black/white differential of 1.35 drops to 1.10 when they look at African- and European-American women of comparable social class, as measured by a range of social indicators. And within each "racial" group, social class is correlated with mortality risk. Because of racial oppression, being black is a predictor of increased health risks, but so is being poor, no matter what one's skin color may be. The fact that even at comparable education and class standing, some health risks appear to be greater for African than for European Americans needs to be analyzed by taking the range of factors into account that constitute the panorama of American racism.

Our society's constructs of race differences, like those of sex differences, penetrate the biological sciences. When we use science to investigate subjects like race or sex, which are suffused with cultural meanings and embedded in power relationships, we need to be wary of scientific descriptions and interpretations that support, or even enhance, the prevailing political realities.

The same can be said about genes. DNA, the chemical, has material reality, but the concept of the gene, which long pre-dates any thought of DNA, has been constructed to fill a host of political, economic, and cultural as well as scientific needs. For this reason, we would do well to become suspicious whenever characteristics are attributed to genes that neatly fit these rather inert molecules for their ideological tasks.

[This slightly abridged version of Ruth Hubbard's essay is reprinted with permission from the September 2001 issue of GeneWatch (vol 14, no. 5). Gene Watch is the bimonthly magazine of the Council for Responsible Genetics. For more information or to subscribe, please see www.gene-watch.org or contact CRG, 5 Upland Road, Suite 3, Cambridge, MA 02140; 617/868-0870, Fax: 617/491-5344; crg@gene-watch.org]

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