Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-31T14:27:26.406Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

When You Have a Hammer …

The Misuse of Statistical Races1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2012

Kenneth Prewitt
Kenneth Prewitt*
Affiliation:
Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
*
*Kenneth Prewitt, Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, 1314a International Affairs Building, New York, New York, 10027. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Race statistics and race policy have been intertwined in American history since its founding, starting with the infamous three-fifths clause, continuing with policies based on nineteenth-century race science, the restrictionist immigration at the turn of the century, the Jim Crow regime, and carrying into the civil rights era through such policy concepts as institutional racism, statistical proportionality, disparate impact, and affirmative action. Across this history, the policies and the statistics were about “race,” whether they punished or benefited, were racist or antiracist. But can there be policy that misuses race statistics, that is presented as about race when it should not be? Race statistics are a powerful policy hammer in American history, but not everything is, in fact, a nail. Today the census undercount is argued over as if it is about race; it isn't really. Posing far greater danger, census race categories have worked their way into genomic medicine. The nineteenth-century belief that “race is biological” lingers in the American mind. The use of census categories in genomic medicine risks re-biologizing race. Maybe we should not leave the hammer lying around.

Keywords

CensusRacial ClassificationGenomic MedicineRace PolicyBiological RacesCensus Undercount
Type
State of the Discipline
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Fall 2012 , pp. 281 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

This article is based on a chapter in Kenneth Prewitt's What Is Your Race? The Census and the Flawed Effort to Classify Americans, scheduled for publication by Princeton University Press in May, 2013. The term “statistical races” is defined in more detail in the book, but essentially means the races resulting from government-adopted racial categories for use in the census, related statistical programs, and administrative records. It is these races that find their way into public polices, whether or not they match lived races, socially constructed races, identity races, biological races, or any other race categories established by social practices and attitudes.

References

REFERENCES

American Anthropological Association (2010). Race: Are We So Different? ⟨http://www.understandingrace.org/home.html/⟩ (accessed August 15, 2012).Google Scholar
Anderson, Margo J. and Fienberg, Stephen E. (1999). Who Counts? The Politics of Census-Taking in Contemporary America. New York: The Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Barkan, Elazar (1992). The Retreat of Scientific Racism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bennett, Claudette (2003). Exploring the Consistency of Race Reporting in Census 2000 and the Census Quality Survey. Paper Presented at the Joint Meetings of the American Statistical Association, San Francisco, CA, August 3–7.Google Scholar
Black, Edwin (2003). War Against The Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.Google Scholar
Bliss, Catherine (2009). Genome Sampling and the Biopolitics of Race. Unpublished Manuscript, Department of Sociology, Brown University.Google Scholar
Brown, Lawrence D., Eaton, Morris L., Freedman, David A., Klein, Stephen P., Olshen, Richard A., Wachter, Kenneth W., Wells, Martin T., and Ylvisaker, Donald (1999). Statistical Controversies in Census 2000. Jurimetrics, 39: 347–375.Google Scholar
Bullard, James H. and Dudoit, Sandrine (2008). R/Bioconductor: A Short Course. ⟨http://wiki.biostat.berkeley.edu/~bullard/courses/T-mexico-08/lectures/hapmap/slides-2x2.pdf⟩ (accessed August 15, 2011).Google Scholar
Charney, Evan and English, William (2012). Candidate Genes and Political Behavior. American Political Science Review, 106(1): 1–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Citro, Constance F., Cork, Daniel L., and Norwood, Janet L. (Eds.) (2004). The 2000 Census: Counting Under Adversity. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.Google Scholar
Collins, Francis (2004). What We Do and Don't Know about “Race,” “Ethnicity,” Genetics and Health at the Dawn of the Genome Era. Nature Genetics, 36: S13–S15.Google Scholar
Darga, Kenneth (1999). Sampling and the Census: A Case Against the Proposed Adjustments for Undercount. Washington, DC: The American Enterprise Institute.Google Scholar
Duster, Troy (2005). Race and Reification in Science. Science, 307(5712): 1050–1051.Google Scholar
Dyson, Freeman (2007). Our Biotech Future. The New York Review of Books, July 19, 4.Google Scholar
Evans, James P., Meslin, Eric M., Marteau, Theresa M., and Caulfield, Timothy (2011). Deflating the Genomic Bubble. Science, 331(6019): 861–862.Google Scholar
Food and Drug Administration (1998). Investigational New Drug Applications and New Drug Applications. ⟨http://www.fda.gov/oashi/patrep/demo.html⟩ (accessed August 15, 2011).Google Scholar
Food and Drug Administration (2005). Guidance for Industry: Collection of Race and Ethnicity Data in Clinical Trials. ⟨http://www.fda.gov/downloads/RegulatoryInformation/Guidances/ucm126396.pdf⟩ (accessed August 10, 2011).Google Scholar
Fujimura, Joan H. and Rajagopalan, Ramya (2011). Different Differences: The Use of “Genetic Ancestry” Versus Race in Biomedical Human Genetic Research. Social Studies of Science, 41(1): 5–30.Google Scholar
Hammonds, Evelynn M. (2006). Straw Men and Their Followers: The Return of Biological Race. Social Science Research Council Web Forum, Is Race “Real?” ⟨http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Hammonds/⟩ (accessed September 3, 2012).Google Scholar
Heer, David (Ed.) (1968). Social Statistics and the City. Cambridge, MA: Joint Center for Urban Studies.Google Scholar
Herrnstein, Richard J. and Murray, Charles (1994). The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Hillygus, D. Sunshine, Nie, Norman, Prewitt, Kenneth, and Pals, Heili (2006). The Hard Count: The Political and Social Challenges of Census Mobilization. New York: The Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Holden, Constance (2003). Race and Medicine. Science, 302(5645): 594–596.Google Scholar
Kahn, Jonathan (2007). Race in a Bottle. Scientific American, 297(2): 40–45.Google Scholar
Katznelson, Ira (2005). When Affirmative Action Was White. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.Google Scholar
Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (2000). The Census 2000 Education Kit/Census 2000 Everyone Counts! Washington, DC: Leadership Conference Education Fund.Google Scholar
Lewontin, R. C. (2006). Confusions about Human Races. Social Science Research Council Web Forum, Is Race “Real?” June 7. ⟨http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Lewontin⟩ (accessed August 28, 2012).Google Scholar
Linnaeus, Carolus ([1735] 1766). Systema Naturae. 12th edition.Google Scholar
Martin, Paul, Ashcroft, Richard, Ellison, George T. H., Smart, Andrew David, and Tutton, Richard (2007). Reviving “Racial Medicine”?: The Use of Race/Ethnicity in Genetics and Biomedical Research, and the Implications for Science And Healthcare. London: Faculty of Health and Social Care.Google Scholar
Morning, Ann (2011). The Nature of Race. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Murray, Charles (2007). Jewish Genius. Commentary, 123(4): 29–35.Google Scholar
Nicholson, Jim (1997). Memo from the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, May 20.Google Scholar
National Institutes of Health (1994). NIH Guidelines on the Inclusion of Women and Minorities as Subjects in Clinical Research. NIH Guide 23.11. Washington, DC: NIH.Google Scholar
Oppenheimer, Stephen and Foundation, the Bradshaw (2003). Journey of Mankind: The Peopling of the World. ⟨http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey⟩ (accessed August 15, 2012).Google Scholar
Orr, H. Allen (2006). Talking Genes. New York Review of Books, 53(14): 20–26.Google Scholar
Peters, Mary E. (2003). Determination of Reasonable Rates and Terms for the Digital Performance of Sound Recordings by Preexisting Subscription Services. Federal Register, 68(117): 36,469–36,470.Google Scholar
Prewitt, Kenneth (2003). Politics and Science in Census Taking. New York and Washington, DC: Russell Sage Foundation and Population Reference Bureau.Google Scholar
Prewitt, Kenneth (2010). What Is Political Interference in Federal Statistics? The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 631(1): 225–238.Google Scholar
Prewitt, Kenneth (Forthcoming). What's Your Race? The Census and the Flawed Effort to Classify Americans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Risch, Neil (2005). Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies. American Journal of Human Genetics, 76(2): 268–275.Google Scholar
Risch, Neil, Burchard, Esteban, Ziv, Elad, and Tang, Hua (2002). Categorization of Humans in Biomedical Research: Genes, Race and Disease. Genome Biology, July 1. ⟨http://genomebiology.com/2002/3/7/comment/2007⟩ (accessed August 26, 2012).Google Scholar
Roberts, Leslie (1992). How to Sample the World's Genetic Diversity. Science, 257(5074): 1204–1205.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (2010). ⟨http://2010.census.gov/partners/research/⟩ (accessed August 12, 2011).Google Scholar
Varmus, Harold (2009). The Art and Politics of Science. New York: Norton.Google ScholarPubMed
Wade, Nicholas (2002). Race is Seen as Real Guide to Track Roots of Disease. New York Times, July 30. ⟨http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/30/science/race-is-seen-as-real-guide-to-track-roots-of-disease.html⟩ (accessed August 1, 2011).Google Scholar
Wade, Nicholas (2006). Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Wallman, K. K., Evinger, S., and Schechter, S. (2000). Measuring Our Nation's Diversity: Developing a Common Language for Data on Race/Ethnicity. The American Journal of Public Health, 90(11): 1704–1708.Google Scholar
Washington, George ([1889] 1939). The Writings of George Washington (Vol. 31). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Wight, Tommy and Hogan, Howard (1999). Census 2000: Evolution of the Revised Plan. CHANCE: A Magazine of the American Statistical Association, 12(4): 11–19.Google Scholar