Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T03:20:21.634Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

How Ordinary Race Concepts Get to Be Usable in Biomedical Science: An Account of Founded Race Concepts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Sophia Efstathiou
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay unpacks a seeming paradox: a concept used to formulate, promote, and legitimate oppressive ideologies—a concept used to formulate mistaken, because they were typological, biological theories about human diversity—is, it seems, the same concept that now promises to deliver wonderful, socially sensitized, innovative results in social and genetic epidemiology. But how could that be? How could scientists expect a concept as problematic as ordinary race to deliver useful scientific results? I propose that there is a process for retranslating Ballungen race concepts in appropriate ways to make them fit and work within social scientific and bioscientific contexts.

Type
Everyday Concepts and Scientific Concepts
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 79 , Issue 5 , December 2012 , pp. 701 - 713
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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

†

This essay is based on “The Use of ‘Race’ as a Variable in Biomedical Research” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2009), recipient of the University of California 2007–8 Andrew White Scholarship in Humanities and Medicine. Thank you for feedback and discussion to thesis advisor, Nancy Cartwright; committee members, Craig Callender, Gerry Doppelt, Steven Epstein, Arnold Gass, and Michael Hardimon; and colleagues at the LSE, Southampton, and NTNU, especially Ray Monk. This follows the PSA 2010 Symposium session “How Ordinary Things Travel to Science and Back,” made possible and fun by Anna Alexandrova, Hasok Chang, and Gregory Radick.

References

Anonymous. 1997. “Recommendations from the Interagency Committee for the Review of the Racial and Ethnic Standards to the Office of Management and Budget concerning Changes to the Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity: Notice.” Federal Register 62 (131): 36873–945.. http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/omb/fedreg/ombdir15.pdf.Google Scholar
Stoker, H. Stephen. 2010. “NIH Announces Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities: Transition from Center to Institute Highlights Expanded Responsibilities.” NIH News, released September 27, 2010. http://www.nih.gov/news/health/sep2010/nimhd-27.htm.Google Scholar
Brancati, F. L., Whelton, P. K., Kuller, L. H., and Klag, M. J.. 1996. “Diabetes Mellitus, Race, and Socioeconomic Status: A Population-Based Study.” Annals of Epidemiology 6 (1): 67–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cartwright, Nancy, Cat, Jordi, Fleck, Lola, and Uebel, Thomas E.. 1996. Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, Francis S. 2004. “What We Do and Don’t Know about ‘Race,’ ‘Ethnicity,’ Genetics and Health at the Dawn of the Genome Era.” Supplement, Nature Genetics 36 (11): S13–S15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Criqui, M. H., Vargas, V., Denenberg, J. O., Ho, E., Allison, M., Langer, R. D., Gamst, A., Bundens, W. P., and Fronek, A.. 2005. “Ethnicity and Peripheral Arterial Disease: The San Diego Population Study.” Circulation 112 (17): 2703–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Daar, Abdallah S., and Singer, Peter A.. 2005. “Pharmacogenetics and Geographical Ancestry: Implications for Drug Development and Global Health.” Nature Reviews Genetics 6:241–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Danto, Arthur. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Duster, Troy. 2005. “Race and Reification in Science.” Science 307 (5712): 1050–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epstein, Steven. 2007. Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fleck, Ludwik. 1979. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Franco, M., Diez-Roux, A. V., Nettleton, J. A., Laso, M., Brancati, F., Cabaliero, B., Glass, T., and Moore, L. V.. 2009. “Availability of Healthy Foods and Dietary Patterns: The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 89 (3): 897–904.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gannett, Lisa. 2005. “Group Categories in Pharmacogenetics Research.” Philosophy of Science 72 (Proceedings): 1232–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gannett, Lisa. 2010. “Questions Asked and Unasked: How by Worrying Less about the ‘Really Real’ Philosophers of Science Might Better Contribute to Debates about Genetics and Race.” Synthese 177:363–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geuss, Raymond. 1981. The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hardimon, Michael. 2003. “The Ordinary Concept of Race.” Journal of Philosophy 100 (9): 437–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopkins, David. 2004. Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jasanoff, Sheila. 1990. The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Jones, Camara Phyllis. 2001. “‘Race,’ Racism, and the Practice of Epidemiology.” American Journal of Epidemiology 154 (4): 299–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kalinowski, Steven T. 2010. “The Computer Program STRUCTURE Does Not Reliably Identify the Main Genetic Clusters within Species: Simulations and Implications for Human Population Structure.” Heredity 106:625–32.Google Scholar
Kaufman, J. S., Cooper, R. S., and McGee, D. L.. 1997. “Socioeconomic Status and Health in Blacks and Whites: The Problem of Residual Confounding and the Resiliency of Race.” Epidemiology 8 (6): 621–28.Google ScholarPubMed
Kaufman, Jay S., and Cooper, Richard S.. 2001a. “Commentary: Considerations for Use of Racial/Ethnic Classification in Etiologic Research.” American Journal of Epidemiology 154 (4): 291–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaufman, Jay S., and Cooper, Richard S.. 2001b. “Kaufman and Cooper Respond to ‘Race’, Racism, and the Practice of Epidemiology.” American Journal of Epidemiology 154 (4): 305–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knorr Cetina, Karin. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
LaVeist, Thomas A. 1994. “Beyond Dummy Variables and Sample Selection: What Health Services Researchers Ought to Know about Race as a Variable.” Health Services Research 29 (1): 1–16.Google ScholarPubMed
Link, Bruce, and Phelan, Jo. 1995. “Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Disease.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 35:80–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Longino, Helen E. 1990. Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Machery, Edouard. 2005. “Concepts Are Not a Natural Kind.” Philosophy of Science 72:444–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Machery, Edouard. 2009. Doing without Concepts. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miles, Toni P., Hanson, Stephen, Kidd, LaCreis, Connor, Avonne, and Jortani, Saeed A.. 2008. “Sensitivity Analysis of Self-Identified Race and Ethnicity (SIRE): Screening for Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms.” Prepublication paper, Nature Precedings, January 17.Google Scholar
Norton, Louise. 1917. “The Richard Mutt Case.” Blind Man 1 (2): 5–6.Google Scholar
Pigliucci, Massimo, and Kaplan, Jonathan M.. 2003. “On the Concept of Biological Race and Its Applicability to Humans.” Philosophy of Science 70:1161–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pritchard, Jonathan K., Stephens, Matthew, and Donnely, Peter. 2000. “Inference of Population Structure Using Multilocus Genotype Data.” Genetics 155:945–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ramos, Edward, and Rotimi, Charles. 2009. “The A's, G's, C's, and T's of Health Disparities.” BMC Medical Genomics 2:29.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Risch, Neil, Burchard, Esteban, Ziv, Elad, and Tang, Hua. 2002. “Categorization of Humans in Biomedical Research: Genes, Race and Disease.” Genome Biology 3 (7): 1–12.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Root, Michael. 2000. “How We Divide the World.” Philosophy of Science 67 (Proceedings): S628–S639.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Root, Michael. 2001. “The Problem of Race in Medicine.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 30 (1): 20–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Root, Michael. 2003. “The Use of Race in Medicine as a Proxy for Genetic Differences.” Philosophy of Science 70 (Proceedings): 1173–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Nikolas. 2007. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenberg, Noah A., Huang, Lucy, Jewett, Ethan M., Szpiech, Zachary A., Jankovic, Ivana, and Boehnke, Michael. 2010. “Genome-Wide Association Studies in Diverse Populations.” Nature Reviews Genetics 11:356–66.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rosenberg, Noah A., Pritchard, J. K., Weber, J. L., Cann, H. M., Kidd, K. K., Zhivotovsky, L. A., and Feldman, M. W.. 2002. “Genetic Structure of Human Populations.” Science 298 (5602): 2381–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schulman, K. A., Berlin, J. A., Harless, W., Kerner, J. F., Sistrunk, S., Gersh, B. J., Dubé, R., Taleghani, C. K., Burke, J. E., Williams, S., Eisenberg, J. M., and Escarce, J. J.. 1999. “The Effect of Race and Sex on Physicians’ Recommendations for Cardiac Catheterization.” New England Journal of Medicine 340:618–26.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tang, Hua, Quertermous, Tom, Rodriguez, Beatriz, Kardia, Sharon L. R., Zhu, Xiaofeng, Brown, Andrew, Pankow, James S., Province, Michael A., Hunt, Steven C., Boerwinkel, Eric, Schork, Nicholas J., and Risch, Neil J.. 2005. “Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies.” American Journal of Human Genetics 76 (2): 268–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tate, Sarah K., and Goldstein, David B.. 2004. “Will Tomorrow's Medicines Work for Everyone?” Supplement, Nature Genetics 36 (11): S34–S42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Uebel, Thomas. 2007. Empiricism at the Crossroads: The Vienna Circle's Protocol Sentence Debate. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Williams, D. R., and Collins, Chiquita. 2001. “Racial Residential Segregation: A Fundamental Cause of Racial Disparities in Health.” Public Health Report 116 (5): 404–16.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wilson, James F., Weale, Michael E., Smith, Alice C., Gratrix, Fiona, Fletcher, Benjamin, Thomas, Mark G., Bradman, Neil, and Goldstein, David B.. 2001. “Population Genetic Structure of Variable Drug Response.” Nature Genetics 29:265–69.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed