race
[this is written by a list lurker]
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w070611&s=chowkwanyun061307
Why genes don’t determine race. Race Against History by Merlin Chowkwanyun
It seemed like just another harmless moment on daytime TV: Oprah
Winfrey began an “Ask Dr. Oz” segment with the physician Mehmet Oz,
and the two arrived at the subject of excessive sweating. Oz cited
high blood pressure as a major cause and then asked Winfrey if she
knew why black Americans experienced hypertension at disproportionate
rates.
No problem so far. But then Winfrey answered Oz’s question by
reviving what scholars have called the “slavery hypothesis” of
hypertension. Black Americans, that thesis holds, experience greater
rates of hypertension today because those slaves most likely to
survive the brutal journey to the New World had bodily constitutions
that retained higher amounts of sodium; with more sodium, they were
likelier to survive ailments related to salt- and water-deprivation
that often resulted in death. But, while sodium-retention became an
adaptive trait that helped many slaves survive, it also imperiled
them and their descendants, since sodium is a major risk-factor for
hypertension. Oz approved Winfrey’s summary of her ancestors’ “unique
ability,” in his words.
There was just one problem. The thesis is bunk. Since its heavy
promotion in the 1980s by Thomas W. Wilson and Clarence Grim, the
slavery hypothesis has steadily been demolished on theoretical and
evidentiary grounds, most notably by the distinguished historian
Philip D. Curtin in a 1992 American Journal of Public Health article.
Curtin argued that Wilson and Grim had sloppily handled statistical
data, made inexact citations to prior articles, and neither showed
that salt was actually scarce on the voyages nor proved significant
numbers of deaths had occurred due to salt depletion. Meanwhile, as
Curtin also pointed out, other researchers found that blacks in other
former slave societies, like much of the West Indies, did not have
uniformly high hypertension. (For a thorough overview, see also
epidemiologist Jay Kaufman’s contribution to an excellent symposium
on the new science of race.) In short, the case for salt-retention as
a race-specific genetic trait is incredibly weak. But these rebuttals
are not just esoteric academic arguments. Without more reflection on
why they keep resurfacing, the assumptions behind the slavery
hypothesis and other notions of genetic determinism will hinder
racial equality, and they could even imperil people’s lives.
Here’s why. First, by claiming an innate link between race and a
chronic health condition, the hypothesis shifts the focus away from
the external factors that public health researchers have identified
as contributors to hypertension. A 1996 study by Nancy Krieger and
Stephen Sidney, published in the American Journal of Public Health,
explored links between victim responses to racial discrimination and
high blood pressure. And a report this year by the city of New York
found that the percentage of fast food restaurants in overwhelmingly
minority (and low-income) East and Central Harlem is four times that
of the white (and wealthy) Upper East Side. Two out of three grocers
in Harlem are bodegas, compared with only one of three on the Upper
East Side, which also has an extra supermarket per 10,000 people.
Minority neighborhoods offer diets that cause not only hypertension,
but also related problems like diabetes, obesity, and other conditions.
Second, the slavery hypothesis assumes a long discredited biological
basis for “races.” Such biologically-based racial essentialism has
been rebutted by scientists like the late Stephen Jay Gould, Richard
Lewontin, and Jonathan Marks. In 1998, the American Anthropological
Association issued a statement that concluded: “[P]resent-day
inequalities between so-called ‘racial’ groups are not consequences
of their biological inheritance.” Yet some folks clearly cling on to
a link between a person’s race and her health.
[…]