Discursive constructions of race talk among Black men and women living in the United States

Race talk within discourse analytic traditions have largely focused on the discursive construction of racism in majority groups. This article extends this work by examining how Black adults discursively engaged in race talk. Across focus groups, two conversations emerged: explanations of racialized experiences and how racialized experiences should be dealt with. In explanations of racialized experiences, participants highlighted their own negative behaviours or constructed experiences as imprecise or an artefact of ignorance. These discourses functioned to circumvent inequitable relations premised on White normativity. In explanations of how racialized experiences should be dealt with, participants constructed themselves as having responsibilities, downplayed their racialized experiences or framed them as inevitable. Each of these discourses functioned to construct racialization as something that could be corrected through good behaviour or they placed ideological limits for what is possible for Blacks in society. Implications for the existing literature on race talk are discussed.     

Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore genetic contributions to disparities in health

Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore genetic contributions to disparities in health were developed using in-depth qualitative interviews with editorial staff from nineteen genetics journals, focusing on the methodological and conceptual mechanisms required to make race/ethnicity a genetic variable. As such, these analyses explore how and why race/ethnicity comes to be used in the context of genetic research, set against the background of continuing critiques from anthropology and related human sciences that focus on the social construction, structural correlates and limited genetic validity of racial/ethnic categories. The analyses demonstrate how these critiques have failed to engage geneticists, and how geneticists use a range of essentially cultural devices to protect and separate their use of race/ethnicity as a genetic construct from its use as a societal and social science resource. Given its multidisciplinary, biosocial nature and the cultural gaze of its ethnographic methodologies, anthropology is well placed to explore the cultural separation of science and society, and of natural and social science disciplines. Anthropological insights into the use of race/ethnicity to explore disparities in health suggest that moving beyond genetic explanations of innate difference might benefit from a more even-handed critique of how both the natural and social sciences tend to essentialize selective elements of race/ethnicity. Drawing on the example of HIV/AIDS, this paper demonstrates how public health has been undermined by the use of race/ethnicity as an analytical variable, both as a cipher for innate genetic differences in susceptibility and response to treatment, and in its use to identify 'core groups' at greater risk of becoming infected and infecting others. Clearly, a tendency for biological reductionism can place many biomedical issues beyond the scope of public health interventions, while socio-cultural essentialization has tended to stigmatize 'unhealthy behaviours' and the communities where these are more prevalent.     

Race, ethnicity, and health: can genetics explain disparities?

Over the past decade, numerous studies have documented profound racial and ethnic disparities in disease in the United States. This essay examines how popular and scientific concepts of race and ethnicity converge with dominant understandings of genetics to inform the design and interpretation of research, public health policy, and medical practice. Although there is some acknowledgment in the biomedical community that racial and ethnic categories are social and not genetic, ideas about race and ethnicity that circulate in biomedicine are contradictory. Thus, in practice genetic explanations for observed differences are common both in the scientific literature and in popular media accounts of biomedical research. Such explanations naturalize racial and ethnic difference and create a conceptual barrier to developing a research program that explores the complex ways in which social inequality and experiences of racial discrimination interact with human biology to influence patterns of disease. Importantly, genetically based ideas lead to disease prevention policies that are bound to be ineffective.     

“Bioethics in Action” and Human Population Genetics Research

Recent disputes about human population genetics research have been provoked by the field's political vulnerability (the historic imbalance of power between the geneticists and the people they study) and conceptual vulnerability (the mismatch between scientific and popular understandings of the genetic basis of collective identity). The small, isolated groups often studied by this science are now mobilizing themselves as political subjects, pressing sovereignty claims, and demanding control over the direction and interpretation of research. Negotiations between the geneticists and the people asked to donate DNA have resulted not only in explicit bioethics protocols but also in diffuse anxiety over the incommensurability between expert and non-expert views about genetic evidence for identity claims. This article compares two disputes over genetics research: the Human Genome Diversity Project and the use of genetics to prove identity claims among the Melungeons of Tennessee. The case studies illustrate “bioethics in action”: how particular controversies and interests drive the production of bioethics discourses and techniques (such as informed consent protocols). They also illustrate some limits on the usual apparatus of bioethics in overcoming this science's multiple vulnerabilities.     

Racial identity and nationalism: a theoretical view from Latin America

The empirical intersection of ideas about race and nation are well-established, but theoretical explanations for this are less developed. Some ideas are advanced about how and why ideologies of race, nation, gender and sexuality intertwine. This leads on to a consideration of the tensions between sameness and difference that are argued to be constitutive of national identities. From here, an argument is developed about dynamics of appropriation and the maintenance of hegemony in racially diverse and multicultural nations. These theoretical ideas are illustrated with material from Latin America, particularly Colombia, with reference to Colombian popular music as an important cultural form in nationalist expression.     

Views from the periphery: discourses of race and place in French military medicine

Numerous authors have interpreted the history of anthropological and medical conceptions of race in nineteenth century France as following a path mapped out by phrenology, anthropometry, and Paul Broca's version of physical anthropology. On balance, this has resulted in an historical narrative centered on Parisian intellectual life and one leaving the impression that by the 1890s anthropological theories had moved away from ethnological and cultural explanations toward more biological views of race. This article, by contrast, examines the world beyond Paris and the literatures of naval and army medicine from about 1830 to 1920. It describes the contours of a medical and anthropological pluralism in matters of race and ethnicity and argues that cultural and ethnological perspectives remained important to theorists of race through World War I.     

Parent-offspring conflict and co-adaptation: behavioural ecology meets quantitative genetics

The evolution of the complex and dynamic behavioural interactions between caring parents and their dependent offspring is a major area of research in behavioural ecology and quantitative genetics. While behavioural ecologists examine the evolution of interactions between parents and offspring in the light of parent-offspring conflict and its resolution, quantitative geneticists explore the evolution of such interactions in the light of parent-offspring co-adaptation due to combined effects of parental and offspring behaviours on fitness. To date, there is little interaction or integration between these two fields. Here, we first review the merits and limitations of each of these two approaches and show that they provide important complementary insights into the evolution of strategies for offspring begging and parental resource provisioning. We then outline how central ideas from behavioural ecology and quantitative genetics can be combined within a framework based on the concept of behavioural reaction norms, which provides a common basis for behavioural ecologists and quantitative geneticists to study the evolution of parent-offspring interactions. Finally, we discuss how the behavioural reaction norm approach can be used to advance our understanding of parent-offspring conflict by combining information about the genetic basis of traits from quantitative genetics with key insights regarding the adaptive function and dynamic nature of parental and offspring behaviours from behavioural ecology.     

‘Aching to be a boy’: A preliminary analysis of gender assignment of intersex persons in India in a culture of son preference

Intersexuality, particularly in the global South, remains an under-researched field of study. In my in-progress doctoral research project, I explore the cultural, social, and medical discourses that influence how key stakeholders such as healthcare providers make decisions about the sex and gender assignment of the intersex child in India. In this paper I interrogate some of these ideas around gender assignment of intersex people in India, paying particular attention to the context of son preference. I am interested in exploring how decisions of gender assignment by medical professionals are guided by ideas of son preference. Focusing on four qualitative, semi-structured, in-depth interviews across two cities with medical doctors from different specializations, this paper is a preliminary attempt to examine some of the factors that guide medical professionals in making decisions about gender assignment of intersex children and explore the dynamics of the decision-making process. Specifically, I explore the factors that inform doctors’ decision-making and locate these decision-making processes within the broader socio-cultural context of India.     

Geneticists and Race

SYNOPSIS. During the twentieth century, geneticists have dramaticallychanged their assessments of the biological and social consequencesof human race differences and race crossing. In the first quarterof the century, most geneticists thought that human races differedhereditarily by important mental as well as physical differencesand that wide race crosses were biologically and socially harmful.The period from 1925 to the outbreak of World War II saw nochange in geneticists' views on hereditary mental differencesbetween human races, but a shift to agnosticism on the issueof wide race crosses. By the early 1950s, geneticists generallyargued that wide race crosses were at worst biologically harmless,but still held to earlier beliefs about hereditary mental differencesbetween races. The final period from 1951 to the present haswitnessed the shift to agnosticism on the issue of hereditarymental differences between races. The changes in geneticists'assessments of race differences and race crossing were causedbyincreased understanding of the complex relationship betweengenes and environment and by cultural changes.     

The state of ethnicity and the ethnicity of the state: Ethnic politics in Southeast Asia

Attitudes about racial inequality in the United States are often viewed through the lenses of discrimination and disadvantage. However, as whiteness studies suggest, systems of racial inequality produce both disadvantage and advantage. National surveys have documented explanations for African American disadvantage but have not collected data on explanations for white advantage. African American disadvantage and white advantage are two sides of the same coin – racial inequality. To understand attitudes about racial inequality, we need to know Americans' beliefs about both sides of the racialized system. This research uses national survey data to examine explanations for both sides of racial inequality and identifies which factors are believed to be most important in explaining white advantage, finding that racial attitudes are complex and are dependent upon the specific situation and context. This research will provide a valuable contribution to both whiteness studies and race relations research.     

Medical and human genetics 1977: trends and directions

Our field is in a rapid state of evolution. The broader concerns of human genetics not of immediate medical interest such as behavioral genetics are often investigated by persons not trained or identified as human geneticists. Both medical genetics and human genetics in general have prospered when various biologic techniques have been applied to genetic concepts. A search for novel biologic methods may provide new insights and may bridge the gulf between Mendelian and biometric approaches in studies of behavior and of common diseases. Medical geneticists need to broaden their fields of interest to encompass other fields than those of pediatric interest alone. We need to attract more basic scientists. Our field is evolving from a largely research oriented science to a service-oriented specialty. This logical development is a sign of increasing maturity and makes available to the public the results of our research. The resulting stresses and strains need careful watching to prevent their slowing the momentum of our science which can contribute continued insights into the many problems of behavior, health, and disease.     

Bodies and borders: a new cultural history of medicine

Both medicine and the history of medicine have seen many changes in the last four decades. The way we tell the story of medical developments no longer concentrates on the important doctors and their ideas. The influences of social history in the 1960s and 1970s and cultural history in the 1980s and 1990s have broadened and enriched the interpretations of our medical past. The social historians have helped us to include politics, economics, and the leading ideas of any period we wanted to study; the cultural approach has added ethnography as well as an emphasis on language or discourse.Today there is a new history of medicine, one far more willing to cross disciplinary boundaries to ask questions about how we know what we know and why we do what we do.This article highlights some of the work in the adjoining fields of medical anthropology and of literature and medicine to demonstrate new interests, new questions, and new methods of inquiry. However, although we have cast our nets far more widely in the process of professionalizing the history of medicine, there is a question about whether we have lost the appeal to one of our core constituencies: medical students and physicians. We need to welcome some of the new changes in medical history as in medicine itself; the common goal is to achieve a better understanding of what we have done and what we are doing.     

Training for genetic counsellors

Genetic counsellors are uniquely trained to provide support, explanations and guidance to individuals or families who have been diagnosed with a genetic disorder. As our knowledge of the genetic basis of disease increases, so does our ability to diagnose it and so does the demand for appropriately trained genetic counsellors. Despite this growing demand, only a handful of countries provides formal courses in genetic counselling, whereas other countries leave genetic counselling in the hands of medical practitioners or medical geneticists.     

Biological Discourses on Human Races and Scientific Racism in Brazil (1832–1911)

This paper analyzes biological and scientific discourses about the racial composition of the Brazilian population, between 1832 and 1911. The first of these dates represents Darwin’s first arrival in the South-American country during his voyage on H.M.S. Beagle. The study ends in 1911, with the celebration of the First universal Races congress in London, where the Brazilian physical anthropologist J.B. Lacerda predicted the complete extinction of black Brazilians by the year 2012. Contemporary European and North-American racial theories had a profound influence in Brazilian scientific debates on race and miscegenation. These debates also reflected a wider political and cultural concern, shared by most Brazilian scholars, about the future of the Nation. With few known exceptions, Brazilian evolutionists, medical doctors, physical anthropologists, and naturalists, considered that the racial composition of the population was a handicap to the commonly shared nationalistic goal of creating a modern and progressive Brazilian Republic.     

Breaking bad news in genetic counseling—problems and communication tools

Breaking bad news is a common problem for clinical geneticists in their daily work. Just like doctors of other specialties, e.g., oncologists, they can use proven communication tools instead of relying only on professional sense. The latter is, of course, always the most important for experienced doctors, but the use of protocols such as SPIKES and EMPATHY facilitates both the delineation of difficult information and the process of its transmission. The article gives an overview of the best tools of this type available to medical professionals dealing with genetic counseling.     

Biological races in humans

Races may exist in humans in a cultural sense, but biological concepts of race are needed to access their reality in a non-species-specific manner and to see if cultural categories correspond to biological categories within humans. Modern biological concepts of race can be implemented objectively with molecular genetic data through hypothesis-testing. Genetic data sets are used to see if biological races exist in humans and in our closest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee. Using the two most commonly used biological concepts of race, chimpanzees are indeed subdivided into races but humans are not. Adaptive traits, such as skin color, have frequently been used to define races in humans, but such adaptive traits reflect the underlying environmental factor to which they are adaptive and not overall genetic differentiation, and different adaptive traits define discordant groups. There are no objective criteria for choosing one adaptive trait over another to define race. As a consequence, adaptive traits do not define races in humans. Much of the recent scientific literature on human evolution portrays human populations as separate branches on an evolutionary tree. A tree-like structure among humans has been falsified whenever tested, so this practice is scientifically indefensible. It is also socially irresponsible as these pictorial representations of human evolution have more impact on the general public than nuanced phrases in the text of a scientific paper. Humans have much genetic diversity, but the vast majority of this diversity reflects individual uniqueness and not race.     

How geneticists can help reporters to get their story right

Many geneticists are disgruntled with the coverage of genetics in the mass media, yet geneticists themselves have a part to play in improving that coverage. This article aims to help geneticists to do so by explaining the forces that shape science news. It provides some specific options for reducing hype, countering genetic determinism and preventing the use of genetics to reinforce discriminatory messages, slants that many reporters are inclined to give to their articles.     

Population genetics meets behavioral ecology

Populations are often composed of more than just randomly mating subpopulations - many organisms from social groups with distinct patterns of mating and dispersal. Such patterns have recieved much attention in behavioral ecology, yet theories of population genetics rarely take social structures into account. Consequently, population geneticists often report high levels of apparent in breeding and concomitantly low efective sizes, even for species that avoid mating between close kin. Recently, a view of gene dynamics has been introduced that takes dispersal and social structure into account. Accounting for social structure in population genetics leads to a different perspective on how genetic variation is partitoned and the rate at which genic diversity is lost in natural populations - a view that is more consistent with observed behaviors for the minimization of inbreeding.