This edited volume explores the extent to which our understandings of race have shifted with the rise of genomic science. Each chapter covers a controversy that has resulted from a new genomic advance, and ultimately, the reader is reminded just how much powerful social and political conceptions of race continue to govern our interpretation of scientific findings. The substantive chapters are both interesting and informative. In particular, they collectively serve as a good primer for how the hard sciences approach genomics, and they offer critical assessments of the new social practices that have spawned from these scientific developments, such as the popularity of genetic ancestry tests, transnational surrogacy, and strategies of disease prevention. Increasingly, in popular media there are claims that genomic science will fundamentally change our understandings of race, and so the studies in Reconsidering Race can be referenced as powerful counters to such claims.

Unfortunately, the most problematic piece is the editorial introduction by Kazuko Suzuki and Diego von Vacano, which frames the volume as a critique against more of the arguments posed in the subsequent chapters. The introduction criticizes the social constructivist view of race, arguing that the problem with the study of race today is the dominance of this paradigm in the social sciences. The editors argue that the problem with the social constructivist view is that, in the normative fight to challenge the belief that there exists a biological basis to race, scholars are falling behind in their ability to explain the social world because they fail to recognize the real-world use of racial categories. For the editors, the social constructivist stance paints racial categories as “social illusions” (p. 3), yet they argue that there are fields, such as medicine, which rely on racial categories to make consequential decisions. They emphasize that racial categories for many individuals are a “matter of life or death” (p. 3), yet due to the dogma of the social constructivist viewpoint, “the use of scientific data can be politically incorrect in the social sciences” (p. 5). The editors thus paint a tension between social constructivists and the hard sciences as a way of defending the notion that an edited volume on genomic science in the social sciences is necessary.

The introduction paints a rather simplified rendering of the race-as-a-social-construction argument. To argue that race is a social construction is to recognize how social, cultural, and political practices inform the meaning of race and racial categories. What we understand the categories of “white” or “black” to entail has no universal or objective definition; rather, racial meaning is constantly in a process of formation informed by both historical and contemporary contexts. In this way, how racial categories are deployed in public-health initiatives, genetic ancestry tests, and with respect to prescription drugs—as well as how they are used to challenge the existence of race itself—are precisely examples of the racial formation cycle. Moreover, the core insights we gain from the social construction argument is that we must continually question the assumptions one makes about race because ultimately, meanings attached to race involve the maintenance of power.

Each substantive chapter in fact problematizes the assumptions that scientists, practitioners, and the public make about race. So, rather than disputing the social construction argument, the volume actually offers a number of exemplary case studies in the social construction of race. A more representative introduction could have, instead, outlined the shared themes that can be found across different chapters.

The first theme reveals the continued struggle to challenge essentialist definitions of race in the biological sciences and the degree to which this struggle continues even after the rise of genomic science. Chapters written by Joseph L. Graves, Jr., and Rogers Brubaker outline how scientists often make subjective judgments when they attempt to define criteria for identifying shared clusters of genes, a judgment that is then used to argue for a shared biological nature to racial groups. As we learn from these chapters, biological and genomic sciences are thus no more immune to researcher subjectivity than are other academic fields. Nevertheless, the chapter by Ann Morning demonstrates that academics in the hard sciences feel less of a responsibility to consider research on race conducted by social scientists, whereas social scientists feel a greater responsibility to cite work in the hard sciences.

A second informative theme covers a discussion of what Catherine Bliss labels “race-based medicine” (p. 109). The chapters by Bliss, Jay Kaufman, Dinela Rushani and Richard Cooper, and Brubaker point out the increasing number of assumptions being made about the relationship between racial background and disease (for example, the belief that sickle cell anemia is a “black” disease). Alongside this is the rise of racially targeted medicines to combat diseases. What the reader learns from these chapters is that the rise in making racial linkages to health was actually an unintentional result of what at the time was a progressive push to increase health studies on racial and ethnic minorities. By encouraging and funding scholars to study minority populations in the context of health, there was greater emphasis on studying correlations by race. Over time, the outcome of this focus was then to overemphasize racial differences in diseases, which has culminated in the marketing of certain drugs for specific racial groups, such as BiDil, a drug marketed for resolving cardiovascular disease among African Americans.

Two other themes consider how increased knowledge about genetics might influence public understandings of race. One theme examines individual reactions to genetic ancestry tests (chapters by Jennifer Hochschild and Maya Sen and by Wendy Roth and Katherine Lyon, respectively) and transnational surrogacy (in a chapter by Sharmila Rudrappa). What is probably not surprising is that while increased knowledge about one’s genetic background is integrated into one’s personal narrative, people continue to make subjective and racially motivated choices concerning how they choose to describe their background. The other theme discusses the use of genomic science in deliberations about social groups and hierarchies in countries outside the United States (in chapters by Ruha Benjamin, Carolyn Rouse, Michael Keevak, and Shirley Sun). Through these chapters, the reader can consider whether we are witnessing a convergence in the ways that countries and governments deploy findings from genomic science in their approaches to defining their populations.

What becomes clear from reading the chapters in this volume is just how important it is to employ a social constructivist lens to view the new narratives surrounding genomic science. So while the editors of Reconsidering Race maintain that the social sciences would do better to adapt their frameworks to encompass knowledge learned from genomics, the many rich contributions to this volume actually show that the hard sciences could stand to learn something from the social sciences.