THE POLITICS OF SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIVITY

On its face, Wade’s argument is patently racist. In a nutshell, Wade claims the human species is divided into principal races that evolved separately to be genetically predisposed to disinctive social behaviors that determined the types of institutions each developed. His argument is grounded in an evolutionary theory of biological races. “Ever since the first modern humans dispersed from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa some 50,000 years ago,” Wade explains, “the populations on each continent have evolved largely independently of one another as each adapted to its own regional environment” (pp. 1–2). According to Wade, this evolutionary history produced three “major” races—Africans, East Asians, and Caucasians, including people from North Africa, the Middle East, and India.

These race-based genomic adaptations included differences in social behavior, Wade asserts, along with distinctive physical traits like hair texture, breast size, and skin color. This evolutionary-lineage concept collapses of its own weight, however, because Wade’s examples of adapted physical traits—dark skin to sunny climates, increased lung capacity to high altitudes, and lactose tolerance to cattle raising—vary across continents without regard to supposedly racial groupings. The evidence from human evolution actually reveals the clinal nature of genetic variation in the human species that defies racial categorization (Fujimura et al., Reference Fujimura, Bolnick, Rajagopalan, Kaufman, Lewontin, Dustuer, Ossorio and Marks2014; Marks Reference Marks and Muehlenbein2010; Serre and Pääbo, Reference Serre and Pääbo2004).

From this flawed theory of genetic races, Wade conjures what he calls a more “speculative” story of human social development. He argues that innate differences in social behavior explain why races and sub-races have distinctive societies with varying levels of achievement. Europeans evolved to create “open and innovative” societies, Jews are genetically adapted to behaviors required for economic success, Chinese are programmed for conformity that makes them obedient to autocrats, and Africans remain mired in violent tribalism. For Wade, it is “instinctual social behaviors” that explain why resource-poor countries like Japan and Iceland are wealthy while more richly endowed countries like Nigeria and Haiti are “beset by persistent poverty and corruption” (p. 13).

Wade is breathtakingly silent about the role of European conquest, slavery, and colonialism in producing these global inequities. To the contrary, he argues that despite the efforts of European powers to prepare their colonies for independence by imposing democratic institutions, African states “reverted” to tribal social systems “to which Africans had become adapted during the previous centuries” (p. 147). He has the unmitigated gall to attribute Western achievements to Europeans’ peaceful nature, thus ignoring the extreme violence entailed in enslaving Africans in order to build Western wealth on their exploited labor. Why not consider instead the Cress Theory of Color Confrontation linking White people’s urge to dominate others to a genetically defective lack of melanin—an equally speculative but more plausible biological explanation for the global racial order (Welsing Reference Welsing1991)?

As important to A Troublesome Inheritance as these claims about innate racial differences in social behavior is Wade’s effort to explain why they are not racist. At a superficial level, Wade makes a lame distinction between genetic superiority and genetic advantage. Wade rejects, because it is racist, “the notion that any race has the right to dominate others or is superior in any absolute sense,” but goes on to assert that “races being different, it is inevitable that science will establish relative advantages in some traits” (p. 8) and “some societies have achieved much more than others” because of race-based genetic differences (p. 9). Wade’s contention, that the traits inherited by Caucasians are more advantageous in the modern world than those inherited by Africans and explain why Caucasians have achieved more, is morally equivalent to saying Caucasians are a superior race.

In addition, Wade uses a specious political ploy to preempt accusations of racism. In an effort to make his book seem novel, objective, and significant, Wade paints himself as a courageous champion of scientific truth battling the forces of political orthodoxy. Wade stages a conflict between the “inevitable” scientific study of human races versus public policies designed to combat racism. Anti-racist views rejecting the evolution of separate human races now pose “intellectual barriers” that “stand in the way of studying the recent evolutionary past” (p. 2). Wade resolves this tension by observing that one can accept race as a genetic fact without being a racist because “race is both a biological reality and a politically fraught idea with sometimes pernicious consequences” (p. 5). He fails to understand that the very concept of race as a natural division of human beings was invented to legitimize, support, and facilitate racism. British sociologist Paul Gilroy (Reference Gilroy2005) underscores this key but often inverted premise: “For me, ‘race’ refers primarily to an impersonal, discursive arrangement, the brutal result of the raciological ordering of the world, not its cause” (p. 39). In other words, race is the product of racism; racism is not the product of race.

Wade also pits genomic scientists against social scientists over the biological reality of race. According to Wade, “The recent discoveries that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional severely undercut the social scientists’ official view of the world” (p. 6). He claims that social scientists ignore the scientific evidence of genetic distinctions between races and refuse to explore its implications for ideological reasons. “The social scientists’ official view of race is designed to support the political view that genetics cannot possibly be the reason why human societies differ,” he writes (p. 5). Wade further explains that, having been cowed by campus “vigilantes” loyal to the social science perspective, most genomic scientists have suppressed their racial findings for fear of appearing politically incorrect. Every aspect of this portrait of objective genomicists dominated by ideological sociologists is fabricated.

The Genomic Incursion in Social Science

In addition, Wade’s portrait of sociologists dominating genomicists is belied by the authoritative status enjoyed by genomic science, coupled by recent calls from within sociology to incorporate the new race science in the discipline’s analyses of social inequality. Many genomic scientists are framing questions about humanity as biological ones that they are better equipped than social scientists and humanists to answer. In a February 13, 2014, New York Times article reporting the publication of a genetic atlas of human mixing events, Wade (Reference Wade2014b) quotes the lead scientist Daniel Falush declaring the superiority of genomics for telling the human story. “In some sense we don’t want to talk to historians,” Dr. Falush said. “There’s a great virtue in being objective: You put the data in and get the history out. We do think this is a way of reconstructing history just by using DNA.” The media tend to treat genomic scientists as the premier experts on racial difference, celebrating their findings as the most reliable and newsworthy. In a front-page story in The New York Times, for example, Wade (Reference Wade2002) touted a genetic clustering study as having proved not only the biological reality of race, but also the superiority of genomic science over sociology and anthropology for studying the true structure of human populations.

When Florida State University criminologist Kevin Beaver released a widely reported study claiming to link gang membership to the low-activity form of the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene, the press was quick to contrast his genetic explanation to a sociological perspective (Beaver et al., Reference Beaver, DeLisi, Vaughn and Barnes2010). In June 2009, the Associated Press reported his research with the headline “Gang-Banging May Be Genetic.” The story ran on the Internet accompanied by a large color photo of bare-chested, tattooed Latino men flanked by a security force holding automatic rifles, adding a racialized interpretation of Beaver’s findings. “Bad neighborhoods and lack of opportunity are usually blamed for boys joining violent street gangs,” the article stated. “But a new study finds that the urge to join gangs may lie, at least in part, in their genes.” Beaver endorsed this explicit devaluation of the social explanation for gang involvement in favor of a more genetic one. “While gangs typically have been regarded as a sociological phenomenon,” Beaver said, his investigation revealed that variants of the MAOA gene “play a significant role” (Fontaine 2009).

Increasingly, social scientists studying the causes and impacts of social inequality are pressured to include a genetic component in their research and to report their findings in biological terms in order to garner funding and respect. The National Institutes of Health is dedicating new lines of funding for molecular labs in an effort to expand the scope of genomics to incorporate health disparities research (Bliss Reference Bliss2012). Although research that crosses the disciplinary boundaries of life and social sciences should be encouraged, these projects tend to adopt a biological rather than political concept of race that largely ignores the impact of social inequities on health (Krieger Reference Krieger2005).

At the same time, sociologists are increasingly integrating into their theoretical approaches to inequality a focus on the interdependence of social environments and individual and group genetic differences (Freese Reference Freese2011). A number of sociologists have recently proposed that this integration include a genetic definition of race (Guo et al., Reference Guo, Fu, Lee, Cai and Harris2014; Shiao et al., Reference Shiao, Bode, Beyer and Selvig2012). A 2012 article published in Sociological Theory, for example, argued that sociologists’ constructionist understanding of race is “out of step with recent advances in genetic research.” The authors advanced a “theoretical synthesis” of genomic and sociological approaches that accepts the claim that genetic clusters within human population structure are consistent with dominant racial classifications, “without diminishing the social character of their context, meaning, production, or consequences” (Shiao et al., Reference Shiao, Bode, Beyer and Selvig2012, p. 68). Similar to Wade, the authors proposed sociological research investigating the genetic origins of racial differences in social behaviors. This incursion into sociology of genetic definitions of race and explanations for social inequality is a far cry from Wade’s protest that sociologists are silencing genomic scientists.

Although Wade claims that politics promotes a social constructionist view of race in science, he never questions the politics of his own view of race as a genetic grouping. Rather, he casts those who believe that race is socially constructed as driven by political ideology and those who believe race is genetically determined as pursuing objective truth. In an early chapter on “The Perversions of Science,” Wade acknowledges the role genetic theories of race played in eugenicist programs in the United States and Nazi Germany—only to distinguish the current incarnation of race science. Moreover, he places all the blame on the “racial fantasies of murderous despots” and none on the scientific theories that fueled them, noting that “ideas about race are dangerous when linked to political agendas” (p. 37). Wade also fails to acknowledge the role genetic theories of race play in U.S. politics today. I now turn to the political context of A Troublesome Inheritance that Wade works so hard to obscure.

CONSERVATIVE POLITICS AND THE NEW RACE SCIENCE

It is not surprising that avidly eugenicist and White supremacist commentators embraced A Troublesome Inheritance, despite Wade’s superficial efforts to distance himself from these ideologies. Jared Taylor, editor of the White supremacist magazine American Renaissance, praises Wade for demonstrating that Africans “cannot maintain government institutions,” “Middle Easterners don’t have the capacity for republican government,” and “foreign aid is probably wasted because poor countries are not genetically prepared for the institutions necessary for wealth” (Taylor Reference Taylor2014). Pronouncing A Troublesome Inheritance “a definitive book on the existence of biological differences among races,” conservative journalist Steve Sailer goes on to endorse Wade’s genetic excuse for racist sexual stereotypes:

But Wade’s racial theories also support conservative ideology in a more subtle way. The 2008 election of Barack Obama as president rejuvenated claims that Civil Rights Era reforms succeeded in overcoming America’s racist past, bolstering the colorblind strategy of conservative retrenchment. As sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Reference Bonilla-Silva2003) notes in his classic Racism Without Racists, “Much as Jim Crow served as the glue for defending a brutal and overt system of racial oppression in the pre-civil rights era, color-blind racism serves today as the ideological armor for a covert and institutionalized system in the post-civil rights era” (p. 3). Colorblind ideology posits that because racism no longer impedes minority progress, there is no need for social policies to account for race; any disadvantages people of color experience today result from their own flaws rather than systemic discrimination.

As genomic science, biomedical research, and biotechnologies are resuscitating a biological race consciousness, the U.S. Supreme Court solidifies a colorblind constitutionalism rejecting governments’ use of race to address institutionalized racism. In invalidating a host of race-conscious state efforts including school desegregation, affirmative action, and voting rights laws, the Court treats measures to eliminate vestiges of Jim Crow as equally contemptible as Jim Crow classifications designed to enforce White rule. At the same time, the routine use of racial classifications in government-supported biomedical research and drug development is not considered invidious because race is considered a natural category. Thus, the FDA’s 2005 approval of the race-specific medicine BiDil has not been challenged as a Fourteenth Amendment violation.

In his positive review of A Troublesome Inheritance, Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray, Reference Herrnstein and Murray1994), indicates the significance of the new race science to conservative colorblindness (Murray Reference Murray2014). He writes that the first front of “America’s modern struggle with race” was the legal battle that “effectively ended a half-century ago with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” The second front—the battle against private prejudice—is practically over because “expressions of racial prejudice by public figures are punished swiftly and severely.” According to Murray, the third front is the current struggle to overcome “the reigning intellectual orthodoxy that race is a ‘social construct’” with the scientific evidence that human beings are genetically divided by race and these innate differences explain social inequality. Why does Murray tie the supposed success of civil rights laws to the importance of a genetic understanding of race?

The new race science promotes race-consciousness at the molecular level at the very moment that the U.S. Supreme Court and conservative policymakers are rejecting race-consciousness at the social level. This convergence makes race appear more significant in our genes than in a supposedly “postracial” society. Rising genetic concepts of race alongside a colorblind political ideology provide a convenient genetic explanation for the racial inequities that persist in U.S. society. Gene-based racial differences seem to make sense of the paradox of intensifying racial gaps in health, wealth, and welfare since the Civil Rights Movement, obscuring the state’s neoliberal privations and violent containment of minority communities, including mass incarceration, police brutality, and coerced sterilization (Alexander Reference Alexander2010, Park Reference Park2011, Roberts Reference Roberts2011).

THE LIBERAL DEFENSE OF THE NEW RACE SCIENCE

Unlike conservatives’ praise for A Troublesome Inheritance, a chorus of liberal commentators and scientists denounced the book for its scientific inaccuracies and racist concoctions. This resounding condemnation should be celebrated for calling out the book’s bigotry and for helping to deny Wade the success enjoyed by Herrnstein and Murray with The Bell Curve two decades ago. Some of the critics thoroughly debunked both Wade’s fantasies about racial differences in social behavior and the genetic understanding of human races that undergirded it (Fuentes Reference Fuentes2014; Laden Reference Laden2014; Marks Reference Marks2014; Raff Reference Raff2014; Williams Reference Williams2014).

Yet I found the liberal critique to be limited by many commentators’ reluctance to challenge the foundation of Wade’s argument. While liberal reviewers uniformly decried the “speculative” second part of A Troublesome Inheritance for its outlandish ruminations about the social impact of racial genetic differences, fewer challenged its premise that races are genetically distinct biological, rather than invented political, groupings. Library Journal predicted, “[m]any of Wade’s conclusions about race, based on geographical adaptation, will seem reasonable, but to some readers his theories about the rise of the West and the intelligence of certain ethnic groups will not” (Henderson 2014).

Nathaniel Comfort (Reference Comfort2014) wrote in Nature, “[Wade’s] book moves smoothly through seemingly reasonable arguments that humans are still evolving, to end up at the retrograde conclusion that Europeans have become the world’s richest and most powerful people mainly because they are genetically the most open, curious, innovative and hard-working” (p. 307). “Wade’s survey of human population genomics is lively and generally serviceable,” writes H. Allen Orr (2014, p. 19) in The New York Review of Books; it is in the book’s latter half that Wade is guilty of “spinning tales that are improbable” (p. 20). A common approach was to soft-pedal Wade’s assertions about the biological reality of races, but to chastise vehemently his heretical conjectures about their social differences.

The liberal acceptance of a race as a genetic grouping is reflected as well in The New York Times’ steady publication of Wade’s racial theories for more than a decade. Wade has been a mainstream science writer and editor since 1967, writing for the prominent journals Nature and Science before joining The New York Times in 1982. I became alerted to the new race science precisely by reading Wade’s articles espousing an evolutionary theory of human races. In 2009, for example, Wade wrote, “The principal human races presumably emerged as the populations of each continent responded to different evolutionary pressures.” A particularly preposterous article featured prominently on the front page of Science Times, “Genome Study Points to Adaptation in Early African Americans,” reported on research attributing African Americans’ higher disease rates to an unexplained increase in “certain disease-causing variant genes” in the enslaved African population as it adapted to the North American environment (Wade Reference Wade2012). The article failed to explain why European slave holders, who adapted to the same environment, suffered no such genetic fate.

In Fatal Invention, I described the political underpinnings of this liberal restraint (Roberts Reference Roberts2011). For many liberals, the election of Barack Obama as president represented twin victories: it seemed to usher in an era both of postracial social equality and of respect for science. In repudiating the ideological influences that had characterized the Bush Administration’s handling of scientific research, some bought into the new race science because it is science. A naïve faith in the ability of science to transcend racism has blinded many liberals to the potential for a genetic definition of race to reinforce America’s racial order. Many believe in the inherent progress of science and trust that scientists conducting research on the genetics of race must be advancing knowledge in an objective, rational, and ultimately beneficial way.

Many scientists see themselves in this light of benign objectivity. In an August 8, 2014, letter to The New York Times editor, more than 100 genomic and evolutionary scientists objected to Wade’s distortion of their research on human genetic variation (Coop et al., Reference Coop, Eisen, Nielsen, Przeworski and Rosenberg2014). Specifically, the scientists criticized “Wade’s misappropriation of research from our field to support arguments about differences among human societies.” Rejecting Wade’s “implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork,” they concluded: “We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade’s conjectures.” This was a remarkable feat of pulling scientists away from their labs to contest en masse a scientifically inaccurate and socially damaging text. It was important that these scientists decisively disconnected genomic population research from unrelated and unsupportable claims about human social behavior (HoSang Reference HoSang2014). But the scientists’ letter, like much of the liberal commentary, focused on Wade’s speculations about social behavior and stopped short of denouncing his biological concept of race. Why?

Some of the signatories, including anthropologist Deborah Bolnick (Reference Bolnick, Koenig, Lee and Richardson2008), evolutionary biologist Joseph Graves (Reference Graves2003, Reference Graves2004), and geneticist Rick Kittles (Batai and Kittles, Reference Batai and Kittles2013), have forcefully debunked the myth of genetically distinct human races. But others who signed the letter have contributed to its rejuvenation. For example, Wade supports his genetic definition of race by quoting four signatories—Neil Risch, Esteban Gonzalez Burchard, Elad Ziv, and Hua Tang (2002): “Effectively, these population genetic studies have recapitulated the classical definition of races based on continental ancestry” (p. 97). In an influential article published in Genome Biology in 2002, these scientists erased any distinction between race and ancestry. On one hand, they defined race “on the basis of the primary continent of origin.” Ancestry, on the other hand, “refers to the race/ethnicity of an individual’s ancestors, whatever the individual’s current affiliation.” In other words, race is where one’s ancestors came from, and ancestry is the race of one’s ancestors.

Moreover, like Wade, these scientists dispensed with the inconvenient evidence that “migrations have blurred the strict continental boundaries” and that Ethiopians, Somalis, and North Africans are “intermediate between sub-Saharan Africans and Caucasians.” “The existence of such intermediate groups should not, however, overshadow the fact that the greatest genetic structure that exists in the human population occurs at the racial level,” they stated, never explaining why we should simply ignore the blurred boundaries and intermediate groupings to uphold an equation between race and ancestry (Risch et al., Reference Risch, Burchard, Ziv and Tang2002, p. 4).

In the Genome Biology article, as well as one in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (2003), Burchard, Risch, Tang, and Ziv argued that it was essential to investigate health-related genetic differences among racial groups in order to attend to the health problems of minority patients effectively and equitably. “Scientifically, I do not think we should fear what other folks are going to do, like David Duke and other politicians,” Burchard told me when we spoke at his lab in 2008. “They may try to distort our findings to fit their neat little box but that should not deter us from doing good science” (Roberts Reference Roberts2011, p. 293).

Liberal scientists like Burchard distinguish their “good” race science from “bad” scientific racism of the past and from “bad” racist practices of the present, failing to see the continuity among racial logics (Bliss Reference Bliss2012; Fullwiley Reference Fullwiley2007). For many biologists, the rejection of scientific racism in the wake of condemnation of Nazi science and the embrace of a civil rights ethos did not make race science untenable. Rather, it made it imperative for scientists to detach their study of biological race from societal racism (Reardon Reference Reardon2005). Liberals must disengage their race science from the historical and current realities of brutal government containment of racialized populations.

Thus, the liberal faith in scientific objectivity has generated an approach to the genetic definition of race that sounds remarkably similar to the conservative one. Like conservatives, these liberal scientists and commentators separate racial science from racial politics to retain a supposedly objective concept of race as a genetic category. Like Wade, neither side questions the false racial assumptions embedded in the science itself. Claiming that modern day genomicists can revive biological concepts of race without the taint of racism ignores the historical relationship between the two as well as the potential for race science to legitimize new forms of anti-Black state violence in the future.

THE FUTURE OF RACE AND SCIENCE

Some may find the widespread condemnation of Wade’s outrageous speculations a heartening triumph over scientific racism. My concern, however, is the tenacity of Wade’s basic claim that human beings are naturally divided into races. The new race science provides a modern mechanism for legitimizing racial oppression in the post-Civil Rights Era when the United States claims to have repudiated violent enforcement of a racial caste system. Recent killings of unarmed Black men, women, and children by police, who are not held accountable, shows the state’s continued capacity to use lethal force as a form of racial containment as well as the devastating power of deeply-held beliefs about innate racial difference. Dehumanizing practices of surveillance and control are obscured by the emerging genetic understanding of race, which focuses attention on molecular differences while downplaying the impact of racism in our society. Moreover, reliance on race-specific, gene-based products to address health and other inequities, like the backlash against affirmative action, rejects the need for state intervention to solve social problems while focusing instead on individual responsibility to seek solutions in private markets (Kahn Reference Kahn2013, Roberts Reference Roberts2011).

What is the future of race in science—regression or revolution? Will life and social scientists continue to revive backward concepts of biological races that have been “buried alive” (Duster Reference Duster2001) by past efforts to discredit them? Or will they seize this moment of political and intellectual crisis as an opportunity to imagine a radically different way to study human genetic unity and diversity, as well as social behavior—one that “privileges the human over the racialized individual” (Zuberi Reference Zuberi2011, p.1590)? Only the latter approach will equip us as researchers to join the struggle to end White supremacist ideologies, institutions, and practices sustained by the political system of race.