From Nature:
Too many scientists still say Caucasian
WORLD VIEW
24 August 2021Racist ideas of categories for human identity continue to warp research and medicine.
Alice B. Popejoy
Of the ten clinical genetics labs in the United States that share the most data with the research community, seven include ‘Caucasian’ as a multiple-choice category for patients’ racial or ethnic identity, despite the term having no scientific basis. Nearly 5,000 biomedical papers since 2010 have used ‘Caucasian’ to describe European populations. This suggests that too many scientists apply the term, either unbothered by or unaware of its roots in racist taxonomies used to justify slavery — or worse, adding to pseudoscientific claims of white biological superiority.
I work at the intersection of statistics, evolutionary genomics and bioethics. Since 2017, I have co-led a diverse, multidisciplinary working group funded by the US National Institutes of Health to investigate diversity measures in clinical genetics and genomics (go.nature.com/3su2t8n).
Many working in genomics do have a nuanced understanding of the issues and want to get things right. Still, I have been dismayed by how often the academics and clinicians I’ve encountered shy away from examining, or even acknowledging, how racism warps science. Decades of analyses have shown that ‘racial groups’ are defined by societies, not by genetics. Only the privileged have the luxury of opining that this is not a problem. As a white woman, I too have blind spots that need constant examination.
Pioneering works in social science such as Dorothy Roberts’ Fatal Invention (2012), Kim Tallbear’s Native American DNA (2013) and The Social Life of DNA (2016) by Alondra Nelson, have eloquently pointed out many of the flawed assumptions and approaches that plague human genomics.
A common theme of this scholarship is that groupings depend more on dominant culture than on ancestry. …
You hear this all the time, but then the examples given usually undermine the argument, but the author, editor, and most of the readers don’t see that.
In the United States, people with ancestry from the world’s two most populous countries, India and China, along with every other country on the continent, are collapsed into a single racial category called ‘Asian’.
First, no, Asian countries west of the Khyber Pass are treated as white/Caucasian. In the 1970 Census, Asians all the way to Bangladesh were treated as white/Caucasian.
Second, and more important, lumping South Asian in with East Asia is due to demands from South Asians in the 1970s to make them eligible for minority privileges such as low interest SBA loans.
Similarly, the term ‘Hispanic’ erases a multitude of cultural and ancestral identities, especially among Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
The creation of the Hispanic “ethnicity” by the federal government in the late 1960s was in response to demands by Hispanics to enable them to be eligible for affirmative action while still being white.
Erroneous ideas about genetic ‘races’ live on in the broad, ambiguous ‘continental ancestry’ groups such as ‘Black, African’ or ‘African American’, that are used in the US Census and are ubiquitous in biomedical research. These collapse incredible amounts of diversity and erase cultural and ancestral identities.
This is the Big One of this line of thinking—blacks are the Most Diverse—but I’ve never seen an example given of how this could be useful in regard to African-Americans, who tended to be highly blended. It would be important if, say, African-American descendants of the Shona Bantu tribe tended to have significant medical differences from African-American descendants of the Ngala Bantu tribe, and individual African-Americans could check off a box to tell you that.
But, first, there aren’t all that many big genetic differences among Bantus. Second, Bantus and Bantu-adjacent West Africans contribute the great majority of the sub-Saharan genetic heritage to American Descendants of Slaves. Third, the real exotics among sub-Saharans, such as Pygmies and Bushmen, are vanishingly rare among ADOS. Fourth, virtually no ADOS is an unmixed descendant of any one Bantu tribe.
No, what’s going on is that white people like the author feel a sense of lèse–majesté in thinking that the magnificent diversity of blacks is somehow being degraded by having one box to check. This is because they don’t really understand what they mean by diversity: is it complexity or is it difference from us? The reality is that the sub-Saharan background of African-American ADOS isn’t all that complex to begin with and has been homogenized on this side of the Atlantic. But the Out-of-Africa theory has established that the human race can be divided genetically basically into two major groups: sub-Saharan blacks and everybody else in the world. So the latter is how blacks deserve the title of Most Diverse.
… One practical way forwards is to move away from having people identify themselves using only checkboxes. I am not calling for an end to the study of genetic ancestry or socio-cultural categories such as self-identified race and ethnicity. These are useful for tracking and studying equity in justice, health care, education and more. The goal is to stop conflating the two, which leads scientists and clinicians to attribute differences in health to innate biology rather than to poverty and social inequality.
Self-identified race and ethnicity probably correlates more closely with innate biology than with poverty and social inequality. After all, you can ask people on the same form how much money they make and how much education they have, which sounds more accurate than trying to infer it from their self-identified race.
We need to acknowledge that systemic racism, not genetics, is dominant in creating health disparities.
And we know this because …
… Simply picking another word to replace ‘Caucasian’ won’t be enough to root out racism in research and medicine. But all should be aware of the harms the word represents.
The point of the word “Caucasian” rather than “white” or “European” is to be inclusive, to include swarthy non-Europeans from the Middle East and North Africa. But that’s not the point, the point is that it sounds old and thus icky.
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