Note: For today’s post, I’m re-sharing a post from a year ago– June 7th, 2020— on the history of race science.

Question: I saw on a House hearing on COVID on Thursday, a House rep said that there may be a possible “genetic component” for racial disparities in the COVID epidemic. The witness, a black woman M.D., pushed back by responding “There is no genetic basis for race…race is a social construct.” I won’t ask you to take on the second part (unless you’d like to), but I feel like it may be helpful if you could maybe explain to folks what Dr. Uche Blackstock said when she said that “There is no genetic basis for race”. Aren’t the features that make a person their race embedded in their DNA? Can you talk about how that’s a dangerous assumption in a public health setting? [Sidenote: I personally agree with Dr. Blackstock, but some people may not have heard this line of argument before…]

Answer: Dr. Blackstock’s words are true. There is no genetic basis for race; race is a social construct. The history of race science is a long, painful, and ugly one. And like so many other issues, its roots are in slavery. Here’s a very brief (too brief) synthesis of race science and answer to your question.

Historians show that the concept of race stems from the Atlantic slave trade, which began in 1441. At that time, Portugal played a leading role in the Atlantic Slave Trade and in response, Portuguese leaders, chroniclers, and the Catholic Church placed Africans in a new category of enslaveable people — a group of “barbaric savages” who deserved “civilizing.” This categorization served the economic interests of the enslavers and assuaged any moral concern they may have had about the horrors they were inflicting on fellow human beings. A well-articulated language of racial inferiority based on skin color was birthed and spread throughout Europe and her colonies. Over the centuries, enslavers looked for ways to confirm their beliefs in their own superiority and the in the inferiority of darker-skinned “others”. This desire for confirmation (confirmation in the economic and social structures the enslavers developed at the expense of the enslaved) birthed race science.

Race science used to just be “science.” Its focus is on identifying biologic differences between the races and using these differences to create hierarchies. NYU provides this important timeline of race science. And FacingHistory.org summarizes, “Prominent scientists from many countries built upon each other’s conclusions…

• Carolus Linnaeus, an eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist, was among the first scientists to sort and categorize human beings. He regarded humanity as a species within the animal kingdom and divided the species into four varieties: European, American, Asiatic, and African.
• Petrus Camper, an eighteenth-century Dutch professor of anatomy, believed that the ancient Greeks had come closer than other people to human perfection. He used Greek statues to establish standards of beauty and ranked human faces by how closely they resembled his ideal.
• Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German scientist, coined the term Caucasian in 1795 “to describe the variety of mankind that originated on the southern slopes of Mount Caucasus” along Europe’s eastern border. He claimed it was the “original” race and therefore the most “beautiful.”
• Samuel George Morton, an American anthropologist, theorized in the mid-1800s that intelligence is linked to brain size. After measuring a vast number of skulls from around the world, he concluded that whites have larger skulls than other races and are therefore “superior.””

Dr. Samuel Morton was one of the most prominent race scientists, especially influential in the United States. His work became widely known and cited as evidence in support of ongoing repression and debasement of black and brown people. When Dr. Morton died in 1851, the South Carolina-based Charleston Medical Journal praised him for “giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race.” And Morton’s legacy, like the legacy of slavery, remains with us today. The horrific Tuskegee Syphillis experiments, built on racist beliefs about black bodies, ended as recently as 1972! North Carolina repealed its compulsory sterilization law in 2003! As Faulker wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The proof? A member of the U.S. Congress identified biology as one of the factors driving the higher rates of COVID-19 mortality among Black Americans. On Thursday! And that Congressional leader is not alone. Recent research shows that the majority of white medical residents believe that black people have higher pain tolerance and that black skin is thicker than white skin. These beliefs then influence the medical treatment people of color receive. These pervasive beliefs stem from our racist history and present.

Now, someone reading this post might ask — what about some differences that are associated with race, like sickle cell trait? Isn’t that a racial genetic difference? Answer: No. It’s a genetic difference based not on skin color, but on geography — where humans have lived in places with high degrees of malaria, they have adapted this trait to help mitigate malaria’s impact. Angela Saini, science journalist and author of Superior: The Return of Race Science gives a nice synthesis of this race/geography conflation in this NPR interview. She also provides a deep dive into race science in her book, showing that current-day science still has hallmarks of race science. As Ramin Skibba writes for Smithsonian magazine, “Saini cites an example of a 2017 study claiming that race and biology indicate that the airways of asthmatic black Americans become more inflamed than those of asthmatic white Americans. Black Americans do suffer more from asthma than whites do, but they’re also affected more by environmental hazards like air pollution from highways and factories as well as disparities in access to high-quality healthcare. These many forms of inequality and structural racism — which sociologists have documented for decades — were swept under the rug in favor of a race variable that led to findings that could be easily misinterpreted.”

How does this all factor into our COVID response? I want to be clear, race is indeed exceptionally important to examine when it comes to health outcomes and disparities. As Dr. Jennifer Tsai wrote in Scientific American several years ago (pre-COVID), “The existence of racial disparities in pain management is an issue of racial difference. Black patients really are getting less pain medication, and yes, because of their race. But this has nothing to do with genetic susceptibility. Such racial logic fuels stereotypes that feed inequity….Race is enhanced as a descriptor when it is mobilized as a marker of potential risks drawn from external inequities and assumptions, rather than as a risk factor that is innately responsible for poorer health outcomes.” For COVID, stark differences in mortality by race are markers of stark inequalities by race.

So much more — books and books — to be read and written on this topic. In summary, there are no biological differences by race. Race is a made up concept used by those individuals, institutions, and systems that have profited from the economic and social systems born from slavery in order to justify their actions and themselves.