Following up on my partial defense of teaching race in the context of human biological variation, Anne Fausto-Sterling has a review of three recent books on the subject for the Boston Review.
All three of the books reviewed seem interesting, with Ann Morning’s “The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference” (University of California Press), and Dorothy Roberts’, “Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century” (New Press) particularly relevant for my own argument.
The entire review is worth reading.
So what is the meaning of race? Morning and Roberts argue convincingly that race is a socially produced set of categories that has profound and often terrible biological consequences. Without putting words into Francis’s mouth, since he doesn’t discuss race per se, he would, I think, agree that epigenetics provides a well-understood tool that ought to be used more frequently in studies of biological correlates of racial inequality in health. If our goal is not just to understand race, but to improve health, then we don’t need research to find genes that cause essential hypertension as much as we need to address the sources of chronic stress. And let’s get those mammography machines into the inner cities and out into rural America.
