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'Race: The Power of an Illusion'
With Pilar Ossorio
Assistant Professor of Law and Medical Ethics,
University of
Wisconsin
Thursday, May 1, 2003; 1 p.m. ET
What is this thing called "race?" -- a question so basic it is rarely raised. What if we discovered that most of our common assumptions about race, for instance, that the world's people can be divided biologically along racial lines, are wrong? Yet the consequences of racism are very real. The new PBS series, "Race: The Power of an Illusion," navigates through our myths and misconceptions, to scrutinize some of the racial assumptions we take for granted.
Pilar Ossorio, associate director of the Center for the Study of Race
and Ethnicity in Medicine at the University of Wisconsin, was online Thursday, May 1 at 1 p.m. ET, to discuss race -- our assumptions and misconceptions.
Ossorio, an assistant professor of Law and Medical Ethics at the University of
Wisconsin, is a bioethicist who combines a law degree with a Ph.D. in
microbiology. She is associate director of the Center for the Study of Race
and Ethnicity in Medicine at the University of Wisconsin, and was Director of
the Genetics Section of the American Medical Association's Institute of Ethics
(1997 - 2000) and co-chair of the Germ-line, Genetic Intervention Working
Group of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1998-99).
"Race: The Power of an Illusion" airs on PBS beginning Thursday, April 24 at 10 p.m. ET . (check local listings).
The transcript follows.
Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control
over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
West Deptford, N.J.:
My mother is African-American and my
father is Caucasian. Do you believe
multiracial people (like me) could
eventually become the majority in the
U.S.?
Pilar Ossorio: People with recent ancestors from more than one major geographic region of the world already are the majority in the US. However, race is not only about ancestry. Race is about identity and politics. At times, people with any known African-American ancestors have been identified as Black, under the law and by social convention. Such people lived in Black neighborhoods, went to Black schools and did not have access to jobs or services available only to Whites. Whether or not the multiracial identity becomes widely accepted depends on politics, not the on people’s ancestry.
A question for you—do you consider yourself to be in the same racial group as other multiracial people, such as people who have one Chinese-American parent and one European-American parent, or people who have one Native-American parent and one African-American parent? Would you consider yourself multiracial if you had one parent who was Black South-African and one who was Black Ethiopian?
With respect to genetics and ancestry, most African-Americans have recent European-American and/or Native American ancestors (grandparents and/or great grandparents). Whether they consider themselves African-American or multiracial, most “Black” people have ancestry that is probably not so different from yours. Most Native-Americans have some recent European-American and/or African-American ancestors and certainly Hispanic/Latino people tend to have relatively recent ancestors from Europe, the Americas and Africa. Asian-Americans may have ancestors from more than one part of Asia, and many are marrying or having children with people of non-Asian ancestry.
Throughout the history of humanity people of different tribes, cities, nations and continents have met and had children together. Genetics research can teach us something about migration pathways, and the mixing of people from different regions and cultures. What it has shown us so far is that there is that is no group of people that has developed distinctive, fairly homogeneous genetic patterns that can be used to definitively identify people as belonging to that group or not belonging. Human beings have far less genetic diversity between groups than do other organisms—such as “races” of a single bird species.
Interestingly, there is more human genetic diversity on the continent of Africa than any place else in the world. Thus, a Black person whose ancestors are all from South Africa can be very genetically dissimilar to another Black South African or to a Black Ethiopian. From the genetic point of view, it makes little sense to think of Black people as a homogeneous group, as a single “race.” On the other hand, because of the history and politics of this country, it makes quite a lot of sense to think of Black people as a single race for purposes of identity and politics.
Annapolis, Md.:
Thanks for taking my question.
I've been interested in the Black Jews of Ethiopia. Apparently, a group of Jews that got seperated from the main tribe around time of the Babylonian captivity, racilly took on Black characteristics, but maintained their religious heritage in spite of being isolated.
What can you tell me about them?
Pilar Ossorio: I'm afraid that I know very little about the Black Jewish people of Ethiopia. There seem to be quite a few books on the topic, but I do not know which is best.
Arlington, Va.:
I am a 33-year-old African American. What continues to amaze me is that the country as a whole, regardless of race or ethnicity, will not take responsibility for actions and attitudes that negatively impact race. It astounds me that it is still OK to tell racist jokes, and to think that an entire group of people are lazy, less intelligent, and welfare dependant or whatever the sterotype is for one group or another. I honestly feel that after 400 years of dealing with race in this country, we will never come to a place where a great majority can view racial differences as a possitive and enriching experience.
Pilar Ossorio: I agree that it is an incredible pity that people cannot view diversity of many kinds, including racial diversity, as enriching, empowering, and beautiful. Classification, including racial classification, is a cultural act, and we classify for particular purposes. We should be asking ourselves why we continue to classify people into a few different races, and to attach notions of inferiority and superiority to those racial categories. Hierarchical notions of inferiority and superiority have been part and parcel of the act of racial classification since the naturalist Linnaeus first divided humans into four races in a book published in 1758 called Systema Naturae.
Because racism seems inextricably bound up with racial classification, some people argue that those who want to move beyond racism should not use race as an analytic category, that we should not use race in our social criticism or our scholarship. But given the importance of race in shaping US history, and given its continuing importance in shaping life today, I do not believe that we could make sense of our lived experience without the concept of race.
Capitol Heights, Md.:
Dr. Ossorio:
I am an anthropologist and a former journalist. I have been writing about the social construction of race for nearly 10 years. Yet many of my former colleagues in media continue to hold onto the notion that race is biologically based. Those views are ultimately reflected in media treatments of race issues. Dr. Ossorio, given the tendency of people to embrace race as natural, what do you think can be done to disengage this mindset?
The American Anthropological Association would like to strike racial categories from the 2010 census. What are your thoughts on this initiative?
Pilar Ossorio: I wish I knew what could be done to alter the mindset of races as "natural" categories. The idea of races as natural, essential, immutable categories of humans has a long history, and is deeply embedded in our unconscious assmptions about the world. Even those scientists and scholars who know the data on genetics and race often act on their pre-theoretical assumptions about racial categories as natural. In designing research we often treat racial categories as though they must reflect enough about shared, common ancestry that people of one race will be more genetically homogenous than a mixture of people from different races, even though this often will not be true.
It is very difficult to change the way the concept of race is deployed in science or in popular culture, when race plays such a signficant role in the material organization of the world. WHen people of the same race do not live together, do not attend school together, do not have the same jobs, do not attend the same churches, etc. then it is easy to think that the observed differences reflect "natural" differences rather than differences we create.
As to striking racial categories--I am not in favor because even though data about race do not tell us anything about natural categories, they do tell us a lot about the categories we create and impose on the spectrum of human biological and genetic variation. It is important to know who has health care and who does not. It is important to know who is living longer and who is not. It is important to know who can catch a cab in New York City and who cannot. Just because racial categories are socially constructed, this does not make them less real or less consequential in our society. I would, however, be in favor of us collecting much more fine-grained information regarding social class and social experience so that we can obtain a much better understanding of other ways in which people in US society are stratefied and other features of life that influence outcomes such as life-expectancy, income level, etc.
Oakland, Calif.:
If we are genetically similar to one another, why are intra-racial transplants more successful than inter-racial transplants, and why do we often hear about the importance of minority groups to sign and up as bone marrow transplants. Doesn't this suggest that race is biological?
Pilar Ossorio: It may be the case that people with recent ancestry to the same continent are more likely to be similar with respect to transplant antigens (the cell surface molecules that help determine whether or not a person's body rejects a transplanted organ);or it may not be. Even if this is the case, it tells us little about race, because racial categories and the manner in which race operates is about many things besides ancestry. In general, people of the same race but who are otherwise unrelated, are not particularly geneticly similar. Most human genetic diversity (85-95% depending on method of measurement) is found within any one race.
In the medical context, I think we must constantly ask the question whether race is a good enough proxy for genetic similarity in any particular case. For some diseases or treatments race might be the best we can do for now. For other diseases/treatments it will not be. Most human populations that experienced historical events with significant genetic impacts are not races, but populations of a different sort. For instance, it seems that people of Ashkenazi Jewish background are descended from ancestors who experienced events that led to a higher frequency of alleles for Tay SAchs and some other single-gene diseases. The interesting category here is not race, but a subpopulation within the "white" race. When we cannot know all of the relevant genetic information directly, the question is whether we can best approximate it by assessing people's ancestry according to race, or some other way.
Getting back to transplants then, even if there is more within-racial-group similarity than between group similarity with respect to transplant antigens, this does not mean that the same will hold true for other loci (positions in the human genome). The data we have suggest that at most places in the human genome there are no significant differences between races in the number or frequency of alleles.
Although we hear many references to data showing that intra-racial transplants have a higher success rate than inter-racial ones, I am not yet convinced that these findings reflect anything about our genetics. I find it interesting that most of these studies look at transplants done from African-Americans to African-Americans, compare those to transplants between African-Americans and European-Americans, and then conclude that intra-racial transplants have a higher likelihood of success. Yet Africa is the continent with the most human genetic diversity in the world, and even African Americans tend to show more genetic diversity than any other Americans. Given the great genetic diversity among people of recent African descent, why should it be the case that such people share transplant antigens in common? If we started from what we know about genetics, we would suspect that African Americans would have a higher rejection rate for unrelated organs, no matter what race the donor was from. And that African Americans would do better with organs from related donors (family members).
As a general matter, we should avoid interpreting every racial disparity we see in medicine to genetic causes.
Indiananpolis, Ind.:
Your comments about not thinking of blacks as one race where interesting. Sometimes I see black people of a particular physical profile (for lack of a better way to describe it) that makes me think they may have come from the same area during slave trading times. Also I once read that slaves from different regions where sought out for their history of physical strength, passivity (peaceful natures I guess) etc.
I know this sounds very im-politic but it makes since to me (I'm black) that certain physical types, etc. were prefered over others during slavery times depending upon the what the slave would be doing. Make sense?
Pilar Ossorio: People with certain physical characteristics might have been preferred during slavery; although given the great variety of tasks assigned to slaves—everything from physical labor to skilled craft work to childcare—I suspect different physical characteristics were desirable to different slave owners at different times. It may be true that people from particular regions of Africa or particular cultural groups were sought out because slave traders believed that people from such people were more likely than others to have some particular, desired traits. But just because slave traders believed something about a particular group of Africans, does not mean that their belief was an accurate reflection of reality.
Also, differences in histories and culture may result in people from one cultural or geographic group being perceived as strong, stoic, passive or what have you by people from another group. But this does not mean that culture is genetic, or that behavior is genetic. We do pass our cultures down to our children, through our communities and families, but cultural transmission is passed on through learning not through genes. Thus, even if slave traders sought certain people on the basis of behavioral characteristics, this does not mean that slaves behaved the same way once their cultures were annihilated and their physical circumstances much changed here in the US; and it does not mean that slaves were able to pass their cultures on to their children. On the other hand, slavery itself had a culture, and the behaviors or adaptive strategies used to survive slavery might still be influencing people today.
Going back to the genetic implications of your comment… It is the case that African-Americans do not represent the full spectrum of peoples from Africa. I believe that people who came to the US as slaves were taken primarily from three regions of Africa. However, if one looks simply at genetics, there is still a substantial amount of genetic diversity among African Americans. If one looks at any particular place in the genome, African Americans are more likely than any other group of people to have genetic variants that others do not have, or that other groups have at very low frequencies. If one looks only at genetics, African Americans are not at all homogeneous; rather within this group one finds the greatest degree of genetic diversity.
Mt. Lebanon, Pa.:
Are there biological or medical problems that result from race? Whatever race is, do some races have disease immunities or susceptibilites that aren't shared or minimally shared by the others? Are creative talents or development favored by some races? There must be something to race aside from surface features otherwise we've wasted as humans a lot of emotional energy for nothing. Thanks much.
Pilar Ossorio:
Diseases with a strong genetic component may be more prevalent in people of some races than others. One comment I often hear is, “well, if there is no genetic basis to race than why do Black people have sickle cell disease while people of other races do not?” Actually, people of any race can have sickle cell disease. There are parts of Greece, the Arabian peninsula, and India where people are just as likely to inherit sickle cell disease as is anybody in Africa or anybody of African descent. Being of a particular race does not cause the disease; having certain versions (alleles) of the hemoglobin gene causes the disease.
Sickle cell disease is what we call a recessive trait—to manifest the disease a person must inherit the sickle cell allele of the hemoglobin gene from both her/his mother and father; a person must have two copies of sickle-cell hemoglobin or she will not have the disease. A person with only one sickle cell allele is called a carrier, she/he does not have the disease but her/his child could have the disease if the other parent is also a carrier.
Scientists believe that sickle cell alleles help people resist the parasite that causes malaria; if a person is a carrier she or he will not get as sick from malaria as a person who is not a carrier. Thus, where malaria was or is prevalent persons who are sickle-cell carriers are more likely to survive and have children. In regions of the world where there is or was lots of malaria, there will be more sickle-cell carriers. Parts of Africa have high rates of malaria, as do parts of the middle east, parts of Asia, and parts of South East Asia. Some parts of Africa—the south and the Northwest, have little or no malaria. Black people whose ancestors are from Southern Africa or Northwest Africa are no more likely to be sickle-cell carriers than are people from Northern Europe.
In the US, our medical community and our popular culture has associated sickle cell with “black race” because many African Americans have ancestors who came from regions of Central Africa where malaria was prevalent. Historically, there have been more African Americans in the US than people from other parts of the world where sickle cell is common. However, in the Southwestern and Western US physicians are beginning to think of sickle cell disease as a “Latino disease” because many Latinos have ancestors from parts of the world where sickle cell is prevalent.
So, sickle cell is not a Black disease, but until recently we have been more aware of the disease in African Americans. With respect to hemoglobin genes, African Americans are more likely to have a sickle-cell version than are American of most European ancestries. However, this does not mean that African Americans or more like each other when we look at other genes. There was a specific historical reason why people with ancestry in certain parts of Africa tend to have sickle-cell alleles; but malaria only had an effect on that one part of the human genome, not on all of it. In general, people of all races have similar genes, and are not more genetically like a person “of the same race” than they are to genetically like people from “a different race.”
Effects such as that exerted by malaria generally have not influenced the ancestors of all Black people, only ancestors of a portion of that race. Likewise, other effects have caused genetic similarities in a portion of European-descended people. For instance, it seems that alleles causing the disease hemochromatosis are more common among Scandinavian people than among other people. This does not mean that all White people are genetically similar to each other and different from people of other races. It just means that for this one gene, a portion of White people’s ancestors may have experienced events that led to one genetic commonality among them.
It is much more difficult to measure talents or capabilities. These are complex characteristics with complex causes and manifestations. For a few diseases, we can trace the cause largely to a single gene. For complex diseases and for characteristics such a musical and athletic ability we cannot trace the causes to single genes. Thinking about the creative talent of music, we should first recognize that it is probably many "talents," including ability to hear pitch, ability to understand pitch relationships and harmonies, ability or desire to create or express drama and emotion, fascination and enjoyment of musical expression, and probably others. Different great musicians probably have these various components of musical talent in different degress; and none or few of them will ever be traceable to a single gene.
Furthermore, creative acheivement requires motivation and opportunity as much as "ability."
There are times and places in which people of one culture, ethnicity, gender or race appear to be overrepresented in an area of creative acheivement, business or other human activity. We can often trace this apparent dominance to opportunity more than anything else. And, the dominant group changes over time.
It may indeed be the case that genes or nongenetic biological factors influence individual's creative abilities. But there is no evidence that such genetic or nongenetic biological factors are distributed differently among the races.
Forestville, Md.:
It seems that basic racist beliefs must be based on the assumption that different groups of people have different origins; that we are not of the same stock. Whether one is an evolutionist or a creationist, the informed thought is that we all have the same origin, and there is differentiation of genetics based on adaptation to the various environmental influences as people disbursed from the center of origin, for whatever reason. Would you briefly touch on the evidence for this assumption (one origin, not several)? My assertion is that there is no such thing as "race", and that "race" is a construct of Darwinism, which is a racist theory in iteself, spawing eugenics, the Holocaust, the justification for race-based discrimination, etc. Thank You.
Pilar Ossorio: For evidence that we are all one human population, from the genetic point of view, you can read the recent books by Jonathan Marks (What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee and Human Biodiversity). Also, see Mapping Human History by Steve Olson. There is no evidence that any single group of human beings has been reproductively isolated for so long that they developed a high degree of genetic similarity within the group and a high degree of genetic difference from other human groups. There are particular places in the human genome where we can see evidence that a mutation occurred in a small group, such as people on an island or in a village, and then spread to other people.
However, race can still be real even if we cannot define it through genetics. Race is real because we believe in it and make it real. Marriage is not real because you can find it in your genes. It is real because we have laws, social institutions and social norms that make it real. There are many concrete things that happen in the world that depend on whether or not you are married. These include whether and from whom you will inherit property, whether you will be able to visit your partner in the hospital or make decisions on her/his behalf when the partner is too sick to maker her/his own decisions, and whether the two of you will be considered the legal parents of a child you are raising together.
Similarly, race is real because we believe in it and act on our beliefs in ways that have concrete effects. We have created a lot of bad things along with the notionof race, the challenge now is to recreate our social categories without the negative effects.
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