Is Race a Social Construct? Razib Says Ask Your Genome.

Only a government bureaucrat would be happy with this situation.

That’s Razib Khan, in a nice post noting how genetic testing, by revealing our infinitely variable genetic heritages, should show how race is a social construct rather than biological fact.

The chart to the left shows how race is a social construct. It’s a bar plot which partitions ancestry, and as you can see, the Asian children are a mix of European and Asian. How does that happen? Because in 1980 the US Census included people of South Asian origin as “Asian Americans.” In contrast, those of Middle Eastern origin remain “non-Hispanic white” (this not totally crazy, think Ralph Nader or Marlo Thomas). But it means that an ethnic Baloch from Pakistan is “Asian,” and an ethnic Baloch from Iran is a “non-Hispanic white.”

Obvious more fine-grained genomic analyses are necessary at least to force us to acknowledge the stupidity of these bureaucratic quirks. I am chagrined to realize that I’ve put “Asian” as my race quite often on medical related forms (or, my parents have done so), when the reality is that my genetic background is very distinctive from someone who is from East Asia (and, West Asia).

Skip Gates made a similar point at the Genes, Environment, Traits (GET) conference last May, when he talked about having his own and others’ genomes sequenced for his television series Faces of America. The genetic histories revealed, he said, “put the lie to any idea of racial purity. We’re all bouillbaise!” (He was quite funny. All the people who got tested, he said, were fascinated to find how mixed their heritages were — and those who found their heritages to be really straightforward often felt disappointment. “They wanted something more interesting,” he said. “It was the only time I’ve ever seen white people wishing they were black.”)

So it’s all mixed. But, says Khan:

this more detailed look at a genomic sequence does not necessarily obviate the need for higher level categories, such as race. One might conceive of a genotype as conferring a set of transparent risks contingent upon a particular variant at a specific location. But by and large we’ve run into limits in this endeavor. And even when we know much more, there will likely be subtle interactions and networks which will simply not fall out of a raw sequence. That’s because populations have histories, and their identity as members of a population is telling you something about that aggregate history. That history shapes a “genetic background,” the sum total of genotypes across the genome, in which a specific genetic variant expresses itself. For example, the ancestors of Amerindians were isolated from the populations of Eurasia, Africa, and Oceania, for at least 10,000 years. Their genomes today are then the outcome in part of this particular special history.

As you might expect, this point — and he has a point, even if its complex and tetchy — gets debated in the comments.

And in a guest post at the excellent Genomes Unzipped, Khan takes a good look at his own genome. In an interesting way, it gets complexicated.

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