Does It Matter If Genetic Tests Tell You That You're "Really" Black, Brown, or White?
Ronald Bailey | November 14, 2007, 10:13am
The New York Times published a remarkably interesting article speculating about the role of genetic testing and racial discrimination this past Sunday. To wit:
...genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is marketed exclusively to African-Americans, who seem genetically predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.
Such developments are providing some of the first tangible benefits of the genetic revolution. Yet some social critics fear they may also be giving long-discredited racial prejudices a new potency. The notion that race is more than skin deep, they fear, could undermine principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have relied on the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal.....
Though few of the bits of human genetic code that vary between individuals have yet to be tied to physical or behavioral traits, scientists have found that roughly 10 percent of them are more common in certain continental groups and can be used to distinguish people of different races. They say that studying the differences, which arose during the tens of thousands of years that human populations evolved on separate continents after their ancestors dispersed from humanity’s birthplace in East Africa, is crucial to mapping the genetic basis for disease.
But many geneticists, wary of fueling discrimination and worried that speaking openly about race could endanger support for their research, are loath to discuss the social implications of their findings. Still, some acknowledge that as their data and methods are extended to nonmedical traits, the field is at what one leading researcher recently called “a very delicate time, and a dangerous time.”
“There are clear differences between people of different continental ancestries,” said Marcus W. Feldman, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University. “It’s not there yet for things like I.Q., but I can see it coming. And it has the potential to spark a new era of racism if we do not start explaining it better.”
Unfortunately, given the exquisite ability of human beings to make invidious out-group and in-group distinctions (see soccer hooliganism, Serbs and Croats, and blue eyes versus brown eyes), I have no doubt that some people will try to use any findings of genetic science about racial differences between people to justify their prejudices.
The Times notes:
Race, many sociologists and anthropologists have argued for decades, is a social invention historically used to justify prejudice and persecution.
"Social invention" or not, notions of genetic essentialism seem to be widespread in our society. The Times cites a Pennsylvania State University professor's attempt to use genetic testing to undermine his students' thinking about racial categories. In some cases, at least, the opposite happened:
...when Samuel M. Richards gave his students at Pennsylvania State University genetic ancestry tests to establish the imprecision of socially constructed racial categories, he found the exercise reinforced them instead.
One white-skinned student, told she was 9 percent West African, went to a Kwanzaa celebration, for instance, but would not dream of going to an Asian cultural event because her DNA did not match, Dr. Richards said. Preconceived notions of race seemed all the more authentic when quantified by DNA.
“Before, it was, ‘I’m white because I have white skin and grew up in white culture,’ ” Dr. Richards said. “Now it’s, ‘I really know I’m white, so white is this big neon sign hanging over my head.’ It’s like, oh, no, come on. That wasn’t the point.”
Whole Times article here.
Seamus | November 14, 2007, 1:37pm | #
As for your second comment, you vastly overestimate the access I have to legal documents, and my willingness to spend my time looking for them.
It really doesn't matter how much time you have, or how willing you are to search for the evidence that would establish your premise; you won't find it.
In fact, a few minutes of Googling turned up this article, which established pretty clearly that Irish immigrants were being naturalized in large numbers under the 1790 Act shortly after its passage:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-049X(198906)133%3A2%3C175%3ANIP1A%22%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23
Funny, there doesn't seem to have been any insistence that the Irish were ineligible because they weren't white.
I could point further to the opinion of the court in United States v. Thind, which indicates pretty clearly that the Irish were always considered "white" for purposes of the 1790 Act: "The words of familiar speech, which were used by the original framers of the law [i.e., the Naturalization Act of 1790], were intended to include only the type of man whom they knew as white. The immigration of that day was almost exclusively from
the British Isles [i.e., both islands] and Northwestern Europe, whence they and their forebears had come. When they extended the privilege of American citizenship to 'any alien being a free white person' it was these immigrants-bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh-and their kind whom they must have had affirmatively in mind. The succeeding years brought immigrants from Eastern, Southern and Middle Europe, among them the Slavs and the dark-eyed, swarthy people of Alpine and Mediterranean stock, and these were received as unquestionably akin to those already here and readily amalgamated with them. It was the descendants of these, and other immigrants of like origin, who constituted the white population of the country when section 2169 [of the Revised Statutes], re-enacting the naturalization test of 1790, was adopted, and, there is no reason to doubt, with like intent and meaning."
Note too that the Court wasn't relying on any legalistic definition of "white" that would differ from its common usage; the Court specifically claimed that the 1790 Act was using "the words of familiar speech."
Purple Green Orange | November 15, 2007, 6:49pm | #
"Example, hinted at by wayne, IQ differences between racial groups. Even if you buy into the highly dubious premise that the differences found once people are grouped by racial category are largely the result of essential/immutable differences, those differences are so small that they are unimportant."
The differences are indeed trivial among average folks, where the respective bell curves have the greatest overlap. However, where the differences are significant is at the extremes.
As an example, consider the following two equally sized populations. The first... call them Purples, have an IQ distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. (FYI, this is, by definition, the "normal" IQ distribution).
The second population... Greens, have a mean IQ of 98 and a standard deviation of 13. Trivial differences, right? 2 IQ points is less than the margin of error on any standard test.
However, consider the extremes. Let's assume an IQ of 130 is the minimum threshold for being likely to succeed in earning a PhD (in any reasonably intellectual academic discipline).
Given the above population distributions, you would find that Purples are more than 3.3 times as likely to possess the necessary intelligence as Greens. The expected outcome? 3 out of 4 PhDs would awarded to Purples.
For something something that required truly distinctive genius-level intelligence (like winning a Nobel Prize in Physics or a Fields Medal in Mathematics), Purples would be disproportionally overrepresented. For instance, above the 150 IQ level, you would find more than 13 Purples for every Green.
That's hardly a trivial difference.
Now instead of Greens, let's suppose you were to look at a hypothetical minority "Orange" population, who represented only 15% of the total population, and had a mean IQ of 84.0 with a standard deviation of 13.3.
At the sames IQ thresholds of 130 and 150, where the Purple:Green ratios were 3:1 and 13:1, you would find the Purple:Orange ratios to be 475:1 and 6984:1.
When you consider that the hypothetical Purple and Orange populations aren't entirely hypothetical, the implications become pretty significant.
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