The National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine says that race doesn’t make sense.
I didn’t want to say anything, but race in America hasn’t made any sense for decades.
Them: “Don’t call us colored people. We’re Black”
Us: “James Brown said, ‘I’m black and I’m proud’, so we can say it out loud?”
Them: “No, you say it too loud, like a racist. Call us African-American.”
Us: “Oh, like Elon Musk?”
Them: “Just because he was born in Africa and is an American, doesn’t make him an African-American. Call us “People of Color”.
Us: “That’s just ‘colored people’, with the words mixed up.”
The report says researchers should not use race as a proxy for describing human genetic variation. Race is a social concept, but it is often used in genomics and genetics research as a surrogate for describing human genetic differences, which is misleading, inaccurate, and harmful.
Race is a social concept, not a genetic or scientific concept. It’s imprecise and misleading. That’s why we have so much trouble with the concept. People shouldn’t be categorized by race for any official purpose.
In education, racial statistics are very popular. How different races compare on state mandated tests, school discipline or participation in AP classes, are all statistics that are given a lot of weight, but can’t actually mean anything. How does the school know that a student is black? No administrator is going to make that call. When a student is enrolled in a school district, does a counselor ask? It’s probably on a form, but how black is the kid? The genetics company, 23 and Me, has millions of DNA samples. They report that, on average, a person self-reporting as black, has 30% Caucasian genes. Logically, Obama was probably more White than Black. I know, you’re thinking that he looks Black, so he is Black. Very imprecise and misleading.
“Classifying people by race is a practice entangled with and rooted in racism, and the pernicious effects of applying this classification to genetics and genomics research have undeniably caused harm over the last century,” said Charmaine D. Royal, committee co-chair and Robert O. Keohane Professor of African and African American Studies, Biology, Global Health, and Family Medicine and Community Health at Duke University. “The lack of consistency in the use of population descriptors also presents problems for the accuracy and applicability of genomics research. The new framework and processes our report recommends can help our field produce more trustworthy science.”
So can we just stop doing that now?