UNNATURAL CONSTRUCTIONS - Making Sense of Nature - page 128

identified according to perceptible characteristics that, for whatever reason,
matter to people who then use those characteristics as markers of social
difference. Racism, as the post-war social science orthodoxy would have it,
is an act of sociocultural discrimination - even when and if the discrimi-
nating parties believe (wrongly) that racial differences are biological. It was
in this context that, early in the new millennium, several human biologists
claimed that racial differences were, after all, a product of natural evolution
and thus physically real.
For example, the then Stanford University professor Neil Risch and his
colleagues published a much discussed research paper in the online peer
review journal Genome Biology in 2002 entitled 'Categorization of humans
in biomedical research: genes, race and disease' (Risch, 2002). Risch et al .
sought to evidence the claim that there are five human races, all with a
distinct geographic origin, albeit ultimately traceable to east Africa. A not
dissimilar paper was published simultaneously in the highly respected jour-
nal Science (Rosenberg et al. , 2002). This was immediately reported by the
New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade and, a year later, the Scien-
tific American magazine devoted a feature article to answering the question
'Does race exist?' (Bamshad and Olson, 2003). At the same time, the British
evolutionist Anthony Edwards (2003) criticised a classic paper by Harvard's
Richard Lewontin (1972), which had argued that inter-racial genetic differ-
ences were significantly smaller than other genetic differences among homo
sapiens . A face-off with critics then ensued in the New England Journal of
Medicine (Cooper et al. , 2003). Not long after, the physical anthropologist
Vincent Sarich and science journalist Frank Miele published the topic Race:
the reality of human differences (Sarich and Miele, 2004). Like Risch et al. ,they
drew upon a large volume of published biological research in order to break
the 'taboo' (as they saw it) about 'race' in US society. Theirs was a critique
of social constructionist arguments and, as they phrased it, a long overdue
attempt to look 'honestly' at 'race' and recognise its biological character. The
history of racism in the United States, they argued, had made too many peo-
ple afraid of acknowledging that some group differences are not just socially
ascribed but scientifically demonstrable - matters of biological fact. Unsur-
prisingly, an often-heated debate then ensued in which Risch et al. , Edwards,
Sarich and Miele, and like-minded researchers were reprimanded for resur-
recting, or at least opening the door for the return of, a 'scientific racism'
that many had thought long-dead. 17
Though I can't recount the fine details of the debate here, what's inter-
esting is the way that Risch et al. , Edwards, and Sarich and Miele prosecuted
their cases. A close reading of their work reveals three understandable lines
of defence against actual and potential critics. First, they all implicitly or
explicitly distinguish 'race' from 'racism' (the argument being that while
racism requires a belief in racial difference, 'race' is not itself a prejudi-
cial idea). 18 Second, this distinction is bolstered by the claim that while
racism today often operates on the basis of the way people's appearance is