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About Face: Forensic Genetic Testing for Race and Visible Traits

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Pilar N. Ossorio
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“DNAPrint Genomics, Inc. has applied the most recent advancements in human genomic technology for the deciphering of an individual's race. We are proud to introduce to the forensic community DNA WITNESS 2.0, a genetic test for the deduction of the heritable component of race, called Biogeographical Ancestry (BGA).”

–Z. Gaskin

“One definite and obvious consequence of the complexity of human demographic history is that races in any meaningful sense of the term do not exist in the human species.”

–D. B. Goldstein and L. Chikhi

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , Summer 2006 , pp. 277 - 292
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2006

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Hispanic/Latina identity has been quite contested throughout US history and remains so today. Although the U.S. government considers Hispanic an ethnicity, and therefore views it as possible for a person to be Hispanic and a member of any race, many Hispanics designate their race as “other” on the census, perhaps because they do not experience themselves as belonging to one of the “big four” races, see Lopez, I. H., “Race on the 2010 Census: Hispanics and the shrinking White Majority,” Daedalus 134 (2005): 42–52, (noting that in 1990, 97.5% of the people choosing “other race” on the census form also checked Hispanic ethnicity, p. 45). In much of the biomedical and genetics literature, the term Hispanic is treated as a race insofar as being Hispanic is viewed as mutually exclusive with being white, American Indian, or African American. Here, I use Hispanic as an ethnicity, and choose the relatively common representation of a white Hispanic person and a non-Hispanic Native American person. My use of this example should not be seen as an endorsement of any particular conception or usage of the term Hispanic.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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