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Thinking Critically about Race and Genetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Rose M. Brewer
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Extract

The issue of how race and genetics should interrelate goes to the heart of an unfinished discussion about race and racism in both the United States and around the world. The category of race is still powerful and dangerous, especially in scientific work. Addressing this issue is all the more important given the fact that race is still frequently essentialized and treated as biologically real. This tendency continues even as social and natural scientists such as Troy Duster and Charles Mills largely agree that race is a social construction. Mills sees this racial construction as deeply rooted in the legal and constitutional orders of American society. Race is a modern category invented by white male scientists in the “era of modernity” and instantiated globally in the consciousness, social practices, and institutional interstices of Western European cultures, among countless others worldwide. Indeed, the pseudoscience of the period was highly informed by tales of difference brought back by explorers.

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , Fall 2006 , pp. 513 - 519
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2006

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