This freak may be able to run faster you
In the 4th grade, Matthew G. broke it to me that black people have extra bones in our feet that allow for faster running.
My nine year-old Self, proud of whichever fast-running, gold-medal-winning Jamaican athlete had triggered the conversation, argued there might be some alternative explanations involving how the black runners had grown up or about what had motivated them to train hard.
Well, Matthew knew that idea had to be ridiculous because it was his father, a doctor, who had unmasked the Black Biological Advantage.
Even at nine I knew there was something terrible about racializing biology and that it robbed the black runners—and robbed me—of something, somehow. I didn’t fully understand what that thing was (and how much of that thing had been taken and what damage was done) until some ill-conceived class participation in David Williams’s “Social Epidemiology” [1] and a reading of Ann Morning’s 2008 paper, “Racial Conceptualization, Problem of the 21st Century.”
As Morning explains,
“Black biological exceptionalism” is a major guideline to which racial concepts enter into play. More than any other group, blacks–whether invoked as African Americans or as Africans–cue respondents to biological accounts for race differentials. This suggests in turn that contemporary race concepts are deeply grounded in historical social and political configurations. The insistence that blacks are fundamentally and thoroughly distinct from others (especially whites) is likely the ideological legacy of a slave-owning society that relied heavily on Africans’ labor, but did not wish to incorporate them as equals. Black biological exceptionalism reconciles physical inclusion with social exclusion. In contrast, the ostensible racial inferiority of American Indians, Asians and Mexicans entailed their physical exclusion from the republic at different times, managed through the law of immigration, nationality or sovereignty (DeGenova 2006; Kim 1999).”
Indeed, if race is biological—if some people are simply less intelligent, more fertile, and faster than others because they belong to a group defined by shared genetic material—what’s the point of exposing the social determinants of health, or empowering people, or slogging through the legislative process, or changing the status quo, or holding systems accountable? Things simply are, and always will be.
Responding to limitations in empirical evidence on U.S. conceptualizations of racial identity, Morning, a sociologist, analyzes 52 open-ended interviews with college students at highly selective colleges.
Generalizability, it seems, isn’t the point. The research instead reveals the innerworkings of a specific group of people—the type of people empowered to shape social policy.
Anyway, in response to this question…
“Researchers have discovered that at birth, babies of different racial groups tend to have different weights. For example, white babies have among the highest median weight, black babies among the lowest, and Asian babies’ weights tend to be in the middle. In your opinion, what are some possible explanations for this finding?”
…Morning found that most students (70 percent) invoked genetics to explain birth weight differentials, noting that birth weight disparities reflected differences in adult sizes (which differed by race) or that birthweight disparities were a function of evolutionary adaptation. Even when invoking social determinants like poverty, the students were reluctant to invoke discrimination and oppression as cogs in the mechanism fueling the birthweight disparities.
My favorite sample student responses:
“I guess for blacks, they’re typically always found like in lower-income housing, lower socioeconomic status, so they may not have been educated and have, like, the resources. They may have been, you know,pregnant in a bad situation, so maybe they don’t know the proper pre-natal care. They may not have access to the proper pre-natal care. And so as a result they may be like drinking or doing these drugs or smoking or something. That could be a reason for low birth weight.” – Meteorology major, State
“African-Americans might be more stressed. I mean, now they have all these minority programs, but when these mothers or something were growing up like 20 years ago, maybe they worried about finding jobs, whereas white people are already settled here, they don’t have to worry, or something.” –Biology major, City
It’s easy to dismiss college kids, with their inexperience, self-consciousness, and love of verbal fillers, but a look at present-day scientific journals suggests the concept of race as “underlying genetic homogeneity” is still making the rounds, affecting the way the root-causes of health disparities are discussed and curbing opportunities to consider effective interventions.
[1] Schooled on the Salt-Retention-Slavery-Hypothesis.
Next:
Race is not a factor in our health status affect health because of intrinsic—or essentialist—differences in our biology, says a recent paper published in the Public Library of Science (PLoS).
Additional resources:
“The uncritical use of race in medicine legitimates an unscientific construct.
Second, physicians can use assumptions about a patient’s race to prematurely eliminate possible diseases or to inappropriately narrow the focus to one disease in the diagnosis of patients. The diagnostic and therapeutic utility of racial labels is limited. For example, although an African American born and raised in the South, a Jamaican, Haitian, Nigerian, and an African American born and raised in the Northeast are all black they are Iikely to differ in beliefs, behavior, and even biology.
Third, some evidence suggests that black patients are more likely than whites to be identified by a racial label and the medicalcase presentations of black patients are more likely to be unflattering than those of their white counterparts.
Finally, particular conceptualizations of race, often unwittingly, have larger societal implications. Viewing race as a biological category is considerably less threatening to the status quo than viewing race as a social category.”
