Race and Genetics What can history tell us
Transcriber: 연휘 유
Reviewer: Zsófia Herczeg
What race are you?
This is a question that I’ve been asked
for as long as I can remember.
I grew up in a city called Kuala Lumpur,
in a country called Malaysia,
in Southeast Asia.
My father is Indian Malaysian,
and my mother Chinese Malaysian.
My father’s parents migrated
from southern India in Madras to Malaysia
at a time when it was called Malaya
under British colonization.
My mother’s parents did the same
but from southern China
in Fujian province.
Ever since I was a child,
people in Malaysia had been confused
about who I was and where to place me.
In Malaysia, there are four
general racial categories.
The first is Malays,
who are indigenous
to the place, and sons of the soil.
The others are Chinese,
Indians and Eurasians
who are descended from migrant groups.
The confusing thing for most people
was my skin color,
which they took to be indicative of race.
There are general stereotypes
about what skin type you should be.
For Malays, it was assumed
that you had brownish skin tone,
for Indians darker than that,
and for Chinese lighter
than either Malays or Indians.
I fell between the cracks
of these stereotypes,
and was often assumed to be Malay,
which in Malaysia is a different cultural
and religious group.
These experiences of mine continued
as I went from country to country.
For my undergraduate studies,
I went to Los Angeles
in Southern California.
And there, their understanding
of racial categories
was entirely different from anything
that I was used to before.
And when filling out forms,
I encountered names of races
that were quite alien to me.
I saw the category Asian
and Pacific Islander, and thought,
“Did that apply to me?”
But wait.
In the United States at that time,
Asian usually meant East Asian:
people from countries
like China, Japan and Taiwan.
In other circumstances,
I had the chance to take
the South Asian category,
and I thought perhaps
that’s more appropriate
because my father’s parents
came from southern India.
I wasn’t sure what they were asking me.
Was it the country where I was born
or the racial category
in that country itself?
Depending on what kind
of understanding of race I chose,
any number of these categorizations
would have been correct.
These experiences of mine
continued as I grew older.
Wherever I went, from country to country,
whether it be Singapore,
Australia or Frankfurt,
the very concept of race would change.
And people like me,
whose physical characteristics
didn’t quite match the stereotypes
of those races,
would fall between the cracks,
and confusion would ensue.
Often genetics would enter
the conversation,
and be used to uphold stereotypes
about those very groups.
As I talk with somebody who’s new,
I would sometimes
bring up my mixed heritage,
and then get questions in return
about that heritage.
For instance, why was it
that Chinese people love to gamble?
Are they somehow
genetically predisposed to gambling?
And what about Indians?
Why is it that they like to drink so much?
It was with some restraint
that I tried to explain that these were
negative racial stereotypes
that had little to nothing to do
with the lived experiences of these groups
or their genes.
My experiences with racial
categories and stereotypes,
not fitting the actual person
and how genes and genetics is used
to uphold those stereotypes,
has shaped the way I think about race
as a historian and a scholar.
These experiences and my studies
into the histories of the idea of race
have made me critical
whenever I hear of race being equated
with essential biological differences.
For instance, genetics has been used
to try and explain
certain group characteristics.
For instance, the incidence of alcoholism
or even incarceration.
Leading to the erroneous conclusion
that addiction or even violence
is inherent in some groups.
No matter how appealing
such a straightforward idea
between group traits and genetics is,
there is not a one-to-one correspondence
between our bewildering concept of race
and our genes.
To understand this complexity,
let us take a brief journey into genetics.
There is a common idea
that we are our genes;
that all that we are,
have been and will be
is somehow written
in genetic code in our bodies.
But is this really the case?
Before going further in this discussion,
we need to know a little bit
about what a gene is.
The United States based
National Human Research Genome Institute
provides us with a glossary
which will help us along
in this discussion.
A gene is a physical unit of inheritance
passed down from parent to child.
It is a range in structures
called chromosomes,
which contain a long DNA molecule.
In that molecule are our chemical
segments called nucleotides.
The sequence of those nucleotides
is sometimes called a code
from which proteins,
which are essential for the basic
workings of our body, are made.
Now, one may think
that the process by which this code
becomes translated into proteins
is a very straightforward one.
This is far from being the case.
This process, known as gene expression,
has been the arena for some
fascinating discoveries.
Only a small part of the genome
codes for proteins.
Most of the genome
used to be actually called junk DNA
because we thought that it was superfluous
and didn’t play any role.
Now, however, we know
that that junk DNA actually is essential
for regulating the production of genes.
And depending on the interaction
between different genes
and the environment,
one code could code for different proteins
or not code for them at all.
Our understanding of how genes
make up our bodies
is so much more,
and it’s gone further than
the simple explanation
of one gene equals one protein.
Now, let’s say proteins are made.
Is one protein responsible
for a complex trait like skin color?
No, there are actually
very few physical traits
that can be traced back to single genes.
Diseases like Huntington’s disease,
cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia
have been traced to single genes
in what has been known
as simple Mendelian inheritance.
Other traits like skin color or height
are called polygenic traits
because several genes and interaction
with the environment
play a role in how they are shaped.
For instance, how much UV radiation
you’re exposed to or your nutrition.
The role which genes play in our bodies,
let alone in our behavior,
is such a complex one,
and this cannot be reduced
to simple genetic determinism,
which is the idea
that genes decide who we are.
Genetics is a complex
and ever changing field of study.
Any attempt to reduce
who we are as humans to our genes
is a gross oversimplification,
and one that can possibly
have dire consequences.
This is what history can tell
us about race and genetics,
that we need to be very wary of simplistic
biological explanations
for who we are and why we are different.
Losing sight of that fact can often lead
to biological understandings of race,
which then are bases
for oppression and stereotypes.
Unfortunately, the connection
between race and biology
and how it is linked to oppressive events
is a long one in history.
In the 18th century,
a scientist by the name
of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
came up with the idea
of five essential races:
the Mongolian, the Malayan, the Caucasian,
Ethiopian and American.
Blumenbach claims
that this categorization was based
on objective characteristics
for what he saw of their skin color,
their hair type
or their skull measurements.
However, similar to my experience
of racial categorization,
for Blumenbach and other
racial scientists like him,
categorization into those races
was never just a matter
of objectively looking at them.
In fact, other differences were then coded
as physical differences.
For instance, cultural,
religious or linguistic.
All of these differences became enmeshed
in what is known as a biological
understanding of race,
which then led to certain understandings
of black and brown peoples.
For instance, that they were incapable
of civilization or governing themselves,
which then formed the basis
and justification for colonization.
Race is not something
that can be seen in molecules.
It is a complex lived experience.
The things that we hold dear,
that we consider to make us humans,
like our language, our cultures,
are not things
that are coded by our genes.
In fact, in genetic analysis studies,
the term race itself is hardly ever used.
The term ancestry
or population is used instead.
But in society, the terms race
get mixed up with ancestry and population,
leading to misconceptions about race
being entangled to misconceptions
about genetics,
and reinforcing biological essentialism
and stereotyping.
I’ve spent the better part
of my academic life
searching for the meaning of race
and tracing this concept through space,
time and new technologies.
Biomedical sciences can give us ways
of understanding ourselves
and our group identities
in biological terms.
But neither us nor our similarities
or differences can be reduced to biology.
It is important
that we are critical of race
and that we inform ourselves
about the complexities of genetics
so that we do not fall
into the trap of thinking
that genes and how they are clustered
in our stereotypes of race
determine who or what we are.
Thank you.