‘Folk Biology and the Genetics of Race’

Kwame Anthony Appiah
Princeton University, Department of Philosophy

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     Last modified: February 14, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/14/2005 2:00 PM in ROZH 102
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Abstract
Session on: Genomics and Identity Politics

For nearly a century anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have been increasingly skeptical of the biological basis of many folk classifications of human beings into races. But some scientists, especially physical anthropologists interested in applied questions (such as the identification of human remains), have continued to insist on the scientific character of racial classifications, even if they think that folk categories need refinement. I think that there's a way of preserving what's right in both claims. Folk classifications assign people to races in a way that is governed by a central rule: if your parents are of the same race, you're of the same race as your parents. (There are, in fact, some places, like Brazil where the word "race" and its cognates are not used in this way. What I have to say doesn't apply to them.) This rule has obvious entailments: you're of the same race as your full siblings, for example. Given that you get your genetic endowment from your parents, genetic characteristics will sometimes track racial identities governed by this rule, provided that there are genetic characteristics that are statistically distinctive of the local members of a socially-identified racial group. So, for example, a majority of socially identified African-Americans have relatively dark skin for genetic reasons. Biological remains that contain some of the genes that characteristically account for this darker skin color can therefore reasonably be identified for forensic purposes as (socially) African-American. Here there is a genuine biological trait that can be used to identify a genuine social trait, even though the social trait is not identical with any intrinsic biological property. So the utility of genomic properties in identifying a social group doesn't entail that the social group is a biological group. This is all consistent with recognizing (1) that many African-Americans do not bear the genes that produce darker skin; (2) that there are other genomic characteristics that are distinctive of African populations that they may share without having the skin-color genes; and (3) that you can be an African American while having many fewer of the genomic characteristics statistically distinctive of an African population than many people who are identified as white. Perhaps all this is obvious. But I find in discussion that people seem not to grasp this point intuitively, so perhaps it is worth making. If you accept these points you can then go on to notice that racial identities in social life tend to be configured in a way that takes account of these sorts of complexities, even while people announce commitments to folk biological theories that are inconsistent with them. So, for example, in practice race-like social identities in local contexts are important to patterns of solidarity: in these contexts, people whose (partially genetically determined) physical appearance doesn't fit the physical stereotype of the group are counted in or out in part on the basis of whether they identify with the interests of the group, in part by their utility to the group. As claims to be able to settle issues of ancestry by genomic analysis become more common, it will be interesting to see whether the appeal of the determinateness and objectivity of scientific claims will come to override more flexible and interest-relative folk understandings.

Multiple Paper Session:
Other papers in this session:
The Politics of Genomic Identity
Sex Genetics and Personal Identity
‘Provenance and the pedigree: The Pennsylvania Amish’
‘Jewish Identities: The Gogodala in Papua New Guinea’
Post Conviction DNA Testing in the American Criminal Justice System