What's Real about Race?
Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
A paradigm-shifting tour of genetics and identity arguing that race is at once a biological fiction and a social reality.
Biologically, race does not exist. Scientists have proven that human DNA is 99.9 percent identical. But we know that racism and its structural impacts shape our health, opportunities, and lives in profound ways. What is the true relationship between genetics and race? And how should we talk about identity in science and medicine?
In What’s Real About Race?, sociologist Rina Bliss illuminates the truth about one of the most misunderstood, controversial concepts in our society and reveals why we cannot confuse race with genetic difference. Blending energizing prose with the latest in genetics research, this paradigm-shifting tour unmasks what’s truly real about race: namely, racism’s impact on our bodies and lives.
Bliss traces the history of race, revealing how unscientific categories of identity—White, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian/Alaska Native—became the modern standard, and illuminates how the myth of biological races endures in science and society, warping our understanding of complex topics like intelligence, disease susceptibility, and behavior. Along the way, What’s Real About Race? busts enduring myths about IQ, ancestry tests, behavioral racism, and more. In fascinating explorations of gene research, medicine, and social justice, Bliss argues for a new way forward. To create equity in science and society, we must disentangle our understanding of genetics from identity and see race for what it really is: a purely social category
At a time when misinformation about our bodies and identities is dangerously prevalent, What’s Real About Race? is an indispensable resource and a powerful reminder that, biologically, our similarities vastly outweigh our differences.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bliss (Race Decoded), a sociology professor at Rutgers University, delivers a searching examination of how questionable science has been used to justify racism throughout history. She explains that as European naturalists traversed the globe in the 17th and 18th centuries, they sent back reports speculating that the people they encountered were of inferior "species," claims that rulers used to rationalize their colonial conquests. Charles Darwin adapted race science to his evolutionary theories in the 1800s, Bliss writes, noting that while he "characterized races as being equally fit to survive," he asserted that Europeans were the most advanced. Surveying a bounty of research from the past 30 years proving that race has no biological basis, she cites studies that found many traits colloquially believed to distinguish certain racial or ethnic groups are actually shared by diverse populations across the globe. For instance, the trait that causes sickle cell anemia, often described as a "Black disease," is relatively rare in eastern and southern Africa while appearing with high frequency in Indian and Mediterranean populations. Bliss lays out scathing critiques of those who continue to uphold a genomic understanding of race, pointing out, for instance, the numerous flaws in political scientist Charles Murray's claims about racial IQ differences. A sweeping refutation of scientific racism through the ages, this packs a punch.
