Abstract
The use of racial categorisations in scientific enquiry, from migration and population studies to pharmaceutical research, has been a contentious matter in sociological investigation. The Human Genome Diversity Project ground to a halt in the midst of indigenous activism and claims of biocolonialism, whilst the production of BiDil – the first race-based prescription drug for African American congestive heart failure patients – raised many a sociological eyebrow for its use of a priori racial categorisations in not only the initial clinical trial but its later marketing. These examples are in the foreground of a wider anxiousness about the use of race in scientific research; a demonstrable history of exploitation of minoritised bodies in scientific enquiry informs much discussion about the presence of the language of race in science. But, as is noted in Race Decoded, we might see race in its contemporary, genomic instantiations ‘as both a negative symbol of legacies of injustice and a positive marker of community struggle and personal growth’ (p. 7).
Catherine Bliss offers vital and original insight into the values and – most importantly – the political consciousness of genomic researchers themselves, to discern the potentially politically empowering use of race categorisations to bring minoritised bodies to the growing political platform of genomic enquiry. Adopting a core-set model for her field analysis, Bliss interviews internationally renowned genomicists. The book, dense with empirical data, problematises the notion that scientists reside in a bubble of objectivity. Rather, interviewees were of the view that science could be a tool of social activism. As Bliss puts it, genomic research invests ‘in a specific biosocial version of social equality to be delivered by a specific group of experts’ (p. 189).
Bliss’ Race Decoded offers a cogent exposition of the recent history of using race categorisation in genomic research to demonstrate the deeply political matter of health research inclusion. The book presents an analysis of the introduction of US National Institutes of Health legislation that mandated the inclusion of ethnic minorities and women in all federally funded research. This discussion acts as the foundation on which Bliss presents interview data with scientists, convincingly woven into an argument that the scientists undertaking genomic research exist, much like everybody else, within a racialised milieu.
Her findings illustrate the profoundly political nature of contemporary genomic research. As Bliss notes, the formulation of a taxonomy in the methodological design before data collection is an act of an overtly political nature. The scientists she interviews are cognisant of this, conceiving of themselves as the unifiers of the once distantiated areas of scientific enquiry and cultural politics. They are conscious of their own positions as the designers of classification systems that might percolate into public understandings of race. So too are Bliss’ interviewees aware of the need to examine these systems of classification critically, both reflexively and across the discipline through peer view. Through this, the interviewed scientists wish to extricate ‘genomics from uncritical taxonomic science’ (p. 142). In this way, argues Bliss, these genomic scientists – cognisant of power and positionality – mobilise a reflexive biosociality.
Race Decoded tackles the role of self-identification as a tool of ethical, political pragmatism. Whilst the scientists Bliss interviewed could classify participants through eyeballing (using the researcher’s prerogative to select the participant’s position in a classificatory system), there is a marked preference amongst her interviewees for allowing the research subjects in their studies to select their own position in a given taxonomy. Of course, as Bliss notes, whilst the beneficent aim of inclusivity and participant agency is laudable, we are enjoined to think of the problems inherent in the fact that the taxonomies compiled will inform the manner in which people identify themselves, if for no other reason than certain options are present and others absent in any list of classifications. However, Bliss sees the instability of race categorisation – always malleable, never static – as a boon. From the moment of data collection, through to database construction, analysis and published discussion, scientists have the capacity to revise initial identifiers to ‘adapt to their subjects’ political context and try to think in their shoes’ (p. 157).
Race Decoded should compel further interrogation of the political positionalities engendered by scientists in the field of biomedical research. As Bliss’ book focuses on laboratories and legislation in the United States, it also highlights the need for sociological consideration of other countries’ genomic practices. Nonetheless, the book successfully illuminates the political agility of race; ultimately, recognising the salience of race in the laboratory does not necessitate the assumption that race exists. Rather, this position on race is focused much less on what race is or is not, and much more on what the invocation of race can do as a dexterous tool of political agency, compelling new kinds of bodies into the arena of biomedical research.