Abstract
What does racial ideology tell us about the logics of race in genomic science? At the completion of the Human Genome Project, genetic scientists famously declared that all humans are 99.9 percent genetically similar. Many scholars argued that this declaration confirmed decades of social science research that found race to be a social, not biological, construct. Instead of ending this debate, however, the remaining 0.1 percent difference ignited greater research interests into the genetic significance of race. In Decoding Racial Ideology in Genomics, Johnny Williams investigates the internalization and reproduction of racial ideology through genomic science to explain how and why erroneous connections between race and biology continue today.
Decoding Racial Ideology in Genomics uses a combination of both firsthand interviews and secondary analysis of other researchers’ interviews with genomicists to interrogate how they internalize racial meanings and impute racial significance in and through their research. Racial ideology operates in genomics as both a producer of and justification for scientific racism. Williams’s main argument is that genomicists embrace and produce racism in their work because they are socialized to internalize racial ideology. In this sense, racism implies “anything genomicists do that reminds them of and renews their belief in ‘race’ as a vital and valid means for making sense of the human genome” (p. 131). Additionally, Williams finds that genomicists operationalize racial ideology to “discount their acceptance of racism as ordinary . . . [and] evade considering how racial thinking and practices enter genomics” (p. 64).
Attempts to discount racism in genomics are realized through genomicists’ reluctance to talk about the impacts of race and racism on their research and their endeavors to refashion genomic science as “color-blind.” Instead of shielding genomics from the impacts of race, Williams insists that genomicists rely on these approaches, seemingly in a tactical manner, to help normalize their own racist tenets. Williams argues further that genomicists try to distance their work from racial bias through scientific methodologies. Here, racial ideology is used to illustrate a link between the maintenance of systemic racism and the epistemological commitments of genomics, namely scientific “objectivity” and “good science.” “Objectivity” and “good science” do not insulate genomic research from the sociopolitical milieu, but instead adherence to these practices shrouds genomicists’ ability to see the true effects of racism. Thereby, Williams finds that genomics is an extension of eugenic racial practices and ultimately “a product of socialized interpreters and decoders whose false detachment and distancing reproduces and reinforces racial ideology and practices that sustain systemic racism without [genomicists] acknowledging or admitting collusion” (p. 132).
Decoding Racial Ideology in Genomics raises important questions about the embeddedness of racial thought within scientific research, which can benefit scholars examining the growing use of biomedical and scientific approaches to difference. Moreover, scholars and students of the sociology of race and ethnicity will appreciate how Williams pushes us to engage seriously with sociological theories of race to unmask the insidious and commonsensical ways racism is reconstituted within and through science. Nevertheless, the book also leaves us wrestling with some unresolved tensions.
First, Williams’s empirical framing is largely restricted to “white” genomicists. This approach inadvertently reduces “whiteness” to a distinct and monolithic social experience and, importantly, misses the opportunity to elucidate how racial ideology informs “nonwhite” genomicists—with seemingly different socializations with race—who may reproduce and/or support the same problematic biological claims about race as some of their “white” counterparts. Relatedly, Williams also overstates genomicists’ intent to reproduce and conceal racism through their work. In Williams’s words, “willful ignorance or refusal to address racial ideology and racist practices in genomics underscored how many interviewees interiorize the logic of white supremacy in ways that ensure their agency as reproducers of systemic racism” (p. 132). Racism, of course, can exist without intent. However, reducing genomicists’ use of race to purposeful or tactical racist acts considerably attenuates the complex and fluid infrastructure underpinning genomics’ racial logics. This includes consideration of genomicists’ shifting and divergent views on race, the social arenas and institutions that support and use genetic understandings of difference, and the critical role nonhuman actors, such as genetic technologies, play in the construction of genomic knowledges. Moreover, Williams could have used his interview data (spanning 1996 to 2016) in a comparative manner to better capture the social actors, paths, and arenas through which genomic understandings of race have been made, reinforced, and challenged.
Finally, the book concludes with a call for genomicists to recognize and acknowledge how racialized culture engenders and substantiates racism in genomics. However, given Williams’s reflection on the ubiquity of racial ideology, it is less clear how genomicists can reconcile the agency needed to illuminate their own racial biases with their internalized racialized culture that “makes it difficult for them to escape [racial ideology’s] influence on their thought” (p. 51). Overall, Decoding Racial Ideology in Genomics helps extend the conversation concerning the way race gets built into genomic innovation, but ultimately it does not demonstrate convincingly that racial ideology is the key driving force for all genomic practices.