On the Perils of Naive Realism, Race and Science at War Again

A kerfuffle has arisen in health outcomes research. A paper entitled “Now is the Time for a Postracial Medicine: Biomedical Research, the [US] National Institutes of Health, and the Perpetuation of Scientific Racism,” has caused many a sabre to rattle. Its authors, Javier Perez-Rodriguez and Alejandro de la Fuente, write:

“The consideration of racial differences in the biology of disease and treatment options is a hallmark of modern medicine. However, this…has no scientific basis, and the premise itself, that is, the existence of biological differences between the commonly known races, is false inasmuch as races are only sociocultural constructions. It is time to rid medical research of the highly damaging exercise of searching for supposed racial differences in the biological manifestations of disease. The practice…required by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of utilizing racial identification as a demographic characteristic with assumed biological implications is at best badly flawed…”

What is noteworthy is that opposition is coming from an unexpected quarter: critical race theory. One could not be admonished for assuming the latter would roar its approval of such measures, however, it’s more complicated than that. Their objection is that many of the guidelines Perez-Rodriguez, de la Fuente and their supporters (whom I shall call Fuentists for convenience) derogate have been instituted at the behest of the race lobby and in the name of eliminating racism from all phases and fields of medicine. The implication that the prescriptions of avowed anti-racist social scientists, critical race theorists, have instantiated racism and been highly damaging to medical research practice has loosed a war of unkind words between the two camps.

The past few decades has seen the growth of identity politics, with an attendant rise in race fetishism. Race now dominates Left discourse in the US as nothing ever has. Class politics are not only largely shunned, but denounced as either irrelevant or obscurantist or even as a White supremacist plot. Paul Gilroy, the brilliant author of Against Race, Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, has dubbed this phenomenon “raciology,” which, in another context, he describes as “the lore which brings the virtual realities of ‘race’ to…life.” The race lobby, however, sees racial phenomena not as transitory or necessarily culture-dependent or permanently eradicable. Rather, a consensus seems to believe, that any group can be “raced” by a transhistorical, omnipresent ecosystem of discrete variables which can coalesce in such a way as to create racism. The danger is always present. This heterodox view backgrounds the ongoing conflict.

Critical race theory is just that–race theory. Oddly, it is not called critical racism theory, as it is this phenomenon which is, putatively at least, its target of study. Most theorists date racism to the Enlightenment when the subject of race was examined in accord with newly developed methods then much in favor. Those who believe racism to be older identify the Enlightenment as a point of refraction which birthed a modern, nominally scientific, race theory distinct from its predecessors. In either case, this period of flourishing scholarly activity has come under attack in the last few decades from postmodernists, with the shrillest condemnation issuing from critical race theory.

Race theory splits into two camps: scientific race theory, now thoroughly discredited and almost universally abandoned, and social race theory. At the heart of the former and critical race theory, is the belief that in the study of race, once all the confounders are stripped away, once all accretions have been removed, that there is still something left. Crucially, they believe that race has agency, and efficacy, and is independent of other social factors such as gender or class with which, however, it can combine and act cumulatively. All save historical materialism theory postulate that race is a thing in itself and of itself; autonomous, irreducible, ontological–sui generis, causa sui, sui juris.

However, this creates a problem for critical race theory, one which centers on the issue of essentialism–the belief that human groups have fixed, elemental characteristics which are not acquired but innate, and which are immutable and universally shared within that population. Examples would be that Jews are greedy, Poles are dumb, Blacks are lazy etc.–It’s just how they are. Wretched though it may be, scientific racism cannot be accused of being arcane or irrational. For the Nazis race was a simple matter: that thing at the core of race was inequality. Aryans were genetically superior, a better breed. Thereby, the Nazis were race essentialists. While not quite so nefarious, the aim of Enlightenment race theory was to unearth such essentialisms which they believed, in keeping with the scholastic tendency of the day, were sure to exist. The study of race was conducted with the scant anthropological data then available, virtually no methodological know-how, inadequate equipment, and no way to test conjectures. They had no chance of getting it right as the technology which would answer their questions lay centuries ahead. Much of the effort consisted of consulting ancient and Medieval texts which dealt with ethnicity, travel, medicine, politics and the like for what little could be gleaned from them.

Much of the contemporary animosity toward the Enlightenment derives from its race theory being employed as warrant for imperialism, slavery, and land theft. Its detractors insist that its pious exaltation of science and humanism, its untroubled devotion to progress, its two-fisted belief in the existence and accessibility of universal truth, was, in the end, misguided, and led to unimaginable suffering. Most pointedly, while the Enlightenment championed personal liberty, it was witness to the greatest surge in unfreedom the world had ever known. Slavery was to befall millions, with the captors citing Enlightenment race theory as justification.

Whether such argument has merit is moot as the matter is settled. Modern science is unequivocal: from a biological point of view, there is no such thing as race. Genetic variance within any “race” is greater than the mean between any two. In fact, when any two Kikuyu meet on the streets of Nairobi, they may genetically differ more one from the other than either from the king of England. The naked-eye-observable surface of an organism is but a tiny part of its genetic expression. “Hurrah,” cheer the critical race theorists who disdain scientific racism and the misery it has wrought, “we are vindicated.”

However, if race can shape societies and direct the course of history, if it is a thing in itself with an independent existence which can roil and dispossess and depopulate and immiserate and enslave, and which is commonly understood to describe phenotypes, how then can race have no material base? How has it the power to provoke war? Is the phenomenon political? Cultural? Economic? What is race?

There are two opposing camps which seek to discover, or believe they have, the answer.

Materialists, whom I shall call Marxists while acknowledging that materialism is broader than just Marxian thought, believe that all societies must be organized to produce or acquire those materials needed for its survival. The manner in which this is done models institutional structures and power dynamics, and configures human relationships. The conflict in interests that result between the top and bottom classes, Marxists believe, is the engine which drives history. For them, race is a ruling-class strategy of social control, a means whose end is dividing the work force into unique, moated identities and, in so doing, keep it divided. Racism arises unnaturally, from class struggle, and is a reification whose birthplace is political economy.   

Critical race theorists agree that race is a social construction, but insist that while class may play a role, it is insufficient to explain the existence and reproduction of racism. They adamantly reject that, at bottom, race and racism are economic. In fact, one award-winning theorist has put forth that class struggle arises from racial conflict, a conviction also held by the Italian, German, and Japanese fascists of last century. However, if race is a social construction independent of class, one which is not derivative, not epiphenomenal–that is arising from dynamics unique to itself, without a necessary conjunction with anything else–then what prompts racism? What conditions induce race-based oppression and permit it to endure?

Given that modern race theorists eschew class struggle theory and revile scientific race theory, their answers to these crucial questions have been quite vague and unsatisfying. A number of prominent race theorists have suggested that the reason for this failure is that the language necessary to accurately describe it does not yet exist–an explanation which hardly suffices to silence their critics. Nevertheless, CRT has advanced rapidly, with Left and Center opponents loath to protest for fear of being accused of racism–with all the liability which that might entail. It’s profile has been lifted and appeal bolstered among non-conservatives by the attacks it has received from the Right. Nevertheless, there have been murmurs of dissent from the Left as well. This might not be noteworthy, save that this criticism has occasionally contained the most damning charge of all, and from the worst possible place.

The Fuentists argue that the racial classifications through which research is approved, funded, and conducted are social constructions with no basis in science. Some supporters add that inclusion and diversity mandates imposed upon scientific research by the National Institute of Health and other state institutions have been a waste of time and money. They contend that the data from decades of such practice support their view. Further, they claim that if such methodologies were subject to standard, non-racial qualification protocols they would not have been undertaken–that politics has trumped science. Most controversially, the Fuentists charge that racially patterned medical research promotes racism in that it serves to perpetuate the myth that race is biological.

The race lobby counters that at every stage of the research process, from data collection to interpretation, there is human intervention, and with it comes the potential for bias. Further, the elimination of such racial categories as Black and White etc. will perpetuate poorer health outcomes for non-Whites.

It is a nettlesome issue, one better left to some one with greater knowledge of science than I possess. However, if one reverses the scientific process by teasing out the confounders to examine them rather than the object of study from which they were isolated, a political paradox of no small importance emerges.

Nowhere do the Fuentists argue that racism does not exist, or that it is undeserving of scholarly attention, merely that it is a political problem and, consequently, outside the ambit of science, and that to bring it into the scientific arena requires the biologization of race. It is precisely this to which they object. Ruqaiijah Yearby, executive director of the Institute for Healing Justice and Equity, writes in “Race Based Medicine, Colorblind Disease: How Racism in Medicine Harms Us All.”:

“The genome between socially constructed racial groups is 99.5%–99.9% identical; the 0.1%–0.5% variation between any two unrelated individuals is greatest between individuals in the same racial group; and there are no identifiable racial genomic clusters. Nevertheless, race continues to be used as a biological reality in health disparities research, medical guidelines, and standards of care reinforcing the notion that racial and ethnic minorities are inferior, while ignoring the health problems of Whites.”

This is massively problematic for the lobby. If Yearby is correct, much of the data cited by race theorists and upon which they base their guidelines is wrong, and their decades-long implementation not only failed to remedy the issues they targeted, but exacerbated them. Let’s be clear: like the Fuentists, Yearby is stating that the race-conscious, race-based objectives worked to entrench racism rather than eliminate it, and harmed not only Whites but also those “races” it was intended to serve. The US medical research community’s adoption and application of race as a methodology has been a disaster. Ruqaiijah Yearby is neither White nor a racism denier of any sort. Her writings reveal her to be an ardent anti-racist on the front lines of the battle against racism in health sciences, one who laudably has devoted her life to this cause. It is from this perspective which she denounces racially organized research. Neither her expertise nor her agenda can be credibly challenged. Often race theorists decry critics and resisters as white supremacists or racism-deniers or the like, but that is impossible in this case. Both message and messenger are a catastrophe for the race lobby.

Later, she writes that those measures intended to identify racism in health disparities research did the opposite:

“No socially constructed race has superior health outcomes compared to any other group in all measures; however, race remains a factor in health disparities research. This harms us all because it perpetuates the falsehood that Whites are superior, prevents medicine from addressing health disparities experienced by all racial groups, and obscures the true cause of poor health outcomes: racism.”

The growing calls for de-racialization of health research has elicited a volley of abuse from the race lobby. Grzanka and Morrison’s “Postracial Fantasies and the Reproduction of Scientific Racism,” is representative:

“According to Perez-Rodriguez and de la Fuente, the use of race as a variable in biomedical research fundamentally reproduces inequalities by predicating perceived group differences (e.g., health inequities, differential outcomes) on the unscientific taxonomies of modern racial categories. Their well-intentioned call to abandon race, however, ironically exemplifies color-blind racial ideology (Neville et al. 2013), which social scientists have critiqued as the dominant framework through which racial inequalities are perpetuated in the name of being racially “neutral.” The social science literature on such appeals to move beyond race is unequivocal: These methods exacerbate rather than eliminate racism. The critical insight of social constructionism is not that because things are socially constructed they do not exist. To the contrary, critical social constructionism helps us to map the formation, meanings, dynamics, and consequences of social constructs such as race, including life chances and health outcomes. To be clear, we are not suggesting a return to a conceptualization of biological race inspired by naive realism or scientism. However, we believe the postracial fantasy imagined by Perez-Rodriguez and de la Fuente ironically furthers scientific racism rather than resists it.”

This is typical of the criticism levied against the Fuentists in that they are 1) unfamiliar with the canonical social sciences’ literature on the topic, and 2) fail to understand the power a social construction can wield. While true that people in the hard sciences have historically been dismissive of criticism coming from outside their walls, the second charge is unfounded. The Fuentists are in no such state of ignorance or denial, as they make clear.

The paradox: We have two groups of educated, presumably disinterested, self-identified anti-racists with each accusing the other of perpetuating scientific racism.

I have for decades now been howling that critical race theory incubates the same core racist and fascist ideas, traffics in the same “racial logic,” which defeated the workers’ movement in the last century and haunts political activism in this one. It is, I contend, a newly rebranded iteration of an old reactionary discourse in that it centers race, and is no less hostile to Marxist analysis and class politics than were the Nazis. While some critical race theorists acknowledge class inequities and tepidly denounce capitalism’s excesses, all tirelessly assault the theoretical foundation from which anti-capitalism rises. Fascism and CRT are likewise antithetical, but the latter has raised the standard of anti-socialism now that the fascists have been driven from the field. It is the new enemy of the working class. CRT reprehends essentialist race theory, nevertheless, it now occupies the same political space; patrols the same ideological boundaries; interdicts the same pedagogical efforts; embargoes political activism which does not subordinate class to race and gender; maliciously attacks those who expose its failures; in short, CRT performs the same prophylactic function as once did racism. Now, as before, race theory constitutes the greatest impediment to the global emancipation of labor and the international, interracial cooperation necessary to achieve it.

And it has been successful. It’s ascent has been shadowed by a concomitant decline in class politics. As Nancy Fraser observes in “Rethinking Recognition”:

“Claims for the recognition of difference now drive many of the world’s social conflicts, from campaigns for national sovereignty… to battles around multiculturalism…They have also become predominant within social movements such as feminism, which had previously foregrounded the redistribution of resources…Why today, after the demise of Soviet-style communism and the acceleration of globalization, do so many conflicts take this form? Why do so many movements couch their claims in the idiom of recognition? To pose this question is also to note the relative decline in claims for egalitarian redistribution. Once the hegemonic grammar of political contestation, the language of distribution is [in decline].”

And when the next clash between haves and have-nots arrives, the partisans of the ruling class will deploy discursive ammunition generated by critical race theory just as centuries before their predecessors invoked the Enlightenment.

Dave Fryett is an anarchist in the Pacific Northwest, and can be reached at [email protected]