Post by ndrthl on Nov 21, 2005 6:38:31 GMT -5
seeing things from a different perspective:
"INTERVIEW WITH ALAN GOODMAN
edited transcript
Alan Goodman is professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College and co-editor of
Genetic Nature / Culture: Anthropology and Science Beyond the Cultural Divide and Building a
New Bio-Cultural Synthesis.
How difficult is it to jettison the idea of race as biology?
To understand why the idea of race is a biological myth requires a major paradigm shift - an
absolutely paradigm shift, a shift in perspective. And for me, it's like seeing what it must have been
like to understand that the world isn't flat. The world looks flat to our eyes. And perhaps I can invite
you to a mountaintop or to a plain, and you can look out the window at the horizon, and see, "Oh,
what I thought was flat I can see a curve in now." And that race is not based on biology, but race is
rather an idea that we ascribe to biology.
That's quite shocking to a lot of individuals. When you look and you think you see race, to be told
that no, you don't see race, you just think you see race, you know, it's based on your cultural lens -
that's extremely challenging.
What's heartening is that so many students love it. They feel liberated by beginning to understand
that, in fact, whiteness is a cultural construction, that race is a cultural construction, that we really
are fundamentally alike. It's our politics, it's political economy, it's an old ideology that tends to
separate us out. It's institutions that have been born with the idea of race and racism that tend to
separate us out.
Young children today, kids today, in my experience, love it that we can have some common
humanity, that we can come together as one, that this idea of biological race is a myth that's
separating us. They love the idea that there's really some wall that can be smashed down and help
bring us together.
What's wrong with classifying by race as biology?
Scientists have actually been saying for quite a while that race, as biology, doesn't exist - that there's
no biological basis for race. And that is in the facts of biology, the facts of non-concordance, the facts
of continuous variation, the recentness of our evolution, the way that we all commingle and come
together, how genes flow, and perhaps especially in the fact that most variation occurs within race
versus between races or among races, suggesting that there's no generalizability to race. There is no
center there; there is no there there in the center. It's fluid.
But many individuals will say, "Well, that's okay, at least it's an approximation. It at least gives us
a way to classify. Hey, you know, our head size may be continuous and shoe size may be continuous,
but we developed a way to classify people by hat size and shoe size. And it kind of works. Your shoe
may be a little bit crunchy but you basically know to go in and start somewhere, So what's wrong
with doing it for race?"
And I'll tell you, there's a couple things that are wrong with it, where that analogy really breaks
down. We've developed a universal system for thinking about hat size that's measurable, for example.
So you can go into Sao Paulo Brazil and the hat merchants there have the same scale that the hat
merchants do in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And we can have universality because it's objective, it's
measurable, we're just measuring the circumference around the head. It doesn't change culturally
from one place to another.
But think about race and its universality or lack thereof. Where is your measurement device? There
is no way to measure race first. We sometimes do it by skin color. Other people may do it by hair
texture. Other people may have the dividing lines different in terms of skin color. What's black in the
United States is not what's black in Brazil or what's black in South Africa. What was black in 1940
is different from what is black in 2000. Certainly, with the evolution of whiteness, what was white
in 1920 - as a Jew I was not white then, but I'm white now, so white has changed tremendously.
There's no stability and constancy. That's life. That's fine as social ideas go, that we all have our
individual classification systems and may use them, but for science, it's death. It does not work.
Science is based on generalizability, it's based on consistency, it's based on reproducibility. If you
have none of that, you have junk science.
What is non-concordance and what does that tell us about race?
For race to have meaning, for race to be more than skin-deep, for race to be more than a typology,
one has to have concordance. In other words, skin color needs to reflect things that are deeper in the
body, under the skin. But, in fact, human variation is rather non-concordant.
I'll give you an example of concordance. Height is actually quite concordant with weight. As we get
taller, we gain weight, we have more weight. One aspect of size is concordant with another aspect
of size.
But most of human variation is non-concordant. Skin color or eye color or hair color is not correlated
with height or weight. And they're definitely not correlated with more complex traits like intelligence
or athletic performance. Those things evolve and develop in entirely different ways. Just as skin color
develops in a different way from size, intelligence, athletic performance, other traits develop in
different and independent ways.
A map of skin color gradients looks sort of like the map of temperature. It gets lighter, as you go
towards the poles and it's darker near the equator. But then take a map of, say, the distribution of
blood type A. Looks entirely different. There's no relationship between the two maps. The
distributions are non-concordant. Simply, one is not related to the other.
When we adopt a racial view, we have to see concordance. And perhaps if we don't see it, we make
it up. Because if there's no concordance, there is no race. So, racist scientists, for example, have to
see a concordance between skin color and IQ, otherwise there's no meaning there, there is no there
there. There's nothing under the skin. Race stops at the color of your skin.
What's at risk? Quite a bit is at risk. It's how we see each other, how we respect each other. It's about
understanding that somebody from one town in Poland, and somebody from the next town in Poland,
could be more different from each other than a Pole and a person from South Africa.
It's about knowing that our assumptions about difference and who we're related to and who we're
most alike may be entirely wrong. It's ultimately about a revolution in how we think about human
difference and similarity.
How much human variation falls within any population, and how much between "races"?
Richard Lewontin did an amazing piece of work which he published in 1972, in a famous article
called "The Apportionment of Human Variation." Literally what he tried to do was see how much
genetic variation showed up at three different levels.
One level was the variation that showed up among or between purported races. And the conventional
idea is that quite a bit of variation would show up at that level. And then he also explored two other
levels at the same time. How much variation occurred within a race, but between or among sub-
groups within that purported race.
So, for instance, in Europe, how much variation would there be between the Germans, the Finns and
the Spanish? Or how much variation could we call local variation, occurring within an ethnicity such
as the Navaho or Hopi or the Chatua.
And the amazing result was that, on average, about 85% of the variation occurred within any given
group. The vast majority of that variation was found at a local level. In fact, groups like the Finns
are not homogeneous - they actually contain, I guess one could literally say, 85% of the genetic
diversity of the world.
Secondly, of that remaining 15%, about half of that, seven and a half percent or so, was found to be
still within the continent, but just between local populations; between the Germans and the Finns and
the Spanish. So, now we're over 90%, something like 93% of variation actually occurs within any
given continental group. And only about 6-7% of that variation occurs between "races," leaving one
to say that race actually explains very little of human variation.
You know, geography perhaps is the better way to explain that 15% more than race or anything else.
For instance, there can be accumulations of genes in one place in the globe, and not another.
But, for the most part, you know that basic human plan is really a basic human plan, and is found
almost anywhere in the world. Most variation is found locally within any group. Why don't we
believe that? Because we happen to ascribe great significance to skin color, and a few other physical
cues that tell us that that's not so. And, in fact though, these may happen to be a few of the things that
do widely vary from place to place. But, that's not true under the skin. Rather, quite another story
is told by looking at genes under the skin.
Are there boundaries dividing populations?
The idea of race, of course, assumes that there are set boundaries between the races, but we know
that to be untrue. You know, there's no racial boundary that's ever been found. Any trait that one
looks at, one tends to see gradual variation from one group to another. The facts of human variation
are that it's continuous, it's not lumped into three or four or five racial groups.
One of the ways to begin to see a different paradigm, to see that the world really isn't divided into
three or four or five types of individuals, is to really try to locate those individuals, to find them and
to locate the racial boundaries between them. You could take any characteristic you want, but the
most frequently used is skin color. We think that each type of person has a different skin color.
But do this as a thought experiment: start off in northern Scandinavian, say northern Finland, and
take a walk in your mind through Scandinavia, perhaps into Germany, down through Germany into
southern Europe, through the Mediterranean perhaps, circle around until you get to Algeria, into
northern Africa, and continue on your way down towards the equator, and finally from the equator
to South Africa.
The challenge would be to say where does one race begin, and where does another race end. Or even
where does dark skin begin, and light skin end? Or, perhaps as you leave the equator, where does
light skin begin to show up again? In fact, what you find is a rather subtle gradation in skin colors.
This is called "clinal variation", and it's really quite like what you see in your weather maps of
temperature in the back of USA Today, or your 11 o'clock weather forecast, where you can see how
temperature grades change ever so slightly as you go from north to south. Well, skin color is actually
quite the same thing. It varies clinally - continuously. There is no abrupt change from one skin color
to the next.
How is human genetic difference - and similarity - traced to our history?
We basically are the same plan, and we don't need to alter our plan. In fact, one of the hallmarks of
humans is that we're flexible. We are built with this very flexible brain and flexible structure that lets
us go into a lot of new situations without needing to genetically adapt to it. We're kind of like the
Swiss Army knife of species. We can apply culture and our ideas to conquer different environments.
When we go into the cold we don't need to grow hair. We just need to find a buffalo skin to put on.
Or better yet, we invent central heating.
As best we know, humans started in Africa. And they had a lot of time working out what they were
going to be like in Africa. And through that time of working out what they were going to be like in
Africa, they began to diverge and change slowly, ever so slowly.
Some of that change may have been due to selective pressures in different parts of Africa. And Africa
is a very diverse place, with different climates, different eco-zones. There may have been some
selection from that, and selection from diseases, with sickle cell being one concrete example of that,
since sickle cell is a response to malaria. And malaria is not something that's a big problem
throughout Africa, but is a huge problem, a huge selective force, in certain parts of Africa.
Adapting to different environments and circumstances is one way that we see change develop.
However, it's probably not the major thing that makes us different clinally, geographically different.
After all, we are a young species, and we're generalists.
Another way we change is more or less by random flow of genes. This is one of the big hallmarks
of humans, that we tend to be very mobile. We've always been very mobile. And our genes are even
more mobile. We may not move, but our genes may move because somebody we mated with, or the
grandchild of somebody we've mated with, that person moves. And that person's great, great, great
grandchild moves, and so our genes are constantly on the move and literally moving around the
planet.
That was the story 100,000 years ago. It was the story 75,000 years ago. It's the story 50,000 years
ago, and up to the present. We've had maybe 100,000 years of having genes move out and mix and
re-assort in countless different ways.
Some of those movements may follow major migrations as agricultural people came into Europe,
as people crossed the Bering Strait and came into the Americas. But, other movements are much
more subtle. They're smaller groups of individuals that moved, or their genes moved from place to
place, and time to time. We're constantly out-migrating and mating outside our group, responding
to the urge to merge. And that happens all the time. And that is us. So, what you end up with,
mathematically and in reality, are subtle gradations; one gene grading one way, another gene grading
another way.
Are we all Africans?
Well, we all spent a lot of time in Africa. Our genes certainly spent a lot of time in Africa. If we are
anything, we are African. I think my genes spent less time in Europe, and less time in Asia, than they
spent as an African, being in Africa. So, yes, I'm African, except that my skin color changed perhaps
when the lineage that led to me left Africa. So, yeah, we are all Africans under the skin.
But, that's an idea too. I think the more accurate idea, or the way to think about things, is that we're
all mongrels. People moved around in Africa, they moved around when they came out of Africa, they
constantly inter-bred with each other. So today we have this notion that, "Oh, you're multi-racial. Oh,
you're this and that." Or, "Wow!" like that was a new concept, that all of a sudden the races are
mixing together. Well, not so. We've always been mixing. We're always mongrels. Every single one
of us is a mongrel.
We are constantly going across barriers, over barriers, under barriers. There's been no breeding
isolation really that's occurred at all. So, the combination of ours being a young species, and there
being no breeding isolation is what generates the fact that all you see is very little variation among
peoples. That the variation is rather continuous, and localized.
How do diseases become racalized?
It used to be at the turn of the century that we would think of individual races as having very specific
diseases. Well, that idea of race-specific diseases was soon shown to be not true. But, what we are
ending up with is the idea that race is a risk factor, and osteoporosis is an interesting example of that.
For instance, if you look at any review article on osteoporosis, it may suggest race is a risk factor.
But, when you try to interrogate that a little bit, it's not totally clear what they mean by race. Do they
mean genetics? Do they mean something about life experience? It isn't quite clear.
And this is where, I think, some medical theory actually hits the marketplace and our day-to-day
lives. That's the important intersection. How do ideas about race take on material reality?
A couple of ways this one takes on material reality is that doctors are trained to think that Black
people are somewhat immune to osteoporosis because that's what their textbooks say. And that then
reflects what they do in actual practice. And that's a point I'd like to get back to.
It also reflects the label on a Tums calcium bottle. The label on the back of the Tums bottles suggests
that white, or sometimes Caucasian and Asian, women are more prone to osteoporosis. The label
doesn't mention anything about the potential benefits of taking a calcium supplement for Black
people.
So, the interesting point is where did that information come from? Well, here we have the Tums
bottle that we can get off our drugstore shelf today. The information on the label comes from the
Food and Drug Administration. Now, the Food and Drug Administration has to get their information
from somewhere. And the one study that is cited most frequently was actually a 1962 study that was
done comparing 40 cadavers of whites and 40 cadavers of Blacks. The individuals died and were
basically made into cadavers because nobody claimed them. They were rather poor individuals in
this particular circumstance who grew up around St. Louis.
So, the information that finds its way onto Tums labels is actually a study of the bones of 80
individuals. What did the study actually show? What did it do?
"INTERVIEW WITH ALAN GOODMAN
edited transcript
Alan Goodman is professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College and co-editor of
Genetic Nature / Culture: Anthropology and Science Beyond the Cultural Divide and Building a
New Bio-Cultural Synthesis.
How difficult is it to jettison the idea of race as biology?
To understand why the idea of race is a biological myth requires a major paradigm shift - an
absolutely paradigm shift, a shift in perspective. And for me, it's like seeing what it must have been
like to understand that the world isn't flat. The world looks flat to our eyes. And perhaps I can invite
you to a mountaintop or to a plain, and you can look out the window at the horizon, and see, "Oh,
what I thought was flat I can see a curve in now." And that race is not based on biology, but race is
rather an idea that we ascribe to biology.
That's quite shocking to a lot of individuals. When you look and you think you see race, to be told
that no, you don't see race, you just think you see race, you know, it's based on your cultural lens -
that's extremely challenging.
What's heartening is that so many students love it. They feel liberated by beginning to understand
that, in fact, whiteness is a cultural construction, that race is a cultural construction, that we really
are fundamentally alike. It's our politics, it's political economy, it's an old ideology that tends to
separate us out. It's institutions that have been born with the idea of race and racism that tend to
separate us out.
Young children today, kids today, in my experience, love it that we can have some common
humanity, that we can come together as one, that this idea of biological race is a myth that's
separating us. They love the idea that there's really some wall that can be smashed down and help
bring us together.
What's wrong with classifying by race as biology?
Scientists have actually been saying for quite a while that race, as biology, doesn't exist - that there's
no biological basis for race. And that is in the facts of biology, the facts of non-concordance, the facts
of continuous variation, the recentness of our evolution, the way that we all commingle and come
together, how genes flow, and perhaps especially in the fact that most variation occurs within race
versus between races or among races, suggesting that there's no generalizability to race. There is no
center there; there is no there there in the center. It's fluid.
But many individuals will say, "Well, that's okay, at least it's an approximation. It at least gives us
a way to classify. Hey, you know, our head size may be continuous and shoe size may be continuous,
but we developed a way to classify people by hat size and shoe size. And it kind of works. Your shoe
may be a little bit crunchy but you basically know to go in and start somewhere, So what's wrong
with doing it for race?"
And I'll tell you, there's a couple things that are wrong with it, where that analogy really breaks
down. We've developed a universal system for thinking about hat size that's measurable, for example.
So you can go into Sao Paulo Brazil and the hat merchants there have the same scale that the hat
merchants do in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And we can have universality because it's objective, it's
measurable, we're just measuring the circumference around the head. It doesn't change culturally
from one place to another.
But think about race and its universality or lack thereof. Where is your measurement device? There
is no way to measure race first. We sometimes do it by skin color. Other people may do it by hair
texture. Other people may have the dividing lines different in terms of skin color. What's black in the
United States is not what's black in Brazil or what's black in South Africa. What was black in 1940
is different from what is black in 2000. Certainly, with the evolution of whiteness, what was white
in 1920 - as a Jew I was not white then, but I'm white now, so white has changed tremendously.
There's no stability and constancy. That's life. That's fine as social ideas go, that we all have our
individual classification systems and may use them, but for science, it's death. It does not work.
Science is based on generalizability, it's based on consistency, it's based on reproducibility. If you
have none of that, you have junk science.
What is non-concordance and what does that tell us about race?
For race to have meaning, for race to be more than skin-deep, for race to be more than a typology,
one has to have concordance. In other words, skin color needs to reflect things that are deeper in the
body, under the skin. But, in fact, human variation is rather non-concordant.
I'll give you an example of concordance. Height is actually quite concordant with weight. As we get
taller, we gain weight, we have more weight. One aspect of size is concordant with another aspect
of size.
But most of human variation is non-concordant. Skin color or eye color or hair color is not correlated
with height or weight. And they're definitely not correlated with more complex traits like intelligence
or athletic performance. Those things evolve and develop in entirely different ways. Just as skin color
develops in a different way from size, intelligence, athletic performance, other traits develop in
different and independent ways.
A map of skin color gradients looks sort of like the map of temperature. It gets lighter, as you go
towards the poles and it's darker near the equator. But then take a map of, say, the distribution of
blood type A. Looks entirely different. There's no relationship between the two maps. The
distributions are non-concordant. Simply, one is not related to the other.
When we adopt a racial view, we have to see concordance. And perhaps if we don't see it, we make
it up. Because if there's no concordance, there is no race. So, racist scientists, for example, have to
see a concordance between skin color and IQ, otherwise there's no meaning there, there is no there
there. There's nothing under the skin. Race stops at the color of your skin.
What's at risk? Quite a bit is at risk. It's how we see each other, how we respect each other. It's about
understanding that somebody from one town in Poland, and somebody from the next town in Poland,
could be more different from each other than a Pole and a person from South Africa.
It's about knowing that our assumptions about difference and who we're related to and who we're
most alike may be entirely wrong. It's ultimately about a revolution in how we think about human
difference and similarity.
How much human variation falls within any population, and how much between "races"?
Richard Lewontin did an amazing piece of work which he published in 1972, in a famous article
called "The Apportionment of Human Variation." Literally what he tried to do was see how much
genetic variation showed up at three different levels.
One level was the variation that showed up among or between purported races. And the conventional
idea is that quite a bit of variation would show up at that level. And then he also explored two other
levels at the same time. How much variation occurred within a race, but between or among sub-
groups within that purported race.
So, for instance, in Europe, how much variation would there be between the Germans, the Finns and
the Spanish? Or how much variation could we call local variation, occurring within an ethnicity such
as the Navaho or Hopi or the Chatua.
And the amazing result was that, on average, about 85% of the variation occurred within any given
group. The vast majority of that variation was found at a local level. In fact, groups like the Finns
are not homogeneous - they actually contain, I guess one could literally say, 85% of the genetic
diversity of the world.
Secondly, of that remaining 15%, about half of that, seven and a half percent or so, was found to be
still within the continent, but just between local populations; between the Germans and the Finns and
the Spanish. So, now we're over 90%, something like 93% of variation actually occurs within any
given continental group. And only about 6-7% of that variation occurs between "races," leaving one
to say that race actually explains very little of human variation.
You know, geography perhaps is the better way to explain that 15% more than race or anything else.
For instance, there can be accumulations of genes in one place in the globe, and not another.
But, for the most part, you know that basic human plan is really a basic human plan, and is found
almost anywhere in the world. Most variation is found locally within any group. Why don't we
believe that? Because we happen to ascribe great significance to skin color, and a few other physical
cues that tell us that that's not so. And, in fact though, these may happen to be a few of the things that
do widely vary from place to place. But, that's not true under the skin. Rather, quite another story
is told by looking at genes under the skin.
Are there boundaries dividing populations?
The idea of race, of course, assumes that there are set boundaries between the races, but we know
that to be untrue. You know, there's no racial boundary that's ever been found. Any trait that one
looks at, one tends to see gradual variation from one group to another. The facts of human variation
are that it's continuous, it's not lumped into three or four or five racial groups.
One of the ways to begin to see a different paradigm, to see that the world really isn't divided into
three or four or five types of individuals, is to really try to locate those individuals, to find them and
to locate the racial boundaries between them. You could take any characteristic you want, but the
most frequently used is skin color. We think that each type of person has a different skin color.
But do this as a thought experiment: start off in northern Scandinavian, say northern Finland, and
take a walk in your mind through Scandinavia, perhaps into Germany, down through Germany into
southern Europe, through the Mediterranean perhaps, circle around until you get to Algeria, into
northern Africa, and continue on your way down towards the equator, and finally from the equator
to South Africa.
The challenge would be to say where does one race begin, and where does another race end. Or even
where does dark skin begin, and light skin end? Or, perhaps as you leave the equator, where does
light skin begin to show up again? In fact, what you find is a rather subtle gradation in skin colors.
This is called "clinal variation", and it's really quite like what you see in your weather maps of
temperature in the back of USA Today, or your 11 o'clock weather forecast, where you can see how
temperature grades change ever so slightly as you go from north to south. Well, skin color is actually
quite the same thing. It varies clinally - continuously. There is no abrupt change from one skin color
to the next.
How is human genetic difference - and similarity - traced to our history?
We basically are the same plan, and we don't need to alter our plan. In fact, one of the hallmarks of
humans is that we're flexible. We are built with this very flexible brain and flexible structure that lets
us go into a lot of new situations without needing to genetically adapt to it. We're kind of like the
Swiss Army knife of species. We can apply culture and our ideas to conquer different environments.
When we go into the cold we don't need to grow hair. We just need to find a buffalo skin to put on.
Or better yet, we invent central heating.
As best we know, humans started in Africa. And they had a lot of time working out what they were
going to be like in Africa. And through that time of working out what they were going to be like in
Africa, they began to diverge and change slowly, ever so slowly.
Some of that change may have been due to selective pressures in different parts of Africa. And Africa
is a very diverse place, with different climates, different eco-zones. There may have been some
selection from that, and selection from diseases, with sickle cell being one concrete example of that,
since sickle cell is a response to malaria. And malaria is not something that's a big problem
throughout Africa, but is a huge problem, a huge selective force, in certain parts of Africa.
Adapting to different environments and circumstances is one way that we see change develop.
However, it's probably not the major thing that makes us different clinally, geographically different.
After all, we are a young species, and we're generalists.
Another way we change is more or less by random flow of genes. This is one of the big hallmarks
of humans, that we tend to be very mobile. We've always been very mobile. And our genes are even
more mobile. We may not move, but our genes may move because somebody we mated with, or the
grandchild of somebody we've mated with, that person moves. And that person's great, great, great
grandchild moves, and so our genes are constantly on the move and literally moving around the
planet.
That was the story 100,000 years ago. It was the story 75,000 years ago. It's the story 50,000 years
ago, and up to the present. We've had maybe 100,000 years of having genes move out and mix and
re-assort in countless different ways.
Some of those movements may follow major migrations as agricultural people came into Europe,
as people crossed the Bering Strait and came into the Americas. But, other movements are much
more subtle. They're smaller groups of individuals that moved, or their genes moved from place to
place, and time to time. We're constantly out-migrating and mating outside our group, responding
to the urge to merge. And that happens all the time. And that is us. So, what you end up with,
mathematically and in reality, are subtle gradations; one gene grading one way, another gene grading
another way.
Are we all Africans?
Well, we all spent a lot of time in Africa. Our genes certainly spent a lot of time in Africa. If we are
anything, we are African. I think my genes spent less time in Europe, and less time in Asia, than they
spent as an African, being in Africa. So, yes, I'm African, except that my skin color changed perhaps
when the lineage that led to me left Africa. So, yeah, we are all Africans under the skin.
But, that's an idea too. I think the more accurate idea, or the way to think about things, is that we're
all mongrels. People moved around in Africa, they moved around when they came out of Africa, they
constantly inter-bred with each other. So today we have this notion that, "Oh, you're multi-racial. Oh,
you're this and that." Or, "Wow!" like that was a new concept, that all of a sudden the races are
mixing together. Well, not so. We've always been mixing. We're always mongrels. Every single one
of us is a mongrel.
We are constantly going across barriers, over barriers, under barriers. There's been no breeding
isolation really that's occurred at all. So, the combination of ours being a young species, and there
being no breeding isolation is what generates the fact that all you see is very little variation among
peoples. That the variation is rather continuous, and localized.
How do diseases become racalized?
It used to be at the turn of the century that we would think of individual races as having very specific
diseases. Well, that idea of race-specific diseases was soon shown to be not true. But, what we are
ending up with is the idea that race is a risk factor, and osteoporosis is an interesting example of that.
For instance, if you look at any review article on osteoporosis, it may suggest race is a risk factor.
But, when you try to interrogate that a little bit, it's not totally clear what they mean by race. Do they
mean genetics? Do they mean something about life experience? It isn't quite clear.
And this is where, I think, some medical theory actually hits the marketplace and our day-to-day
lives. That's the important intersection. How do ideas about race take on material reality?
A couple of ways this one takes on material reality is that doctors are trained to think that Black
people are somewhat immune to osteoporosis because that's what their textbooks say. And that then
reflects what they do in actual practice. And that's a point I'd like to get back to.
It also reflects the label on a Tums calcium bottle. The label on the back of the Tums bottles suggests
that white, or sometimes Caucasian and Asian, women are more prone to osteoporosis. The label
doesn't mention anything about the potential benefits of taking a calcium supplement for Black
people.
So, the interesting point is where did that information come from? Well, here we have the Tums
bottle that we can get off our drugstore shelf today. The information on the label comes from the
Food and Drug Administration. Now, the Food and Drug Administration has to get their information
from somewhere. And the one study that is cited most frequently was actually a 1962 study that was
done comparing 40 cadavers of whites and 40 cadavers of Blacks. The individuals died and were
basically made into cadavers because nobody claimed them. They were rather poor individuals in
this particular circumstance who grew up around St. Louis.
So, the information that finds its way onto Tums labels is actually a study of the bones of 80
individuals. What did the study actually show? What did it do?