The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics Edited by Evelynn M. Hammonds and Rebecca M. Herzig. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Pp. 368. $95.00 cloth, $45.00 paper.

Calvert, Scout

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CriticismVolume 51 | Issue 3 Article 92009The Literature of Difference In Cultures of ScienceScout CalvertWayne State UniversityFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticismRecommended CitationCalvert, Scout (2009) "The Literature of Difference In Cultures of Science," Criticism: Vol. 51: Iss. 3, Article 9.Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol51/iss3/9Criticism, Summer 2009, Vol. 51, No. 3, pp. 513–519. ISSN: 0011-1589. 513© 2010 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201-1309.THE LITERATURE OF DIFFERENCE IN CULTURES OF  SCIENCEScout CalvertThe Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics edited by Evelynn M. Hammonds and Rebecca M. Herzig. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Pp. 368. $95.00 cloth, $45.00 paper.Between social constructivism and cynicism over scientifi c racism, race-based science seemed, for some, to be a dead end at the end of the twentieth century. A new cul-tural acceptance of the social con-struction of race seemed apparent in contentions over data collection categories in the 2000 U.S. Census; California’s 2003 Proposition 54 sought to eliminate race categories in data collection. At the same time, the rise of population genom-ics, spurred by efforts like the Hu-man Genome Project, seemed to signal a pluralistic perspective, re-fusing to afford a genetic basis for race categories. In 2005, drawing on emerging discourses of same-ness in genomic diversity, the Na-tional Geographic Society launched its Genographic Project, which asks volunteers to donate a DNA sample to a database to track hu-man migration patterns. In genetic ancestry projects, enthusiasts use noncoding markers to identify oth-ers with whom to compare family trees. They also import other tools of population genetics to identify the “deep ancestry” or haplogroups, which indicate a geographic origin in prehistory. Recreational genom-ics is, with increasing frequency, topical fare in popular media, in-cluding weekly newsmagazines and mainstream Internet and printed news sources. This fascina-tion is perhaps most popularly and poignantly visible in Oprah Win-frey and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s public pursuit of data about their 514 SCOUT CALVERTAfrican ancestors. Yet, postracial politics notwithstanding, recre-ational genomics improvises a  racialized vernacular from under-standings submerged in kinship, tribe, and population narratives, as Kimberly TallBear has pointed out, mutating “race,” out of the nineteenth-century concept of “blood quantum” that imperfectly signals complex tribal relatedness and membership.1 Purchasers of the kits look to the genome as the “Book of Life,” fi nding themselves as racialized and medicalized sub-jects, written in its pages.2 With publicity generated by Winfrey, Gates, and the Genographic Proj-ect, high school and college stu-dents, along with genealogists, are experimenting with recreational genomics and a mutated racial  discourse that accompanies test-company promotional materials and test interpretations. In a ge-nomic age, race categories are ex-periencing a renaissance.As these ongoing genetic recon-structions and deconstructions of racial categories demonstrate, sci-ence has the authority to establish truth claims that scholars in the humanities must reckon with. While students of American cul-ture and history have long turned to social science and literary sources to make sense of racialization in the United States, primary sources from the history of science have been less available for these  scholars. Partly, the preeminence of  scientifi c discourse and the  specialized genre of its literature have made it a diffi cult target for nonscientists to engage. Scholars in the humanities may avoid a scien-tifi c debate either because they feel out of their depths interpreting sci-entifi c data, assume that the scien-tifi c debates on race are settled, or resist scientifi c authority in re-sponse to well-documented in-stances of scientifi c exploitation of people of color. Or humanities scholars may have surrendered to science the work of settling mat-ters of fact, keeping hermeneutics and textual matters for themselves. But researchers outside the sciences have been hobbled by rejecting  science in a move that leaves un-touched its power to legitimize knowledge claims. Science and technology studies can provide a methodological resource that will be ready to hand for literary stud-ies: tracing objects through the practices and discourses that pro-duce them as settled matters of fact, made, but not made up.Race is a slippery object in sci-entifi c literature, and scholars in the humanities will have a hard time holding tight to both ends of what Donna Haraway describes as a “greased pole,” tracking the so-cial and legal arrangements that produce race while examining and debunking scientifi c data claimed to be evidence for or against race.3 Here, Evelynn Hammonds (Har-vard University) and Rebecca Herzig’s (Bates College) edited volume will be a useful resource  ON THE NATURE OF DIFFERENCE 515with a welcome approach. At-tuned to discursive strategies across decades of scientifi c litera-ture, historians of science Ham-monds and Herzig present a selection of fi fty-seven primary documents that elucidate scientifi c understandings of racial differ-ence from Thomas Jefferson’s 1782 “suspicion” that “blacks . . . are in-ferior to the whites” (28) to con-temporary arguments about the scientifi c validity of the concept of race, played out in anthropology and genomics. “Science” is coded as the interpreter of “Nature” in Western discourse; The Nature of Difference is a play on words made possible by that slippage, a play that simultaneously reminds the reader of the elision. Hammond and Herzig, in fi ne analytic form, throw the spotlight on how scien-tifi c practices across disciplines de-scribe and create what thereby becomes naturalized difference, rather than describe the essence of difference itself.Hammond and Herzig’s atten-tion to the distinction between sci-entifi c processes that stabilize racial facts and the facticity of sci-entifi c arguments is sustained in commentary and the organization of the source material. An astute general introduction explains the rationale for the selection of the pieces, most of which are repro-duced in full. Each of the nine thematic sections also has a sepa-rate introduction, with questions that point readers to the discursive moves and modes of attention of each author rather than to a pe-dantic exploration of racism that is stark in some of the articles. Herzig and Hammond focus on race in the United States, fi ttingly as the United States developed particular forms of race science in conjunction with institutional-ized slavery at the founding of the  nation. Racial understandings were perpetuated in new forms with westward expansion and at the end of legal slavery. Several selections take the racialization of  Africans or American Indians head on, whereas others talk about “races” generally. Given the speci-fi c histories of Chinese ex clusion, a selection specifi cally addressing the racialization of Asians in the United States seems to be an omis-sion, although one article about the state of public health in San Francisco infers anxiety over Chi-nese immigration at the same time it constructs a version of appro-priate white femininity around cleanliness and sensitivity to dis-ease, and Hammond and Herzig give Chinese immigration due consideration in the introduction to this section. Obviously, the edi-tors are unable to include the vast archive of source material that might address this and other ques-tions of racialization in the United States. This predicament is recti-fi ed by the inclusion of a bibliog-raphy of materials for further study at the end of each section’s introduction.516 SCOUT CALVERTThe editors purposely avoid settling on a particular defi nition or understanding of race, but at-tempt to show the unsettled and ongoing nature of the debate. They ask readers to track the rise and permutation of various fea-tures of the arguments. For ex-ample, in the introduction to a section titled “Anatomical Obser-vations,” the editors ask, “In what larger political, economic, and so-cial contexts might ears, noses, in-dex fi ngers, or brain hemispheres attract attention as reliable signs of racial difference?” (17). Jeffer-son’s now-shocking assertion that blacks prefer white sensibilities, just as a male orangutan prefers an African woman to a female of its own species, comes in the mid-dle of an elaboration of differences Jefferson thought were pertinent: fair skin that readily shows a blush; the alleged heat tolerance and cold intolerance of black peo-ple; the quality of sweat (25). Readers will see how some of these dubious distinctions remain present in people’s personal con-structions of race.Herzig and Hammond avoid the debunking strain of some  histories of science that traced per-sonal bias, logical leaps, and meth-odological failures that produced false evidence of racial difference and validated the prevailing racial hierarchies. They instead “ap-proach science not as a single in-strument or method that reveals (or obscures) the real truth about human difference but instead, like race, as a profoundly heteroge-neous array of practices” (ix). The editors’ selection rationale and or-ganization support this endeavor, and make the text usable for schol-ars across disciplinary contexts who study race. The heterogeneity of practices is apparent from the get-go: The fi rst section, which  reproduces fi fteen dictionary defi -nitions of race, from medicine, bi-ology, anthropology, genetics, and evolution, and spanning the late nineteenth through early twenty-fi rst centuries, shows the muta-bility of the object and fraught efforts to settle and circumscribe the notion.The remaining sections chart sites where racial differences might be found (hair, glands, lungs, birth canals, genes); methods that might specify them (counting sweat glands, measuring skin pigmenta-tion, assessing skeletal differences, sequencing genes); anxieties over contagion of disease or race; what hybridity tells us about differences. These selections trace the shifting terms and methods that produce difference, and remind us that sci-entifi c communication is itself a procedure for establishing scien-tifi c matters of fact. For example, the section “Immunity and Con-tagion” features an 1887 debate  between physicians Washington Matthews and Thomas Mays over interpretations of the prevalence of consumption amongst American Indians. The terms of this  ON THE NATURE OF DIFFERENCE 517argument—whether  consumption was a sign of inborn racial differ-ence, or ameliorated by “civilizing” factors that could affect the inci-dence of the disease—helped settle the fates of Native Americans at the close of the West and after more than fi fty years of offi cial re-moval policy. Science brings about the worlds it  often claims only to describe.The ultimate fate of racial groups is also a preoccupation evi-dent in discussions in the following section on “Evolution and Degen-eration.” Culminating in a 1914  essay by Alexander Graham Bell on positive eugenics, this section tracks the anxieties of a nation reckoning with Emancipation and the fulfi llment of a manifest des-tiny to occupy the continent from coast to coast. Adaptation to new environments signals evolution; conveniently, groups that instead degenerated would eventually cease to exist. High mortality rates could signal problems in work and living conditions, or a congenital inability to adapt to those condi-tions. Sexual dimorphism was thought to be a component of  degeneration, so considerations of race and sex together are more  explicit here, though implicit throughout the collection. Just as genetics discourses are heavy-weights in public rhetorical spaces now, each of these scientifi c  explanations played a role in policy and popular conceptions of race in its day.The options on offer for nonsci-entists to engage scientifi c knowl-edge production have seemed to avoid toeing the putative line be-tween science and society that shields the sciences from social  interference. This is the line that Stephen Jay Gould unwittingly de-fended when he recalculated cra-nial capacities to argue that bias resulted in skewed data that ma-ligned Africans.4 Thus society be-comes the scapegoat in any scientifi c failure, and truth is realized by good science when social interests are kept out. Better than that,  science should be instructive to  society, as Aravinda Chakravarti argues in a recent article on recre-ational genomics in Nature: “More often than not, the views of society have shaped science rather than the other way around. In this in-stance, it may be time for science to reshape the views of society.”5 In this view, which sees cultural and social processes as distinct from scientifi c ones, society should, at last, accept the hard truths on offer from science. This assumption was on display when University of Chi-cago geneticist Bruce Lahn defen-ded his 2005 research showing that brain size had responded to selec-tion pressures, coinciding with the emergence of culture in Europe. Unfortunately, the alleles Lahn found had a low incidence in sub-Saharan Africa. When Lahn’s data were reanalyzed by other research-ers, casting doubt on his claims, Lahn argued that it is other 518 SCOUT CALVERT scientists who “start with a politi-cal agenda and fi t the evidence to that.”6 His supporters claimed a  social interest—political correct-ness—had interfered with the dogged pursuit of truth.From here, it looks like those with an “agenda” produced a bet-ter account of Lahn’s data, calling into question the account of science as an activity best transacted out-side of and separate from society (as if that were possible). More than this, contemporary genetics re-search illustrates that science’s power to beguile imaginations works on those in the humanities, too, some of whom have turned to genomics testing to discover and reveal “truths” about unknown ancestry, an apocryphal African or European cropping up in the  family tree. The allure here is to fi nally prove we’re all the same un-der the skin, or at least that we have more in common than we had liked to admit. If this premise seems too neat, readers of The  Nature of Difference will also be able to trace the evolution of this aspiration from its context after the Second World War and the Holo-caust, and see how this project is another one for making race  matter, but differently.The Nature of Difference is a timely addition to conversations about race and genomics, orga-nized so as to allow readers to make new connections between contem-porary discourses and the histories of science and race. The text’s  selections and the organization of the selections with introductory material are especially helpful, serving as navigational aids to the sometimes astounding statements of racial fact that could otherwise be conversation stoppers. The book would be useful either as a course text or as a collection of primary material for individual research. Students wishing to track the sci-entifi c construction of sex and sex-uality more directly alongside race should consider pairing this text with Lucy Bland and Laura Doan’s 1998 edited volume of primary sources, Sexology Uncensored. For those looking for analysis of the production of genetic racial differ-ence, Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, edited by Barbara Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah Richardson (2008), keys its essays to genomics, race-based medicine, and genetic ancestry, while Genetic Nature/Culture, edited by Alan Goodman, Deborah Heath, and M. Susan Lindee (2003), offers an anthropological approach and re-spected scholars in science studies (Troy Duster, Sarah Franklin, Joan Fujimura, Donna Haraway, Rayna Rapp, and Hilary Rose, to name just a selection). Both of these essay collections would help students see how the analytic questions sug-gested by Hammonds and Herzig open up the apparently settled  domain of science for productive interdisciplinary inquiry.—Wayne State University ON THE NATURE OF DIFFERENCE 519NOTES1. Kimberly TallBear, “Native-American-DNA.com: In Search of Native American Race and Tribe,” in Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, ed. Barbara Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah S. Richardson (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 235–52.2. Donna Haraway, “Gene: Maps and Portraits of Life Itself,” in Modest_ Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouseTM:Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), 131–72.3. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowl-edges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 183–202.4. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981).5. Aravinda Chakravarti, “Kinship: Race Relations,” Nature 457 (2009): 380–81.6. Michael Balter, “Brain Man Makes Waves with Claims of Recent Human Evolution,” Science 314 (2006): 1871, 1873, quotation on 1873.

The Literature of Difference In Cultures of Science

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