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The Meaning of Race in Science and Society
From: Columbia University
| By:
Harold P. Freeman |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Dr. Harold Freeman has spent his entire career treating cancer patients in Harlem,  and he has witnessed the impact of poverty and racism on health. Alarmed by the extreme ill health of his patients, Freeman (right) used his experiences in Harlem to examine the situation elsewhere in America. He found that race is a social construct with no actual basis in human biology, yet it often affects scientists and their research pursuits and plays a role in health care nationwide. As president of the American Cancer Society from 1988 to 1989, Freeman explored the relationship between racial classifications, created arbitrarily by men and based on physical characteristics, and the improper use of these sociological classifications as objective scientific variables. He calls on scientists to recognize race as a social construct that has no place in biological science. |
"Race had to be invented by someone who created classifications, and ultimately it has a real undeniable human effect. How do you make the point that it is real but doesn't exist?"
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 n America we all are affected by our economic status. We all are affected by the racial classifications we fall under, no matter how valid they may be. We all are affected by the culture in which we live. We all are affected by social injustice, whether we are the dominant society or those upon whom social injustice is perpetrated. |
I hope to challenge your thinking a bit. I don't expect that you will agree with everything I say, but if I am successful in making you think a little more deeply about some of these very deep social and human issues, I will have accomplished my goal. |
A personal interest in race
There are two important things I would say to introduce myself. First of all, I am a physician who has worked in the community of Harlem for my entire career, starting in 1967, when I finished my training as a surgical oncologist. |
I came to Harlem Hospital. Working in a poor, predominantly African-American community has deeply shaped my life and my scholarly attempts. I have seen people coming into the hospital socially wounded, coming in too late for treatment. There are no medical answers for many of the cancers I was facing. That was a turning point for me: despite my higher medical training, I was facing a population whose problems my skills could not answer. |
I turned outward to try to discover why this was occurring. Poverty, culture and social injustice became targets of my inquiry. I have attempted to take a local experience that I deeply understood--the Harlem experience--and understand whether the experience is the same in other parts of America. |
I would also say that I have lived roughly half my life in legal segregation and the other half in a country where the laws are fair but the hearts and minds of the people are not necessarily fair. |
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| Charles Darwin. | |
Perhaps the single most defining issue in the social history of America is race. Charles Darwin explained evolution through natural selection; his theories have shaped biological science. Darwin did not think much about the meaning of race. In 1871, he wrote in The Descent of Man, "The variability of all of the characteristic differences between races cannot be of much import." |
Most evolutionary scientists believe man originated in East Africa and began to migrate to other parts of the world approximately 100,000 years ago. The external effects of man's new environments changed people; this is the accepted theory of how human physical differences came about. Perhaps we could settle the debate about race by agreeing that we're all African, but I don't believe that's going to happen anytime soon. |
Poverty, culture and race
Those of us interested in science and society need to distinguish between the meaning of race and the effect of racism, and the meanings of culture and class. These are all very important determinants of outcomes both in medicine and in society. |
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| Descendants of slaves in Alabama, 1937. | |
Poverty is a strong driving force in society, and poverty causes negative human events. Poor people tend to have inadequate living conditions, poor housing, poor social support systems, high unemployment, poor diets, risk-promoting lifestyles, less information, education and knowledge, and diminished access to health care, particularly preventive care. Notice that race is not in this set of considerations, though race is very important. These negative factors lead to decreased survival, irrespective of race classification. |
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| Martin Luther King Jr. | |
Perhaps culture becomes the prism through which poverty reflects itself. People of the same culture tend to communicate in the same way. They tend to have a similar physical and social environment. They tend to have shared beliefs and values and traditions. Ultimately, they have a similar lifestyle, attitude and behavior. This is different from poverty, but it's a very powerful set of human factors. If we view it as a prism, culture could modify poverty's expected negative effects. |
The Seventh Day Adventists live in a culture based on their religion. They don't drink alcohol, they don't smoke cigarettes and they tend to be vegetarians. With this lifestyle, they tend not to develop lung cancer or diseases related to high-fat diet and high-meat diet, such as cardiovascular disease and some cancers. Even when they're poor, they avoid certain problems that come in the box labeled "risk-promoting lifestyle." Compared with any other American group, Seventh Day Adventists live six years longer and have the lowest rates of cancer. |
In central Harlem, where I have worked for quite a long time, people (particularly males) smoke more and eat a high-fat diet. A diet high in fat and meat, heavy smoking and heavy alcohol intake accentuate poverty's lifestyle effects. |
A group of poor white people I came to know about and visited in Harlan, Kentucky, have striking similarities to the people in Harlem, New York: high smoking rate, high-fat diet and high alcohol intake. Their death rates from certain diseases are similar. I believe culture can either accentuate or diminish poverty's expected negative effects. |
Some policymakers have said that everybody has access to health care because we have emergency rooms. As a cancer surgeon, I know that when people are sick enough to get to the emergency room with cancer, they're going to die. People need access at a point where life could be improved or saved. |
As the national president of the American Cancer Society in 1989, I conducted a series of hearings for which we invited testimony from people of all ethnic groups in seven cities who lived in poverty and had cancer. These people experienced greater pain and suffering because they came for treatment so late. They found barriers to health care because they were uninsured or had Medicaid and had no education. |
Poor people often make sacrifices to get health care. The people at the hearings lost their jobs, their automobiles and, the biggest sacrifice of all, their dignity. They said they found society's educational system insensitive and even irrelevant to them. These people gave up hope and became fatalistic. |
If there is a so-called "race" of people who are disproportionately poor, then whatever poverty means will be disproportionately reflected in that group. Black Americans comprise 12 percent of the American population but 28 percent of the poor. There is disproportionate poverty. So to the degree that black Americans or other groups are disproportionately poor, they will disproportionately experience the effects of poverty. |
A brief lesson in social injustice
I have concluded that there are three major factors that cause disparities in health outcome, each of which would take a very long time to discuss. These are poverty, culture and the effect of social injustice, which must be considered in its historic and current context. |
Over 500 years ago, Columbus "discovered" America, a land occupied by millions of native people. They didn't know they were Americans then. In fact, the suggestion that these people were "discovered" concerns me. How can you discover a country occupied by a people? This probably means that those people were not considered people. |
Black slaves were brought to America in 1619. Thomas Jefferson wrote the very beautiful Declaration of Independence in 1776. This man had about 100 slaves when he spoke of all men being created equal. In fact, if you believe in DNA evidence, it appears that he had children by one of those slaves, Sally Hemings. |
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| Former slave with a horn used to call slaves, near Marshall, Texas, 1939. | |
We fought a Civil War from 1861 to 1865 to preserve the Union, and the Emancipation Proclamation was written in 1863. Some blacks in Texas did not hear they were free until two years later, on a day they call Juneteenth Day in Texas. If you don't know you're free, you're not free. During the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War, 19 black people were elected to Congress, some from Mississippi and South Carolina. The Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision in 1896 reversed this, bringing "separate but equal" as the law of the land, until the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 stated that separation of races was innately unequal. This led to the civil-rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, which was led by Martin Luther King. |
Defining racial categories
The purpose of this history review is to show the historical context that scientists and society have acted within. For an example, take the classification of people. During slavery, the offspring of a white slave master and a black slave woman were always called something other than white. |
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| "Quadroon Belle, New Orleans," 1920-6. | |
You couldn't be white if you were mixed with a black person. This was considered to be a contamination. Someone half white and half black was called mulatto. Quadroons were one-fourth black, three-fourths white, and octoroons were one-eighth black, seven-eighths white. These were accepted racial classifications. The classifications of white, black, quadroon, octoroon and mulatto were in the 1900 census. |
States had different ways of classifying people. In the late 1700s, the Virginia state legislature determined that a person who was one-fourth black was black, but one who was one-eighth black was white. One hundred years later, the South Carolina state legislature met to discuss adoption of the "one-drop rule," meaning that a person with even one black ancestor would be considered black. They decided that one-eighth black was black, but one-sixteenth black was white. The South Carolina officials who opposed the one-drop rule argued, "For God's sake, some of us would be black, and that wouldn't be fair." |
Society has changed its designations of people according to race over time. Scientists, too, have changed their classifications according to race. One very famous scientist, Samuel Morton, in 1850, measured the skulls of white, black and Native American people and concluded that the skulls of white people were larger, their brains were larger, so they were more intelligent. This was an accepted scientific proof at the time. |
In retrospect, this seemed to be an attempt to justify the slavery practice of the time. Some slaveholders were churchgoing pillars of the community who claimed to be good people but were slaveholders. Once you can define people as outside the human race, it's easier to treat them badly. The scientists of the day began to cooperate with the practice of the day, slavery, to downgrade the humanity of an entire group of people. |
Racial classification in science
In 1997, I chaired a meeting of the President's Cancer Panel to look at the meaning of race in science. We brought in American scholars from a broad spectrum of disciplines, from philosophy to social sciences and population genetics, from anthropology to basic science and government. Together we discussed the meaning of race, and subsequently I wrote a report to the president of the United States. The report was also published in the journal Cancer. |
One of the first questions we asked was "Who is black?" You might be surprised, but "Who is black?" in America is currently defined by the one-drop rule. After the historical categories of octoroon, quadroon and so forth, and different definitions of race in different states, the current definition of a black is a person with any black ancestor, no matter how remote in the past, whether it is admitted or found out. |
Gunnar Myrdal, the famous sociologist, explained in 1944 that the one-drop rule originated in the 1600s, was fully accepted by the government by 1920 and was accepted by black Americans at the same time. In the 1920s of the Harlem Renaissance, a group of very educated black people of varied skin color, from apparently white to ebony black, came together and concluded, "Why don't we just say we're all black? We know it's kind of ridiculous, but let's say we're all black, because they're treating us the same way. Let's come together socially, culturally, politically and fight this thing together." For white Americans, this definition was related to a sense of superiority over blacks, but for blacks it was a defense against oppressors. |
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| Papa Doc Duvalier. | |
Papa Doc Duvalier, who led Haiti until the 1970s, had a fascinating interpretation of the one-drop rule. A white journalist, surrounded by Haitians who appeared to be black, asked the dictator what percentage of the Haitian population was white. The dictator thought for a minute and said, "I think about 98 percent are white." The journalist looked around and saw nothing but black faces. He said, "Well, with all due respect, how could it be?" And the dictator said, "We use the one-drop rule, too." I thought it was a very good answer. |
For the first time in history, the American Society of Physical Anthropologists stated in 1997 that races do not exist. They don't exist today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the whole history of man. Dr. S.H. Katz, who led the study, said, "The biological concept of race is untenable and has no legitimate place in biological science." I emphasize biological science. I want to distinguish that from social science because I think race has a place when defining people according to their social history. |
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| "Peruvian mulatto," 1868. | |
According to Dr. Katz, the old racial categories had been based on externally visible traits such as skin color and facial features. It had been presumed that outside appearance was a measure of the 100,000 genes each of us has. What a remarkable concept. According to the population geneticist at the Cancer Panel meeting, only 0.01 percent of those 100,000 genes determine outside appearance. Yet we look at each other through the lens of race, making assumptions about people, including their genetic makeup, based on external appearances. |
The anthropologist Dr. Leonard Lieberman pointed out that anthropologists do not believe humans are all the same. They are saying that race is not the classification that helps us understand how people are different. This is a very fundamental point. Marcus Feldman, a population geneticist, explained at the meeting that there is more variation within a racial category than between races. There is likely to be more genetic difference between you and somebody in your same racial classification than between you and somebody said to be in a different race. |
The philosopher Sandra Harding said at the meeting that race is not a thing; race is a relationship between groups which reflects the cultural framework of societal values. |
She believes this cultural framework exists within the natural sciences, and the scientific questions we ask are influenced by race. How we shape our views, how we decide what to study and how we study science are shaped by a cultural framework. |
Keeping classification in historical terms
The 2000 census denotes four racial classifications. The census says you can be white, black, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American and so on, but for ethnicity, either you're Hispanic or you're not. In a lecture I gave in Puerto Rico I used the word "Hispanic" and someone raised a hand and said, "What do you mean by Hispanic?" I said, "Well, that's what they say you are." He said, "We didn't know that. We don't believe we're Hispanic. We're Puerto Rican." These are complicated terms. |
When I wanted to find an expert to talk about the census, I naively called the Census Bureau. I was told by some high official that the Census Bureau has nothing to do with determining these categories; they are decided by the Office of Management and Budget. Directive 15 of the Office of Management and Budget says, "Racial and ethnic categories used in the census have been socially and politically determined and were never intended to be scientific or anthropological in nature." But how many people know that? |
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| Coca-Cola machine labeled "White customers only!" | |
As I said before, I conclude that the history of racial classification cannot be dissociated from the history of racism in America. In other parts of the world, people are classified differently. In fact, in Brazil they say you may appear black, but if you have enough money you can be white. But there is still a need to classify people according to race to redress historical inequalities from a civil-rights perspective. |
I was watching television one day and saw kids of apparently different ethnic groups hitting golf balls. Kids of all colors stepped up to the golf ball and said, "I'm Tiger Woods. I'm Tiger Woods." This would be a beautiful country if everybody felt they were Tiger Woods. |
But Tiger Woods says that he's one-eighth black. He says it would be unfair to call himself black because that would deny his mother's meaning to him. Young people will bring this up more and more, because there's no biological logic behind classification--it has to do with society and politics. Why should I be classified one way if I have a parent who is Chinese and another parent who is Nigerian, and I respect both of them? Why should I always be black? The civil-rights organizations, in their concern for social justice, promote the continued use of racial classifications. |
Gunnar Myrdal described in his book The American Dilemma in the 1940s a country based on the fundamental principles described in its documents, particularly the Declaration of Independence. To Myrdal the dilemma was that blacks were treated as inferior while the nation tooted the Declaration, which said that "all men are created equal." |
He said that this is like a schizophrenia, that it would bring conflagration and conflict, and it did. That conflict occurred mostly in the 1960s, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, and it changed the laws of the country. But what about science? Is there not still an American scientific dilemma? |
What is the meaning of applying the same rules to science? Racial classifications are  socially and politically determined, but race by way of racism is a determinant of social status, economic status and health outcomes. As people who want to help, how do we put these together? The category doesn't exist. Race had to be invented by someone who created classifications, and ultimately it has a real undeniable human effect. How do you make the point that it is real but doesn't exist? |
There is a need to disentangle the social and political meaning of race from the presumed biological meaning of race. As late as 1994, a book was published called The Bell Curve, arguing that intelligence is related to race. The authors argued that a substantial part of the determination is genetic. I would have to ask the author, Dr. Murray, "How did you know who was black?" and he would have to say, "I used the one-drop rule." Well, I would ask, "What is the scientific meaning of the one-drop rule?" |
Race as a scientific variable
Race in the United States is a social and political construct derived from our nation's history. It has no basis in science or anthropology. Biologically distinct races do not exist today and there is no evidence that they have ever existed in the recorded history of the human community. However, racism, which is rooted in the erroneous concept of biological racial superiority, has powerful societal effects and continues to influence science. |
There is no genetic basis for racial classification. This leads me to ask several questions: Should race be used as a scientific variable in biological studies? How should multiracial identity be accounted for in the design, interpretation and application of scientific research? How can race be validly applied to research studies that, in many cases, are designed to improve health conditions for specific populations? |
To what extent is race currently being used as a biological classification in science? What assumptions do scientists make when they compare races, and how do these assumptions affect our scientific conclusions? How do societal values related to race affect the selection of scientific problems worthy of study and the development of hypotheses? |
I believe that to retain race as a variable with a bearing on scientific research, it must be recognized that race is a social construct primarily determined by how one group of people sees, values and behaves toward another group. If race is to be used validly in scientific research, scientists must define what they mean by race. It shouldn't be too much to ask. When dealing with variables such as age, you say a man is 58 years old. Dealing with sex, you say male, you say female. With race, you say nothing. I put the burden on the scientists to say what they mean by race. Then we could debate what the assumptions are. |
If the purpose is to study, for example, African-Americans as a social community, it should be defined as such, not as a biological category. A social definition is reasonable and the study should be done, but say what you mean. There's confusion about results in science because of the failure to make a distinction between race as a social category and race as a biological category. We're about to uncover the entire human genome within the next year--soon we will map all 100,000 genes. The more we map the genes in the human species, the more race disappears. The more we know about genetic makeup, the more race disappears. |
But genetic techniques now available to study human variation could and should be used to identify subgroups of the population. This won't fit into race, but there clearly are groups of people with genetic similarities due to cultural closeness and mating together. In attempting to understand the uneven distribution of cancer across our population, for example, our studies should seek to identify the real variables determining the distribution, rather than presuming that the category is the determinant of the outcome. We should not assume that being in a race is the cause of the disparity. Even sickle cell anemia is no longer considered a "black" disease but one that emerged in areas with endemic malaria where the sickle cell trait was protective for survival. |
I challenge the scientific community to review the social values that shape our scientific perspectives. Scientists, like all of us, carry the baggage of their social experience into science. You don't suddenly become a purely objective person when you get a Ph.D. or a medical degree. You don't shed what has happened to you. You've been socialized. I think that is part of the problem. We look at people through the lens of race, make assumptions that are sometimes false, and we value and behave toward people through this lens of race. |
The cultural framework in which science has been and still is conducted and the role of science in constructing and legitimizing race and racism need to be recognized and addressed. Scientists, whether molecular biologists or social scientists, are driven to reach scientific truth, and a drive to reach scientific truth, I believe, must always be wedded to social justice. It is difficult to assert that the category of race does not exist but its effects do exist. We have to fashion a public policy that will allow for correction of disparities related to historical problems while at the same time denying the scientific validity of the category. |
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| James Baldwin. | |
I believe science could be very powerful in eliminating racial misconceptions and could be pivotal in moving our society toward racial justice. James Baldwin once said to a white journalist, "As long as you believe that you are white, I will have to say that I am black." As long as people define themselves as being on a higher level, there will be others who cannot reach that level. |
Albert Einstein described a four-dimensional time-space continuum where space is curved. If two objects are dropped from some height, the observer on the ground will see two objects falling. Einstein proved that those two objects are at rest relative to one another, and that a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points, because space is curved. These are physical principles, but I believe that in society, too, what we see depends on where we stand. |
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