CORPORATE
SUBSCRIPTIONS
For less than
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them according to patterns of the
326 signposts. Only four clear
groups turned up. Of the 3,636
participants, only five had DNA
that matched a racial or ethnic
group different than the one they
chose at the beginning of the
process. That’s an error rate of
0.14 percent.
The study’s high correspondence
between self-identified race and
genetic makeup could influence
how medical research is carried out.
Tracking genetic differences among
patients is costlier than using
self-identified race and ethnicity. If
socially defined categories of race
and ethnicity correspond this closely
stress, depression, exposure to toxic
materials in the environment.”
Graves says “social oppression”
also can place blacks—even high-income blacks—at risk for hypertension. As “the socially dominant
group responds with hostility toward
a member of a socially oppressed
group within their midst, we would
expect that the out-of-place person
would experience greater stress,”
Graves writes in his book.
Graves may be a well-educated
author and academic, but his
parents grew up under Jim Crow,
which could affect his health, he
says. “Even upper-class African
Americans come from generations
an impression,
DiversityInc
“Race becomes meaningful in how one
experiences one’s body and health because
of different experiences around racism and
access to resources.”
Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics
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to genetically defined categories,
researchers could use race as a
cost-effective shortcut, a way to
make useful generalizations about
how an individual patient might
respond to treatment options.
Graves is deeply concerned about
medical professionals who use genetic
predisposition to explain certain
illnesses, such as hypertension,
without paying enough attention to
the social and environmental factors
that could make people of color
more prone to certain illnesses.
“Knowing someone’s genetic
ancestry doesn’t necessarily tell you
about their predisposition to a
complex disease,” Graves says.
“Factors that contribute to complex
disease, such as environment, are not
equally distributed among socially
defined racial groups. Some are more
likely to live in poverty and poverty
is associated with all sorts of increases in risk factors including diet,
that suffered,” he says. “Most of
us come from families one generation out from severe degradation
[that] people under Jim Crow
experienced. Individuals today are
affected by issues suffered by great
grandparents and maybe even
beyond that.”
Since poverty is so strongly
associated with disease, Graves says,
“if we really want to look at health
disparities, one could just as easily
look at social class and show the
same kinds of disparities … but
nobody’s talking about that.
Everyone’s talking about race.”
But why? Can race tell us anything meaningful about disease predisposition? That idea just doesn’t
make sense to Graves and others.
“To see certain genetic variants
among a racial population and
say that’s why they’re susceptible
to a certain disease takes society
off the hook,” Lee says. DI
