Refashioning Race: DNA and the Politics of Health Care

Abstract

Something is happening to race. Historically, in discussions of race and science, science has either been on the side of the devil or of God.1 But science is a socially contingent knowledge-seeking activity. It can serve the interests of the State, for better or for worse; more commonly, it serves several social masters and produces mixed messages. After World War II, liberal ideologists, primarily through the unesco statement on race, rejected the typology of fi xed racial categories in favor of the abstraction “universal man.” Donna Haraway documents this brilliantly in a number of works. To back up the new ideology, liberals called on the social sciences and especially the biological sciences for documentation. As Haraway puts it, for phylogenies and types, new accounts of race substituted “gene fl ow, migration, isolation, mutation, and selection [as] the privileged scientifi c objects of knowledge” (Primate 202). By making modern biology the mainstay of this new narrative of universal man, liberal policy makers hoped to banish racism and racial categories from our social systems. But this modernist moment, despite a fl urry of efforts to beef it up in the 1990s, is in big trouble. As they focused on the institutional constructs of race, scholars emphasized that race is “I Am a Racially Profi ling Doctor” —Satel 56