Seks Melayu: Cara dan Praktikal

By Jacqueline Stevens

With the benefit of being a late-comer to this esteemed group of scholars responding to Armand Mari Leroi's characterizations about the state of the research on genetics and race, it seems obvious that the evidence in favor of re-opening the debate on whether race is a genetic classification has as much validity as that which might prompt revisiting empirical claims from Genesis and medieval Catholic astronomy. Especially troubling are Leroi's claims about the most credible source for his evidence, the conference that led to the Nature Genetics supplement. He states that at the conference leading to this publication, “some even argued that, looked at the right way, genetic data show that races clearly do exist,” but he does not say how many said this or who they were. Joseph L. Graves Jr. was on the external advisory board of the National Human Genome Center at Howard University, the group that organized the conference whose results Leroi putatively summarizes. Graves was also present, read the papers, and writes that Leroi's claim about their meetings supporting a return to conventional uses of nineteenth century racial taxonomies was wrong. “[N]one expressed that 'race' as classically defined was an appropriate way to classify individuals” (emphasis added).1 It may be that Graves overlooked a comment here or there but it would be quite bizarre if he missed an emerging consensus.

Among the articles appearing in the Nature Genetics issue that Leroi references as authorizing his claims about a new use of a geneticized concept of race, only one makes even a weak case for using race in biomedical research. And this article, authored by scientists mapping genes and their evolution, not doing clinical research, says relying on standard racial classifications for medical interventions is apt to be unhelpful. “At face value, such results [locating disease genes in ancestral populations] could be interpreted as supporting the use of race in evaluating medical treatment options,” write Lynn Jorde and Stephen Wooding, “but race and ancestry are not equivalent. Many polymorphisms are required to estimate an individual's ancestry, whereas the number of genes involved in mediating a specific drug response may be relatively small. If disease-associated alleles are common (and thus of clinical significance), they are likely to be relatively ancient and therefore shared among multiple populations. Consequently, an individual's population affiliation would often be a faulty indicator of the presence or absence of an allele related to diagnosis or drug response” (emphasis added).2 One reason the New York Times readers were never clued into Leroi's missed attributions is that he left their sources unnamed. Leroi quotes only the texts with which he takes issue and not the ones he asserts support his views. This allows him to impute an authority to certain claims that are not supported in the texts themselves. His article contains not a single direct quotation from anyone justifying racial classifications for medical research.

In addition to misidentifying an emerging consensus, Leroi has incorrectly dated the origin for critiques of a geneticized idea of race and the underlying evidence that they have used. As Graves also points out, Leroi wants his audience to believe that until Richard Lewontin's denunciation of race in 1971, racial categories reflected long-held popular intuitions. But the concept of race is a relatively recent one, dating only from the fifteenth century, which is when the Roman Catholic Church banned enslaving enemies, even when captured in just wars.3 At that point Portugal's King Alfonso V sailed deeper into southern Africa, where he could initiate a slave trade and kidnap people from political communities with whom Portugal had no previous contact, unlike the Moors of northern Africa, who themselves had occupied Portugal and Spain for large swaths of time. Some Moors had become Christianized—and many Portuguese and Spaniards converted to Islam. In short, no one in the neighborhood of the existing European and even Islamic empires was fair game for enslavement. Not being able to enslave human beings, as these could be converted, Spanish and Portuguese monarchs claimed these tribes from southern Africa were sub-human, and hence emerged the idea of race.

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