Sociological Theory http://stx.sagepub.com/ The Genomic Challenge to the Social Construction of Race Jiannbin Lee Shiao, Thomas Bode, Amber Beyer and Daniel Selvig Sociological Theory 2012 30: 67 DOI: 10.1177/0735275112448053 The online version of this article can be found at: http://stx.sagepub.com/content/30/2/67 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: American Sociological Association Additional services and information for Sociological Theory can be found at: Email Alerts: http://stx.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://stx.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav >> Version of Record - Jun 18, 2012 What is This? Downloaded from stx.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on October 12, 2012 STX30210.1177/073527511 4480532448053Shiao et al.Sociological Theory 2012 Sociological Theory 30(2) 67 –88 The Genomic Challenge to the © American Sociological Association 2012 DOI: 10.1177/0735275112448053 Social Construction of Race http://st.sagepub.com Jiannbin Lee Shiao1, Thomas Bode2, Amber Beyer3, and Daniel Selvig4 Abstract Recent research on the human genome challenges the basic assumption that human races have no biological basis. In this article, we provide a theoretical synthesis that accepts the existence of genetic clusters consistent with certain racial classifications as well as the validity of the genomic research that has identified the clusters, without diminishing the social character of their context, meaning, production, or consequences. The first part of this article describes the social constructionist account of race as lacking biological reality, its main shortcomings, and our proposed solution: the concept of clinal classes. The second part discusses the character of the group differences that would be consistent with clinal classes and introduces the concept of genomic individualism, which extends an emerging model for understanding biosocial causation to include the genetic effects of ancestry. The third part develops the argument for a “bounded nature” reformulation of racial constructionism that reconceptualizes racial and ethnic categorization as the social perception of ancestry. The final part summarizes the article’s contributions and outlines implications for future research. Keywords Race, ethnicity, ancestry, genetics, genomics, social construction, sociology, racial formation In Racial Formation in the United States, Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994) observed that as a result of intellectual efforts since the start of the twentieth century and political efforts by racially defined groups, “we have now reached the point of fairly general agreement that race is not a biological given but rather a socially constructed way of differentiating human beings” (p. 65). In their original formulation, they advanced their theory of racial formation “to refer to the process by which social, economic, and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which [those forces] are in turn shaped by racial meanings” (Omi and Winant 1986:61). Later they reconceptualized racial forma- tion as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (Omi and Winant 1994:55), placing more emphasis on the construction of racial categories than on their social consequences. Although the idea of race as a social construction predates Omi and Winant’s (1986) first edition by almost a century, their book has arguably become its dominant theoretical statement. This occurred in part !"#$%&'($)*+,-+.'&/,#0+12/&#&0+.30+"45 2University of Oregon, Beaverton, OR, USA 3Auxiliares de Conversación, Madrid, Spain 4University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA Corresponding Author: Jiannbin Lee Shiao, University of Oregon, Department of Sociology, Eugene, OR 97403-1291 Email: [email protected] Downloaded from stx.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on October 12, 2012 68 Sociological Theory 30(2) because their theory successfully supplements (1) the social constructionist refutation of race as possessing any biological reality with (2) a detailed account of race as possessing a social reality independent of its entanglements with ethnicity, social class, and nation. Their theory of racial formation delineates the social processes particular to race, developing the idea of racial constructionism beyond the general approach of social constructionism, which “rejects any category that sets forward essential or core features as the unique property of a collective’s members [and treats] every collective [as] a social artifact—an entity molded, refabricated, and mobilized in accord with reigning cultural scripts and centers of power” (Cerulo 1997:387). Expansive in its conceptualization, the theory of racial formation has provided a unifying framework for myriad studies that document how geography, history, and politics shape the salience, mean- ing, social rules, and boundaries of racial categories (e.g., in sociology alone, see Almaguer 1994; Bonilla- Silva 1997; Kim 2008; Lie 2001; Saito 1998; Shiao 2005; Telles 2004). We suggest, however, that these many fine contributions are premised on, and unnecessarily burdened with, a conception of human bio- logical variation that is out of step with recent advances in genetic research. In our view, recent research on the human genome challenges the basic assumption that human races have no biological basis (Abraham 2006; Leroi 2005; Risch et al. 2002; Rosenberg et al. 2002; Wade 2006). The increasing power of computer assisted quantitative data analysis and the growing resolution of available genetic data has enabled quantitative geneticists to identify an empirical structure within human genetic variation that at a certain scale resembles the continentally based racial classifications of the U.S. federal government. Many proponents of these new advances, mostly nongeneticists, frame them as chal- lenges to social constructionist theories of not only race but also gender, sexuality, and even other phenom- ena, such as ethnocentrism, violence, and child rearing (Hsu 2007; Khan 2007; Pinker 2002; Salier 2006). These challenges form a broad critique of what their proponents perceive to be a “pronurture” bias that dominates the mainstream of contemporary academia. They recognize this bias as rooted in an understand- able reaction against the historical complicity of the biological sciences in justifying racism, sexism, and ethnocentric “chauvinism” (Pinker 2002:14), but they also regard this complicity and the need for its cor- rection to be largely matters of the past. Instead, the proponents of the new advances argue that the time has come for a bolder examination of the possible biological basis of human variations that many academ- ics assume to be entirely social in both origin and character. In other words, they argue that the time for fear of biological realities, even in relation to the thorny issues surrounding race, has passed. Others, however, have criticized these arguments as constituting a new biological determinism (Duster 2005, 2006a; Social Science Research Council 2006; Weiss and Buchanan 2006). Specifically, these critics charge that this new intellectual current (1) exaggerates the degree of consensus among natural scientists about recent research (Dunklee, Reardon, and Wentworth 2006; Lewontin 2006; Morning 2009); (2) incor- rectly presumes the absence of racial assumptions and beliefs among natural scientists and in scientific practice (Duster 2006a; Epstein 2008; Fullwiley 2008); (3) minimizes alternative explanations based on social, cultural, and historical factors (S. Lee, Mountain, and Koenig 2001); (4) overlooks the complexity of the biological mechanisms and biosocial interactions mediating gene expression and social process (Duster 2005; Fujimura, Duster, and Rajagopalan 2008; Hubbard 2006; Ossorio and Duster 2005); (5) glosses the cultural baggage associated with the idea of race and how it has distorted the study of human biological variation (Fausto-Sterling 2008; Goodman 2006); and (6) evidences a negligent disregard for the social reception of its pronouncements about the “reality” of racial biology (Cho and Sankar 2004; Kauf- man 2006; Stevens 2006). In our view, these criticisms provide an effective response to the “less nurture” critique of the proponents, but they fail to provide a reformulation of racial constructionism that would be consistent with the new advances. In this article, we provide a theoretical synthesis that accepts the existence of genetic clusters consistent with certain racial classifications as well as the validity of the genomic research that has identified the clusters, without diminishing the social character of their context, meaning, production, or consequences. We argue that the recent research in genetics demonstrates that certain racial, and also ethnic, categories have a biological basis in statistically discernible clusters of alleles rather than in the traditional notions of Downloaded from stx.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on October 12, 2012 Shiao et al. 69 human races as arising from categorically distinct ancestries or as possessing categorically unique essences (Marks 2006; Spickard 1992). The first part of this article describes the social constructionist account of race as lacking biological reality, its main shortcomings, and our proposed solution: the concept of clinal classes. In brief, clinal classes are the lumps