Cross-posted at The Sociological Cinema.
Back in 2007, Dr. Oz stood on the set of The Oprah Winfrey Show and infamously promoted to an audience of 8 million viewers the idea that African Americans experience higher rates of hypertension because of the harsh conditions their ancestors endured on slave ships crossing the Atlantic. This so-called “slave hypothesis” has been roundly criticized for good reason, but I was struck that it was being promoted by such a highly educated medical professional.
The episode got me thinking about the sociologists Omi and Winant’s notion of a racial formation as resulting from historically situated racial projects wherein “racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (p. 55-56). These projects take multiple forms but in at least one version, there is an attempt to collapse race—a socially constructed concept—into biology. Such projects are similar insofar as they suggest that the socially constructed distinctiveness between people of different racial categories roughly approximates a meaningful biological distinctiveness. Scientists have been centrally involved in this effort to establish a biological basis for race. In the middle of the 19th century Dr. Samuel Morton attempted to show that average cranial capacities of people from different racial groups were significantly different. Today, many people scoff at the misguided racism of the past, but I think Dr. Oz’s promotion of the slave hypothesis demonstrates that the search for a biological, and therefore “natural,” basis for race continues.
So how do proponents of the slave hypothesis explain hypertension? In 1988 Dr. Clarence Grim first proposed the theory, which is the idea that the enslaved people who survived the Middle Passage were more likely to be carriers of a gene that allowed them to retain salt. Grim argued that this ability to retain salt, while necessary for a person to survive the harsh conditions of a slave ship, would ultimately lead to hypertension as the person aged. Thus Grim proposed that African Americans living in the United States today are the descendants of people who have this selected feature. As I mentioned above, this theory has been soundly refuted but reportedly still remains in many hypertension textbooks. Looking at the clip above, which is from January of this year, it seems that medical professionals like Dr. Oz may be still promoting it.
I think it is important to recognize that this particular racial project persists in many forms, and one final example is from 2005, when the FDA approved BiDil as a customized treatment of heart failure for African Americans. The approval was based on highly criticized research, but the approval also implicitly makes the case that a racial group might be so biologically distinct from others as to warrant its own customized medication. Much like the search for different cranial capacities, the propagation of the slave hypothesis, and the marketing of drugs designed for different racial groups, BiDil’s emergence can be seen as an attempt to deploy racial categories as if they were immutable in nature (see Troy Duster’s article in Science).
Criticizing this racial project is more than an academic exercise. As a social construct, race is already a central principal of social organization, which benefits whites at the expense of other racial groups. It is already a powerful basis upon which privileges are meted out and denied. In my view, the effort to loosen race from its moorings as a social construct and anchor it again as a biological fact of nature is an attempt to fundamentally alter the discussion on racial inequality. If this project prevails and race comes again to reflect a biological truth, then fewer people will acknowledge racial inequality as the result of a human-made history. It will instead be seen as the result of humans being made differently.
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Lester Andrist is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park, specializing in the role of social capital and personal networks in finding jobs in India and Taiwan and cultural representations of groups in indefinite detention. He is a co-editor of the website The Sociological Cinema.
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Comments 88
Margaret — November 16, 2011
I would like to point out that Dr. Oz may be educated, but he is a quack who promotes unscientific medical practices, so it should come as no surprise that he is promoting dubious medical claims. Here's an excellent summary of what a group of scientifically minded medical professionals thinks of Dr. Oz: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-trouble-with-dr-oz/
Lau — November 16, 2011
While I'm not supporting the Slavery Hypothesis claim, I have a question about how the "Slavery Hypothesis" specifically promotes the idea that there are biological differences among races - as I understand it, the theory explains that Africans that survived the journey on slave ships retained salt better than those who died on the voyage. This does not suggest that Africans, by virtue of their race, retain salt more than other races, but that the group of Africans who arrived in the New World had the genetic predisposition to do so. Because there was relatively little racial mixing going on, can we assume that this genetic predisposition could have been passed down through the generations? This same scenario could have played out if a group of European Caucasians or Asians had been selected in the same manner and then did not reproduce with any other group outside of those who also had the same predisposition for retaining salt. How does this hypotheis support a biological basis for race?
Yrro Simyarin — November 16, 2011
It's a real mess, trying to distinguish the real science from the quackery.
There are some genetic differences that trend along racial lines. Sickle Cell anemia, for example, or lactose intolerance. The lines drawn by those genetic communities don't necessarily align with the social concepts of race, but they are an easily visible proxy.
We do need to be especially suspicious of any claims that seem too convenient for one social theory or another - such as the ever-shifting "proof" of caucasian superior intelligence. But I think we need to be careful we aren't so concerned its effect on social equality to reject all science that shows genetic differences between populations.
pduggie — November 16, 2011
i thought it was recently claimed that all non-african populations have neanderthal gene sequences. Is that socially constructed?
Bagelsan — November 16, 2011
Obviously if the science behind a medical claim is no good we should reject it, but I don't think all research involving race or ethnicity is for nefarious purposes. The idea of tailoring treatments to specific groups (or even to individuals) is gaining a lot of popularity, and this attempt to pick apart any possible genetic/biological differences between "races" (or just related/semi-isolated populations) seems like a version of that tailoring. If anything, focusing on populations other than white men strikes me as a great idea; the white male default in research and medicine doesn't do women and/or people of color much good when they try to access treatments designed only for a particular group.
Furthermore, various diseases do appear in some races more than others and that's not racist, that's just genetics -- for example, cystic fibrosis is most common among whites. However, CF is also a disease that receives a huge amount of funding towards its research... whether that funding disparity is racist is a whole other question.
Guest — November 16, 2011
I don't understand this whole post.
This seems like a reasonable claim:
People who had genetic predispositions to retain salt would have survived harsh conditions more effectively.
The predispositions would be passed on to future generations.
A specific group experienced these harsh conditions at higher rates.
Therefore we would expect these predispositions to occur more in this group than in other groups who did not experience these harsh conditions.
Seems pretty logical to me.
GooZ — November 16, 2011
Dr. Oz may be a "a highly educated medical professional," but he's somewhat of a joke in the medical community. Most recently he made a fool of himself in front of radiologists by promoting thyroid shields for mammograms, exposing a level of ignorance we have come to expect from him.
http://www.radiologytoday.net/archive/rt0611p18.shtml
Cocojams Jambalayah — November 16, 2011
Thanks for your posts explaining your first comment and admitting that you "misspoke". By the way, you would have been correct if you had written that there are more interracial marriages now in the USA . A large reason for that is that those marriages were illegal until 1967 From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage#United_States
*Ironically, that Supreme Court case is "Loving vs Virgina" Besides legal documents, photographs, newspaper clippings, published books, and anecdotal stories all all evidence of the interracial mating in the United States of people of Black African descent with people who were of White European, Native American, Asian, and other ancestries prior to 1967 in the 17, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
Also, I realize Lua, that you might not be from the USA, or may not have lived in the United States and therefore may not know that much about African American history. It's possible that you and some people posting on this blog (from the USA or outside of the USA) might not have even personally seen or interacted with any African Americans (or any other people of any Black African descent) and therefore would not have heard the information that we (Black folks) share about our interracial ancestries and how far that history goes back. That's one of the good things about the internet. It helps people who might never meet share information about their respectives histories and cultures.
Gilbert Pinfold — November 17, 2011
Um, the 'debunking' of Morton's cranial volume experiments has just been debunked in a high profile U. Penn study.
Marie — November 17, 2011
I really, really wish he would address the fact that racism and perception of discrimination has physiological affects which might, say, affect rates of hypertension in people of color. But of course, he goes the route of blaming African Americans rather than looking at contributing factors such as the society they live in.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447724/
jennifer esein — November 17, 2011
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_Stress
I think that has a better explanation of why minority groups (in this case African-americans and not people living in Africa) face debilitating health problems (i.e. hypertension). But people would rather place a genetic reason as to why that is because its alot easier to do a half-assed job and just "phone it in" when it comes to taking care of certain groups of citizens in this country. People would have to come to grips with the fact that certain groups face tiring "actual" and "perceived" prejudices and discrimination and the rhetoric of people of the majority group trying their damnest to ignore it by saying its something innate or dispositional.
But whatever, its not like we need to have these groups of people healthy to contribute to the betterment of society anyway. They are after all written off as "deviant" in some way or another, so nothing good can come from them. sarcasm/
Kelly H — November 17, 2011
That sounds weirdly Lamarckian to me. African Americans have hypertension because their ancestors were subjected to a lot of stress?
Seriously, though, how would retaining salt help one survive a terrible ocean journey, where surely salt would be plentiful, water not so much.