Tarrytown Racial Justice and Genetic Technologies Reflections

Kate Darling, Katherine.Darling@ucsf.edu

Hello. My name is Kate Darling and I am graduate student at UC San Francisco. I first want to thank CGS and especially Osagie Obasogie and Emily Beitiks for inviting me to serve as reflector.  It’s a privilege to be given this opportunity to share some of what has transpired over the past few days in the racial justice and genomics track. I have been asked to briefly report out on the work of the group over the last few days, and to reflect on the past, present and future racial justice and genomics.

SO:

Where have we been? Where are we now? Where are we going?

What are our next concrete steps for action?

Many ongoing conversations and historical, intellectual and political legacies shape future possibilities for and constraint on our strategies and plan for action. I cannot give a complete – or even an insufficient - history of race, racism and genetics in six minutes.

I will do my best to faithfully crystallize some of the themes and key directions and strategies we’ve discussed over the past few days.

I do want to highlight up front that the telling and retelling these histories continues to be itself an integral piece of our steps toward justice. In fact, the working group put concerted attention to the how such a project could take place. Here, it is crucial to highlight the continuities between contemporary uses of race, and the deep links between families, reproduction and histories of racism in the U.S., as well as the connections between sciences of heredity and continued patterns of racial exploitation, racisms and forms of structural violence.

Past, Present and Future interconnected and intertwined. This is clear in the ways we not only re-make race, but also re-make history and the possible future horizons through forging these connections. Our remembering and forgetting are political actions – and so one site of intervention identified is that of the collective memory through teaching and curriculum development. Documenting and retelling the histories of eugenics and sterilization abuses could be one way to trace the continuities between historical and contemporary forms of racism and their connection to new and old genetic technologies.

This is not past as prologue but past as a path forward.

It remains crucial to re-contextualize these legacies as lines of continuity within ongoing political struggles against oppression rather than points to mark a demarcation between bad scientific racism of the past and clean new ‘objective’ research.

In this vein, I know we are all looking forward to CGS’ and Facing History and Ourselves work on the legacy of eugenics in the U.S., as this history could provide us stark lens on the intercrossing and mingling between reproduction, racism, class and disability. These efforts could be really synergistic with future work of the Racial Justice and Genomics group through media boot camps to disrupt current narratives.

In light of these important continuities, however, how do we diagnose our contemporary times? Where are we now?

As Paul Vanouse highlighted through his art last night, the completion of the Human Genome Project came along with many now iconic images and ideas: including the notion that ‘race’ could not be scientifically substantiated. However, declaring race ‘over’ in 2000 has not stopped us from using racial and ethnic categories to orient research questions and shape medical guidelines and policing practices today. And I say with certainty, declaring race dead in the water did not, and likely will not end racism. Just as declaring society ‘colorblind’ will not translate to social justice.

Instead, as we discussed in the track, the resurgence of biological race come comes along with a set of broad societal and scientific transformations.  

Dorothy Roberts keyed us into a set of tensions between access to genetic technologies and social justice goals. Access to potentially harmful technologies will not lead to social justice, and the expansion of gene databases used in policing exacerbates the problems of already unjust systems of incarceration and border control. Further, high tech medical treatments as a justice goal when these technologies solidify individualistic notions of ‘health’ and human well being.

These tensions touch on a larger issue. Familiar lexicons and concepts are – like ‘equal access’, ‘choice’, ‘diversity’ and ‘community engagement’ are proving insufficient.

This is particularly true of an emergent set of policy ‘solutions’ to the use of race and ethnicity in biomedical research – as Ruha Benjamin pointed to in the session. These have resulted broadly in race-based research and increased pressure to recruit marginalized communities to research and recruit scientists of color to put a recognizable and trusted ‘face’ on research. Yet, at the same time that these efforts intend to make biomedical research more inclusive and ‘sensitive’, racism and structural inequality remain largely unspeakable and illegible and efforts for democratic governance are so far largely unrealized.

We are in a historical moment that calls us to question the central assumptions of these and other policy ‘solutions’. The upcoming generation of scholars is taking on the challenge of posing alternative strategies, concepts and tactics for anti-racism and upending oppression. Who are the best allies and coalition groups? What are the best tactics and strategies? What sites of intervention and transformation need to be prioritized?

These questions focused our discussion of where the work of the Tarrytown project on Racial Justice and Genomics should go from here. Where to are we going?

Over the past few days the track has developed the scaffolding for a proposal for a working group to sustain the commitment to these concerns and push change forward. And I know this project has taken shape not just over the last few days, but really over many many years. In closing, I want to provide you a glimpse of how this proposal is taking shape.

This working group would create a sustain structure and give organization toward a more set of substantive goals.

This Racial Justice and Genomics group would focus on questions of how best to work with concepts of human variation and racism across the domains of medical science and practice, population genetics, and forensic uses of genetics, industry. This strategy uses an interdisciplinary set of stakeholders through sustained discussion and action within the arenas of media, biomedicine and state practices. Based on our brainstorming this week these goals include: convening a long-term interdisciplinary working group around the uses of race in racial health disparities research, developing a set of best practices for research, possible curriculum development for use in medical schools, and media engagement and boot camps around the history of sterilization abuses in California.

If you want to hear more about the details of these emerging plans, please be in touch with our group leaders: Jonathan Kahn, Deborah Bolnick, Rayna Rapp and Dorothy Roberts.