Racial Justice

New developments

DNA forensics and databases have become important tools for fighting crime: they have helped identify potential suspects based on biological evidence left at crime scenes as well as exonerate many who were wrongly convicted of crimes.

Through advances in genetics, scientists have attempted to produce new diagnostic tests and treatments tailored to individual genetics. Race-specific medicines, as an intermediary step between universal medicines and individual medicines, attempt to deliver treatments for groups of people on the assumption that racialized groups share the same genes. At the same time, race-based medicines have been lauded by some for focusing attention on populations that have been underrepresented in mainstream medical research, which has tended to focus on white males.

Ancestry testing, which uses DNA to help determine a person’s genealogy, is becoming increasingly popular: according to a Science magazine article from 2007, an estimated 460,000 people had taken such tests in the previous six years. The tests claim to allow people to identify where their ancestors may have geographically come from and expand their family trees, something African Americans in particular have been drawn to do in the face of the legacy of slavery, which tragically erased their links with their ancestors.

Concerns

Given the myriad ways in which the institutionalized racism in the criminal justice system already adversely affects people of color, DNA databases can become another tool to systematically reinforce that bias. As hopes for using DNA to solve crime expand, there is increasing legislation to expand DNA databases: where once the collection of DNA samples was limited to convicted adult felons, now several states have authorized the collection of DNA from juvenile offenders, non-US citizens and individuals who are merely arrested. Since people of color face disproportionate rates of arrest, one significant concern is that these policies will exacerbate the racial bias already proven to exist in the criminal justice system. Additionally, there are concerns about fallibility: while DNA profiles that are correctly processed and interpreted have a high level of accuracy, the increasing number of human errors in the laboratory have lead to wrongful convictions.

Increasingly narrow interpretations of privacy are leading to searches for familial DNA or the collection of abandoned DNA; there is also a growing use of DNA dragnets, the practice of collecting the DNA not merely from suspects but from anyone who lives or works near a crime scene. The expansion in the collection, profiling and databasing of DNA is invasive of privacy, challenges civil rights and opens the door to more dangerous uses, such as unauthorized surveillance and investigations, and the possible search for a genetic link to crime, violence or aggression. Communities of color are disproportionately impacted by all these risks.

Ancestry testing can also impact different communities in distinct ways. For some Indigenous communities, ancestry testing poses the threat of undermining tribal sovereignty, where membership is defined socially and politically. Mass collection of Indigenous peoples’ DNA from around the world in the name of research has lead to the exploitation of Indigenous people as objects of scientific interest, and in some case to the patenting of their DNA for financial profits.

Race-based medicines, in searching for genetic and biological links to health conditions, attempt to geneticize the health disparities between different racial groups. Countless studies have documented that communities of color have less access to health care, receive lower quality of care when they do access it, and live in more toxic environments, resulting in poorer health outcomes compared to their white counterparts. The trend of geneticizing group health disparities removes the focus away from how to eliminate racialized health inequities based on known social and environmental conditions.

Most scientists hold that there is no biological basis for race: researchers at the Human Genome Project have found that we are all 99.9% genetically the same and that there is more genetic variation within any given human group than there is between any two groups. The development of race-based medicines and the increasing popularity of ancestry testing, even in the face of research showing that there are no significant genetic differences between racial groups, point to a concerning trend of attempting to link the social category of race to biology and genes. This reinforces the idea of race as a genetic and biological category, a view that, given the history of eugenics and the past uses of scientific racism, is as troubling as it is wrong. In this framework, inequality between racial groups can then be seen as a natural expression of genetic differences, and behaviors such as aggression, violence, honesty and intelligence can get attached to genetic racial categories, justifying mass incarceration, detention, sterilization, unequal access to public benefits, and, ultimately, the elimination of some groups of people. Most importantly, all this can be done with the unquestionable imprimatur of scientific “truth.”

Key questions

In a criminal justice system that disproportionately arrests and incarcerates people of color, how can we ensure that the mass collecting, profiling and databasing of DNA will not further disadvantage communities of color?

How can we ensure that communities of color are represented in mainstream medical research without succumbing to the allure of race-specific medicine or the creation of genetic categories of race?

How can we all benefit from the applications of genetic science that promote individual and social wellbeing without falling into the quicksand of scientific justification for social differences and exclusion?

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