Race is one of the most elusive phenomena of social life. While we
generally know it when we see it, it's not an easy concept to
define. Social science literature has argued that race is a
Western, socio-political concept that emerged with the birth of
modern imperialism, whether in the sixteenth century (the Age of
Discovery) or the eighteenth century (the Age of Enlightenment).
The editors of this book point out that there is a disjuncture
between the way race is conceptualized in the social science and
medical literature: some of the modern sciences employ racial and
ethnic categories, but they do so to analyze, diagnose, and treat
particular conditions such as organ transplants for mixed-race
children, heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, skin disorders,
obesity, and gastrointestinal diseases. As such, race has a
physical, as opposed to a purely social, dimension. In order to
more fully understand what we mean by "race", social scientists
need to engage genetics, medicine, and health. To be sure, the long
shadow of eugenics and the Nazi use of scientific racism have cast
a pall over the effort to understand this complicated relationship
between social science and race. But while the contributors of this
volume reject pseudoscience and hierarchical ways of looking at
race, they make the claim that it is time to reassess the
Western-based, "social construction" paradigm. The chapters in this
book consider three fundamental tensions in thinking about race:
one between theories that see race as fixed or malleable; a second
between the idea that race is a universal but modern Western
concept and the idea that it has a deeper and more complicated
cultural history; and a third between socio-political and
biological/bio-medical concepts of race. Arguing that race is not
merely socially constructed, the contributors, including Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., Ann Morning, Jennifer Hochschild, Rogers
Brubaker, Michael Keevak, Carolyn Rouse, and Sandra Soo-Jin Lee,
offer a provocative collection of views on the way that social
scientists must reconsider the idea of race in the age of genomics.
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