A race about race: race, inter-race and post-race in the study of human genetics.

In 1929, Charles B. Davenport, Director of the Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor in New York, co-published Race Crossing in Jamaica, a 512-page study on the "problem of race crossing, with special reference to its significance for the future of any country containing a mixed population." (1) The island of Jamaica was chosen for its isolated pockets of "pure-blooded negro, mulatto and White" of similar economic class. The method of evaluation entailed primarily anthropomorphic and psychological examinations of hundreds of subjects from these three groupings. Anthropomorphic examinations included 60 measurements of body regions, including face breadth, cranial capacity and relative height in varied positions. Psychological tests included the Knox moron test and the criticism-of-absurd-sentences test. The book concluded that Blacks and Whites differ in both physical and mental capacities and that among the Browns, while some are equal to or superior to their progenitor races, "there appear[s] to be an excessive per cent over random variation who seem unable to utilize their native endowment." (2) In a concurrent solo publication of the same title, Davenport states this conclusion more forcefully. A population of hybrids "will be a population carrying an excessively large number of intellectually incompetent persons." In this publication he also suggests one method to make cross-breeding permissible: "If only society had the force to eliminate the lower half of a hybrid population then the remaining upper half of the hybrid population might be a clear advantage to the population as a whole, at least so far as physical and sensory accomplishments go." (3)

Davenport is probably the most influential and prolific eugenic scientist in the United States, but his texts were hardly the forerunners of racist science. An often discussed, early predecessor is Paolo Mantegazza, whose iconic Morphological Tree of the Human Races (1890) is a branching timeline of human development reaching its pinnacle with the Aryan race. In 1883, Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, actually coined the term "Eugenics" (good in birth) as a science dedicated to improving human stock by getting rid of so-called undesirables and increasing the number of desirables. In its contemporary usage, Eugenics is defined as "a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed," (4) a distinctly more encompassing concept than Galton's. Yet, it is ultimately the socially conservative approaches of its main promoters (separation, segregation and sterilization) that we associate with the term. "Negative Eugenics," as it has been terme d, is concerned with limiting who can breed and with whom. For example, as Davenport laments, because of racial intermixing: "The standard races of mankind are rapidly disintegrating." (5) Improvement and conservation were key contradictory goals in many of the early eugenic writings on race. (It should be noted, however, that Eugenics was in no way limited to racial concerns, and, indeed, many of the most heinous sterilization campaigns in the U.S. involved persons convicted of crimes or deemed "feebleminded.")

Davenport's Jamaica study sought to definitively disprove the theory of "hybrid vigor," which was espoused by laissez-faire social Darwinists who felt that, in keeping with the theory of evolution, the fitness of the human race would be ensured because weaker, recessive genetic material would naturally be weeded out. Hybrid coupling, in Davenport's opinion, is only viable if undesirable offspring can be eliminated, whereas conservative inbreeding produces more reliable results and preserves the integrity of the existing racial groups. As theorist Paul Gilroy has noted, the concept of race was invented during colonization to justify sub-human treatment of enslaved and colonized peoples and to reify concepts of nation and national identity. The stigmatization of racial intermixing was promoted to keep these boundaries stable. It is no surprise then that conservative, negative Eugenics was welcomed and fostered across the most fervent nationalist enterprises, especially those of the U.S., Germany and England.

Following World War II and the disastrous cause-and-effect scenarios concerning the relationship of German Eugenics to Nazi genocide, a concerted effort was made across Europe and North America to dissociate from Eugenics and human genetics in general. Sociology replaced biology as a method of understanding the causes of human difference, and environmental factors replaced hereditary factors as avenues of inquiry. Not until the late 1980s did human genetics return as a high-profile scientific enterprise with the initiation of the Human Genome Project (HGP), which had the goal of mapping every single gene in human DNA. The HGP carefully sets itself apart from Eugenics in several ways: 1) It is purely a research endeavor aimed to gain a better understanding of what we as humans are, with no immediate social goals. 2) It addresses the location of genes across all of humanity, not the differences between groups. The DNA of a diverse population of donors is said to compose the database. 3) Ethical oversight is a m ajor component of the project. James Watson, the same man who co-discovered the double helix structure of DNA in the 1950s, lobbied intensely (and perhaps wisely knowing the public's possible negative reaction to the project) for 3% of HGP funding to further ethical debate.

One of the strongest proclamations made at the completion of the rough draft of the genome catalog in the summer of 2000 was that race is a social construction that has no biological basis. (Although, in fact, this had been stated in 1950 by a team of UNESCO scientists, it is unclear how widely accepted this idea was by scientists at the time.) (6) The research supporting the recent pronouncement found that there is more genomic variance between individuals of one "race" than between "races."

Another informative statement made by genomic spokespeople is that, as the genome data becomes useful for the diagnosis and potential re-engineering of genes responsible for genetic disease, genetic surgery would not be part of a broad mission to improve society. Rather surgery would only be used to allow individuals to make choices that would allow for a normal life. Thus "choice" and "normalcy" replace "control" and "improvement" as key words in the latest phase of human genetics, although this may of course only be a lexical shift as definitions for each term are vague and possibly interchangeable.

How then might we understand this story of race and human genetics? Does the "post-biological" age of genome science usher us, like the Enlightenment, from the dark ages of Eugenics? Or is this current phase still technically Eugenics given that making one "normal" from "abnormal" would constitute an improvement, and given that genetic improvements would be passed on to subsequent human generations, and since "improvement of the human species" is the very definition of Eugenics? While many contemporary critics have addressed concerns over issues of privacy, copyright, ownership and access to treatment, the HGP's firm stance against racism has silenced many cultural critics of the politics of race.

Paul Gilroy notes that the findings against the genetic, and implicitly bio-logical, basis of race might promote an end to racism (as it will also destroy its bedfellows, nationalism and fascism). Furthermore, Gilroy proposes that the very units of investigation--focusing upon genetic molecules rather than merely outward physical traits--will permit a more realistic understanding of the human being, unbiased by stereotypes based on skin-color. (7) Gone are the taboos of hybridity and the boundaries of race--indeed, findings assert that humans are much closer to other species, genetically, than previously imagined. Similarly, theorist Donna Haraway and many cyberfeminists imagine the blurring of race, gender and species as having a great liberating potential. (8) Collectively there is something very exciting and promising about the anti-essentialist stances of these authors.

Less optimistically, the Critical Art Ensemble believes that the HGP will merely usher in a new approach to Eugenics, one that emphasizes the value of normalcy that the public will not only accept voluntarily but will eagerly pay extortionate amounts for. Analogous to how pharmaceuticals (one of the fastest growing U.S. industries in the 90s) are taken to normalize (non)rational behavior, genetic surgery would likewise better equip a person to lead a "normal" life. (Indeed, genetic screening for several predispositions is already a common practice in the U.S.) The Critical Art Ensemble cannot imagine that achieving "normalcy" would be limited to merely fixing legitimate genetic illnesses, but would quickly become used for either cosmetic or socially determined normalization. In this case, regardless of the existence, or rather absence, of a genetic foundation for race, certain external traits, such as skin color, might have a social instrumentality or stigma that makes genetic manipulations attractive based o n dominant cultural values. Judging by today's climate, the level of skin pigmentation is arguably proportionately related to the level of affluence and power found in the respective demographics. (9)

We also have to remind ourselves of a complication in the idea that genetic manipulation can be about "individual choice." In fact, unlike use of pharmaceuticals to control abnormal bodily function, an individual will never make genetic decisions on their own behalf. These choices would by necessity be made prior to the individual's birth. If we acknowledge that genetic surgery is by definition eugenic (as noted in the previously mentioned logical proof), then this modification and substitution of genetic material is a new form of liberal, laissez-faire Eugenics, as opposed to the negative, conservative Eugenics prominent in the early twentieth century.

In a symposium at the Henry Art Gallery in April this year, sociologist Troy Duster discussed human molecular genetics and the subject of race while contrasting the rhetoric of these issues with their practice in law. Following statistics culled from the racial profiling of black motorists in the U.S., he described recent interest among law enforcement officials in establishing genetic databases. Duster's concern was that such databases might be used to profile genetic predisposition to crime, based upon similarities in the genetic fingerprints of convicted prisoners, and Would merely replace or augment visual racial stereotyping with quasi-scientific racial stereotypes. (10) The proposition is reminiscent of Galton's criminal composite photography in which criminals were thought to possess distinct facial features that, if or when diagnosed, could be used to predict criminal behavior before it actually happened. (11)

In trying to establish a relationship between the present era of human genetics and its beginnings as a tool of racist science, I have admittedly resorted to the future tense with regards to the uses that genomics might be put to. This is because the data of the HGP is just now being interpreted. The new science of human genomics is just beginning to leave the laboratories for the commercial biotech sector. As Maynard Olsen, a pioneering genome scientist at the University of Washington once noted, it is ultimately not the research scientists' findings that change society, but rather how the public chooses to proceed with this new information. The issue is not so much what we can learn or create in the lab, but what constraints or incentives we place on our industries that disseminate this knowledge as services and products. (12)

One of my concerns, echoing those of Duster, is the manner in which external traits previously linked to race might now become microscopic objects of distrust and abnormalcy. For instance, in November of 2000, in a lecture at the University of California at Berkeley, James Watson himself suggested that there are biochemical links between skin color and sex drive. Such a notion was common among early eugenicists, but it registered, once more, as shocking when it came from the mouth of the Nobel Laureate. He discussed an experiment at the University of Arizona where male patients were injected with a melanin extract. (Certain genes control the body's production of melanin, which is the substance that darkens our skin color.) The test was designed to see if the epidermis could be chemically darkened to prevent skin cancer, but found that as a side effect the men became sexually aroused. (13) The Sunday Times in Britain quoted various Berkeley scientists who condemned the hypothesis on scientific grounds. For ins tance, Thomas Cline, a professor of genetics, said the lecture had "crossed over the line from being provocative to being irresponsible because the senior scientist failed to separate fact from conjecture." (14)

What is most disturbing about Watson's statements is that just when the scientifically unpopular concept of race has been removed from skin color, a stigmatization and micro-analysis of individual black-identified traits may follow. Indeed, perhaps it is not the black body that is deemed prone to promiscuity, but blackness itself. The very signifiers of race, rhetorically dislodged from their signifieds but still encoded within every cell in our bodies, could be personified as sexual deviants or misguided subversives awaiting the opportunity to express themselves against our will and irrespective of environment. The timeworn Christian distrust of the body may be complemented by a eugenic crusade against the micro-bodies in the nucleus of our cells. While the genomics movement has made a strong case for biological predilections in a handful of genetic diseases, Watson's suggested expansion for the scope of investigation carries strong racial and eugenic overtones.

In the last 125 years, the focus of human genetics has migrated from race, to inter-race and now (with many accompanying optimistic sighs of relief) to post-race. Essentialist notions of a pure, racial subject have been disproved on scientific grounds. However, a return to any determinist (or, optimistically, semi-determinist) doctrine such as human genetics--be it biological or micro-biological--will be plagued by reductive interpretations. As patterns of DNA code replace external traits as objects of study, essentialist projects might become even more insidious. It is clear from Watson's statements that racist notions can exist even when race does not. The embarrassing specter of Eugenics has been dissociated in the exhaustive cataloguing phase of human genetics known as the Human Genome Project. Our current distaste for Eugenics comes primarily from its implementations and less from its fanciful, misguided categorizations. However, if genomics reaches (or continues in) a clinical phase (such as genetic sur gery) nuanced rhetorical maneuverings may be required from its promoters to shake not only the specter of Eugenics, but its very definition.

The experiment documented on the following pages investigates race and genomics in the post-racial era through the lens of the original Davenport Jamaica study.

NOTES

(1.) Charles B. Davenport and Morris Steggerda, Race Crossing in Jamaica (Washington, D. C.: Carnegie Institute, 1929), p. 3.

(2.) Ibid., p. 477.

(3.) Charles B. Davenport, "Race crossing in Jamaica" in The Scientific Monthly, September 1928, Vol. XXVII, p. 238.

(4.) Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1997).

(5.) Race Crossing in Jamaica, p. 235.

(6.) The proclamation is discussed by Evelynn M. Hammonds in "New Technologies of Race" in Jennifer Tery and Melodie Calvert, eds., Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life (New York: Routledge, 1997). The U.S., for instance, has recently been accused of not honoring war conventions by a U.N. tribunal, but has not taken their judgment seriously. Likewise, we can assume that a country without civil rights probably paid little heed to the findings on race in the 1950s.

(7.) Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

(8.) Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991).

(9.) Critical Art Ensemble, Flesh Machine (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1998).

(10.) Summarized from Troy Duster's lecture at the "Paradigms Lost and Found: The Implications of the Human Genome Project" symposium, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Washington, April 6, 2002.

(11.) Galton's process involved overlaying negatives of several persons convicted of the same offense and thus producing a multiple exposure that visually averaged their features.

(12.) Paraphrased from a conversation with Maynard Olsen in Seattle, December 2000.

(13.) http://abcnews.go.com/sections/living/SecondOpinion/secondopinion_107 .html, November 27, 2000.

(14.) Jonathan Leake and Sophie Petit-Zeman, "DNA Pioneer Hit by Race-Sex Row" in Sunday Times, London, December 31, 2000.

RELATED ARTICLE: RELATIVE VELOCITY INSCRIPTION DEVICE (RVID)

RESULTS

The results shown here were obtained in phase I of the Relative Velocity Inscription Device project, a series of 23 DNA races, each two to three days in duration, which took place at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington from April 3, 2002, to June 22, 2002. The numbers below indicate the distance that a given DNA sample from four family members moved in a given race. The diagram above shows the average distance of the four family members' DNA movements in the 23 races.

SUMMARY

The Relative Velocity Inscription Device (RVID) is a live, scientific experiment using the DNA of one particular family of Jamaican/American heritage: a Brown (Jamaican-born) mother, a White (U.S.-born) father, and their two offspring. (Ironically, one of the subjects in this family, referred to throughout the protocol as "brother," is also the principal investigator of this very project.) The RVID is a race about race using actual skin color genes from each of the family members as the four competitors. The experiment employs a process called "gel electrophoresis," which allows us to discern the different rates at which fragments of the family members' DNA from genes affecting skin color move/race through an electrically polarized gelatin. The experiment takes the form of an interactive, multimedia installation, allowing the entire scientific process (dozens of DNA fragment have raced to date) to unfold in the space of public display. The project merges contemporary DNA separation technologies with early twe ntieth-century interest in human genetics, particularly the Race Crossing in Jamaica study by Charles B. Davenport from 1929 (discussed in the opening essay of this supplement).

PROCEDURE

The blood of each family member was drawn by Dr. Amos Dare. Then the DNA was isolated from these blood samples by Drs. Kelly Owens and Mary-Claire King, who furthermore amplified specific genes understood to influence skin color, some of which varied between family members. (The amplification process is used to increase the amount of a small sample.) These genes were thereupon subjected to enzymes that cut the amplified genes. Whether an enzyme cuts or not depends on the presence or absence of one particular base of several hundred bases in a gene fragment. In each race, these DNA fragments (one from each family member) were placed alongside one another in an electrophoresis gel (by a member of the King lab or gallery staff) and raced against one another in a series currently counting 23 races.

Gel electrophoresis is a scientific protocol generally used to compare and analyze DNA fragments--the familiar representation being the "DNA fingerprint." Gel electrophoresis involves first pouring a thin (agarose) gel of about 1 cm and allowing this gel to set. The gel is then placed flat in a container and voltage is applied across the length of it. DNA is subsequently positioned in small holes at the negatively polarized end. The gel is composed of microscopic pores, which allows the DNA, due to its negative charge, to slowly diffuse through the gel toward the positive pole. Thus, over a given amount of time, the DNA samples migrate toward the opposite end of the gel at consistent speeds that depend upon their molecular size.

When bathed in the ultraviolet light that enabled this study to be visualized, the DNA samples in the gel glow. During this illumination, the samples' positions in the gel were captured digitally (with a specialized video camera), analyzed by a computer and projected upon the rear wall in order to ascertain the progress of the race at any time. The position of all samples at the conclusion of each race was stored in a database. This publication reports on the results recorded in that database. With the exception of DNA preparation and addition to the gel, the entire experiment was controlled, visualized, analyzed and recorded by the computer in the exhibition space.

OUTCOMES

The diagram (on the previous page) shows the average distances in pixels traveled by the family members' DNA. The mother's DNA was on average the fastest of the group, averaging 456.35 pixels traveled per race. The father's DNA averaged the next best at 441.57 pixels traveled per race. Curiously, the father's DNA won the most races (an impressive 9 of the 23), but finished poorly in several other races, lowering his average velocity. The sister's DNA moved the third fastest, averaging 435.74 pixels per race, and the brother's DNA the slowest, averaging 402.30 pixels per race. Median travel distances of the family members break down similarly to mean values, although the father shows a slight advantage using this method of evaluation. Family median distances are: father=567 pixels/race; mother=555 pixels/race; sister=504 pixels/race; brother=485 pixels/race. (Average velocity can be easily computed from the distances traveled by dividing each distance value by the average time of each race, 31 hours, to obtain the average pixels/hour figure.) According to both mean and median based methods of evaluation, the parents' DNA is clearly faster than their (presumably more hybrid) offspring. This outcome represents data from only the first 23 races of the family members (all that was available at the time of this publication). Presumably, data will continue to be generated and collected in subsequent project phases so that interpretation might follow.

PAUL VANOUSE has been working in emerging technological media since 1990, critically exploring the intersections of big science and popular culture. His interactive cinema, performances and installations have been exhibited internationally. Vanouse is an Assistant Professor of Art at SUNY Buffalo and a Research Fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He lives in Buffalo, New York.