In the past, the subject of race has been viewed as an innate biological difference, often with the ill-intent of declaring one racial group superior to another. It would of course make sense then, that the first civil rights movements would be centered fully around the cause of destroying that idea of ‘difference,’ and emphasizing how every person is the same in their basic humanity. I have seen lots of posters, slogans and examples explaining racial diversity in a sort of cute, motivational-speaker-type manner, such as a popular elementary school lesson explaining it by showing that white eggs and brown eggs are identical once you crack them open. This emphasis on ‘sameness’ claims and constantly reaffirms that race is just a social construct, an unreal, non-scientific category that humanity made up in its constant attempt to overcome others or put things in boxes.
I was interested then, in Dr. Mukharji’s lecture about the re-biologization of race. He talked about the Indian Genome Variation initiative and their claim that there is unity in diversity, as well as their related research concerning pools of genomic difference within India. Dr. Mukharji raised some interesting questions about whether this was a return to research about the genealogies of difference. Thinking about modern research within the framework of all past research and the duplicity through which past researchers gained that fundamental knowledge demonstrated the complex ethical background with which many modern fields of study have to grapple, and choose to learn from even while rejecting past methods. I was intrigued in how this lecture on the positive and negative impacts of data collection in genomic research emphasize how past research still informs the manner in which modern researchers must do their own work.
The short anecdotal examples that Dr. Mukharji gave really resonated the importance of the presence of the past with me. The story of the scientist using lies and coercion to get bones from a graveyard, and the story of the researchers using falsehoods to justify taking blood from the unwilling really were a good reminder of how that information, which was obtained in such a bad way, is still in use as a baseline level of knowledge about those communities from which other scientific data might not be available. It also is important that the lecture mentioned how small some of these data pools were, and how generally their conclusions were drawn about large communities based on such little information. And yet, that is still the information that might be accessed today.
One member of the audience asked how modern social issues might still be involved in this early research on trace identities. Dr. Mukharji’s reply, talking about modern textbooks in California that still use information from genetic studies with poor research methods and technique, really showed how easy it is to assume that science is infallible science, even in the past, and accept its findings without question. I see that there is a constant need to go back and look at old research which is still used, and to reexamine that research and question whether it would be acceptable today, either in the way that the data was collected, or if the actual nature of the findings was scientific at all.