UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, MARCH 2016African Americans experience perennially high rates of chronic metabolic disease, premature death, and prolonged disability. For decades, explaining the social patterning of health inequalities has been the purview of social epidemiology, a field that has increasingly featured biological and genetic measurements alongside social classifications such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and economic class. In this intermingling of the biological and social, scientists can transform the social into the biological and back again. Race is a conceptual medium through which complex social relations can be morphed into biological truths in both explicit and implicit ways.
Why does race continue to be quantified as a biological phenomenon? This question tests the premise that biology provides the proper scientific language with which we ought to define race, and that the individual human body is the right place to sort out the meaning of race.
As social and life scientists continue to debate the appropriate epistemological house for the concept of race, the social structures of racism continue to shape the unequal distribution of disease in the United States and around the world.
In my book, Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America, I investigate the historical embroidery of race and metabolic syndrome in a range of life science disciplines. Metabolic syndrome is a biomedical concept that encompasses the major ...
