Genetics: Under the Skin

September 17, 2014

(Nature) – Is race biologically real? A clutch of books published this year argue the question. All miss the point. Michael Yudell’s Race Unmasked and Robert Sussman’s The Myth of Race can be read as inadvertent retorts to former New York Times journalist Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance, published while the former were in the press. Wade’s book is by far the most insidious, but all three are polemics that become mired in proving (in Wade’s case) or disproving (in the others’) whether race is biological and therefore ‘real’. This question is a dead end, a distraction from what is really at stake in this debate: human social equality.