"but once you are talking about medical implications, I think you too easily dismiss race."
I'd actually be particularly tempted to dismiss race with regards medical implications precisely because when discussing medical implications we should be accurate. Race isn't.
If we talked about ancestry that would be far more useful medically spe…
"but once you are talking about medical implications, I think you too easily dismiss race."
I'd actually be particularly tempted to dismiss race with regards medical implications precisely because when discussing medical implications we should be accurate. Race isn't.
If we talked about ancestry that would be far more useful medically speaking. If we talked about specific conditions (Chris and I touch on sickle cell anaemia/trait below) that would be useful. If we talked about family history, that would be useful. But if we talk about "black" people or even worse, "brown" people, we waste time and resources on people who have completely different risk factors and needs.
As you say, "race" is an enormously oversimplified way of looking at human complexity. And at the time it was conceived, sure, we couldn't do much better (we also hadn't figured out that bloodletting and phrenology weren't medically sound). But now we can.
I'm not suggesting we ignore our differences at all. But especially in a medical context, I think we should be as precise as possible. Ticking "Black" or "White" on a form is not precise.
"Ticking "Black" or "White" on a form is not precise."
I think we have a lot of agreement - it's definitely not precise.
Where we might differ is that I am suggesting that medicine often operates on correlations and probabilities which are not precise or absolute, and that the data which has been gathered often requires inexact proxies for pragmatic reasons.
So for example, one might notice that there are statistically significant different outcomes among 100,000 patients given some treatment, between those who checked white and black. We would agree that the researchers having a complete genotype of all patients would be much better; but in the real world, imprecise proxies are often all we have or can feasibly obtain, and so we need to nevertheless pay attention to any (fuzzy, not precise) signals that nevertheless rise above the noise floor. It's a lot more practical for researchers to acquire data which includes how a race box was checked, than to get a full genetic sequence of every subject (not just a few markers like 23andMe uses).
AND again, I am speaking of a limited context where pragmatically, race may be the best proxy we have for something which IS relevant. This does NOT generalize to most situations we encounter in our lives, and I am not urging more emphasis be placed on the damaging concept of race.
And by the way, I appreciate your way of looking at things in historical context rather than removing them from context to evaluate them in isolation and under today's light.
"but once you are talking about medical implications, I think you too easily dismiss race."
I'd actually be particularly tempted to dismiss race with regards medical implications precisely because when discussing medical implications we should be accurate. Race isn't.
If we talked about ancestry that would be far more useful medically speaking. If we talked about specific conditions (Chris and I touch on sickle cell anaemia/trait below) that would be useful. If we talked about family history, that would be useful. But if we talk about "black" people or even worse, "brown" people, we waste time and resources on people who have completely different risk factors and needs.
As you say, "race" is an enormously oversimplified way of looking at human complexity. And at the time it was conceived, sure, we couldn't do much better (we also hadn't figured out that bloodletting and phrenology weren't medically sound). But now we can.
I'm not suggesting we ignore our differences at all. But especially in a medical context, I think we should be as precise as possible. Ticking "Black" or "White" on a form is not precise.
"Ticking "Black" or "White" on a form is not precise."
I think we have a lot of agreement - it's definitely not precise.
Where we might differ is that I am suggesting that medicine often operates on correlations and probabilities which are not precise or absolute, and that the data which has been gathered often requires inexact proxies for pragmatic reasons.
So for example, one might notice that there are statistically significant different outcomes among 100,000 patients given some treatment, between those who checked white and black. We would agree that the researchers having a complete genotype of all patients would be much better; but in the real world, imprecise proxies are often all we have or can feasibly obtain, and so we need to nevertheless pay attention to any (fuzzy, not precise) signals that nevertheless rise above the noise floor. It's a lot more practical for researchers to acquire data which includes how a race box was checked, than to get a full genetic sequence of every subject (not just a few markers like 23andMe uses).
AND again, I am speaking of a limited context where pragmatically, race may be the best proxy we have for something which IS relevant. This does NOT generalize to most situations we encounter in our lives, and I am not urging more emphasis be placed on the damaging concept of race.
And by the way, I appreciate your way of looking at things in historical context rather than removing them from context to evaluate them in isolation and under today's light.