Race, Human Variation, and Health, the Interaction of

Health disparities by ‘race’ are large, consistent, and persistent. These disparities are attributed to two divergent causal pathways, either: (1) genetic differences in disease susceptibility among races or (2) variation among groups socially defined as ‘races,’ and deriving from lived experiences of discrimination, including both subtle and more overt forms of racism. I argue that a genetic explanation is both epistemologically and epidemiologically flawed, mainly because human genetic variation maps poorly onto racial groups. The preponderance of evidence suggests that racial differences in health have little to do with genetics and much more to do with the conditions that render individuals socially assigned to racial categories more vulnerable to the processes that cause ill health, including what we conventionally define as racism.