Racial Destiny or Dexterity?

The Global Circulation of Genomics as an Empowerment Idiom

RUHA BENJAMIN

In 2001 at the World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa, a heated dispute ensued between representatives of the Indian government and the Dalit movement (formerly “untouchables”) over whether caste discrimination should be included on the international agenda as a form of oppression akin to racism. This was the latest iteration of a longstanding debate that pits the view that caste is an ancient, naturalized hierarchy against the idea that it is a colonial fabrication built upon existing social fault lines. Some Dalit activists have made appeals to ancient genetic divisions, emphasizing the outsiderness of the upper caste, in order to legitimize their grievances, undermine the authority of powerful actors and build solidarity with other racialized groups. Representatives of the Indian government, in turn, have resisted the latter appeals and were largely successful in eliminating any mention of caste discrimination in the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance proceedings and outcomes document (Egorova 2009). Although the inherited position of caste is tied to one’s work, it is also an embodied status such that lower castes are often considered “impure” and “untouchable” with numerous implications for social life. But until very recently there was little scientific evidence to support the notion that caste groupings were biologically distinct in the way that US racial groupings have historically been construed. In 2009, when the Durban Review Committee convened in Geneva to evaluate progress towards the conference goals, a sizable delegation of Dalit representatives traveled to Geneva to “raise their voices against the wall of silence they [were] met with at the Durban Review Conference” (Human Rights Watch 2009). In this case, advancing the idea that group differences are biologically real is a way to assert social divisions as consequential, and therefore requiring redress. To the extent that socially subordinate groups find it necessary to claim recognition and assert rights in genomic terms, it is both a form of co-optation of and capitulation to science as the authority on group boundaries.

In this chapter, I explore how genomics is both powerful and problematic due to its epistemic agility (making competing knowledge claims) and normative dexterity (asserting conflicting political claims), rather than due to the field’s strict enforcement of hierarchically stable categories. While those at the bottom of the Indian social hierarchy have seized upon genomic findings to bolster their oppressed group identity (Egorova 2009), those who monopolize power and status in India have also used population genomics to support their claims to indigeneity when that was called in to question. Genomic claims are used at both ends of the lines of power, where the meaning of biological difference and the rights sought by different groups are negotiated and contested. But despite the seeming short-term empowerment that genomics claims seem to hold for marginalized social groups, the long-term political implications of describing centuries-old social divisions as “genetic diversity” are unclear. In what follows I discuss national genomic initiatives in Mexico and India, which marshal already existing national discourses about biological and cultural affinity in their quest to genetically map variation in the population. I compare their different conceptions of heterogeneity, one focusing on diversity and the other on mixture, to show how political and scientific actors in both contexts must contend with the ways in which linking genetic and social groupings become politically controversial.

Since the World Conference on Racism, some in the Dalit movement have welcomed genomics research that supports the theory of Aryan migration, seeing in it:

Whereas many social scientists and racial justice advocates have spent decades working to denaturalize race and highlight its social construction, the new biopolitics of race are “new” in part because the relationship between biological knowledge and political power is decoupled. That is, the logic of biological difference and social subordination are not so tightly knit as they were in previous eras characterized by explicit forms of eugenic ideology (Hammonds and Herzig 2008). As Rose cautions, it is important to avoid painting contemporary developments in the life sciences as a new genetic determinism; instead, current debates over race and genomics should be located within the biopolitics of the twenty-first century that “does not seek to legitimate inequality but to intervene upon its consequences” (Rose 2007:167). This is what Bliss (2012:15) aptly calls an “antiracist racialism, or the idea that there is no rank to races but there are nevertheless discrete populations worth studying” as a prevailing ethos among both genomicists and other social justice activists. Focusing upon just such interventions, the following discussion examines the “new-fangled” relations between race and genomics with a sober eye towards the way such attempts to intervene in the name of the dispossessed may sediment longstanding inequalities in unexpected ways. It builds upon work by Roberts and others cautioning that our newfound ability to intervene upon life in unprecedented ways is not necessarily cause for celebration, because this new form of biocitizenship “threatens to replace active, collective engagement to create a better society with providing information to the biotech industry and consuming its goods and services” (Roberts 2011:225). The biopolitics of race are one set of developments within the broader context of “racial neoliberalism” (Goldberg 2009) that marks a shift away from state-sanctioned medical experimentation, towards the privatization of health research in which the onus is on individual biocitizens to opt in or out. But the seeming empowerment of individuals can serve as a ruse, drawing our attention away from the inequitable social contexts in which individuals exercise circumscribed agency. For example, the US pharmaceutical industry outsources clinical trials to places that have “pharmaceutically naïve” populations to test drug efficacy because Americans already consume too many drugs to make them useful test subjects (Petryna 2005). Another countervailing process is pharmaceutical development situated in postcolonial contexts, where the location of drug discovery comes to matter for the researchers and the knowledge produced (Pollock 2014). But, due to persistent global inequalities, the actual fruits of such research are out of reach for many of those whose bodies are the experimental substrate of science. Such disparities – between those who bear the risks and those who reap the benefits of experimental life sciences – will likely persist in the context of genomic medicine.

Strictly speaking, population genomicists seek to understand how “evolutionary processes … influence variation across genomes and populations” (Kumar 2012) by sampling and genotyping individuals in the hope of finding patterns that may eventually relate to disease susceptibility and drug response. As a first step in understanding population genomics, it is important to recognize that it is not simply a new discipline, but part of a broader social field with political implications that exceed the intentions of researchers. The growth of the field is tied to the crises faced by the global pharmaceutical industry, wherein an estimated US$140 billion worth of drugs will lose their patents between 2012 and 2017 (Kulkarni 2012). Companies are under pressure to reconfigure their business models and find new markets as blockbuster drugs fall over the “patent cliff.”¹ The one-size-fits-all model of drug development is giving way to a niche marketing strategy in which companies are turning to “growth potential in specialty markets and in emerging nations” (Wilson 2011). This approach is often undertaken in the name of helping “the underserved,” as exemplified by prominent Canadian health policy officials Daar and Singer:

Developing countries are not only potentially huge markets for drug therapeutics but are also depositories of important human genetic diversity. Understanding this diversity is valuable because it better defines those population subgroups that will benefit more from a particular drug than others, and allows the detection of side-effects that might not be seen in populations that are mainly Caucasian. (2005:245)

Such appeals to marginalized racial groups as the purported beneficiaries of genomic medicine avert critical attention from the broader political economy of pharmaceuticals in which “the public health paradigm shifted from prevention to treatment access, [and] political rights have moved towards biologically-based rights” (Biehl and Eskerod 2009:10).

A focus on the political economy of drug development reveals that, in resuscitating intellectual property and establishing niche markets, racialized understandings of biological difference become the value added, as a justification for extending patent life. In “How a Drug Becomes ‘Ethnic’” (2004), Kahn describes how the role of law and commerce in creating race-based medicine becomes “masked both by well-meaning concerns about perceived health disparities and by an imprudent reliance on erroneous or incomplete statistical data” (2004:3). His in-depth case study of the first race-based prescription in the USA, BiDil, illuminates how legal and marketing imperatives incentivize racial packaging even, or especially, when the scientific grounds for doing so are shaky. As Rajan explains, “the more things get reduced to their molecular components … the more one needs to reply on statistical, population-based data to ‘individualize’ therapy. This means that one can individualize therapy only on the basis of population classifications” (2006:163). So although “personalized medicine” is the umbrella under which many of these practices fall, many analysts caution that race serves as a permanent “detour” to individualized treatments (Collier 2012). Kahn points out that as companies attempt to “tailor therapies ever more closely to the genetic profile of individuals or groups of consumers, identifying racial or ethnic correlations with disease are becoming big business” (2006:118). In terms of “tailoring” drugs to consumers, groups not individuals comprise the necessary markets.

In response, a number of postcolonial nations seek to control the terms in which researchers and pharmaceutical companies approach their populations as resources for genetic samples and as markets for new drugs by asserting “genomic sovereignty” over their population’s genome. In addition to the economic implications, proponents of genomic sovereignty in India and Mexico expressed a sense of exclusion from the US-based International Haplotype Mapping project, “a partnership of scientists and funding agencies from Canada, China, Japan, Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the United States to develop a public resource that w[ould] help researchers find genes associated with human disease and response to pharmaceuticals.”² As I have described elsewhere, scientists from a number of countries, including Mexico and India, questioned the generalizability of this initiative because it did not include samples from their populations (Benjamin 2009). In Mexico, where a Genomic Sovereignty amendment to the national constitution was passed, foreign researchers are subject to fines and prison time for collecting genetic samples without the necessary permission. Spokesmen for the new policy have made claims about the uniqueness of the “Mexican Genome” as a justification for protecting Mexican genetic samples (Schwartz-Marin and Restrepo 2013). Governments are approaching the genomic data produced from their citizens’ bodies as a national resource vulnerable to capitalist piracy, in the same way that plants and minerals have been regarded for some time (Hayden 2003; Foster 2014). In response, one US-based investor lamented that the expansion of Big Pharma in to foreign markets has “hit a roadblock: Nationalism” (D’Altorio 2011).

Some of the countries with genomic sovereignty policies are part of the “emerging seven” – China, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, Russia, India and Mexico – that global capital regards as its new “Promised Land” (Pharmaceutical Technology 2009). US business journals discuss this in terms of companies needing to develop strategies to capitalize on the “new” illnesses resulting from the higher standards of living in these societies. The financial consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) estimates that by 2020 the “emerging seven” may account for as much as one-fifth of global sales. PwC says “the number of diabetes suffers in India is projected to reach 73.5 million people by 2025, with the direct cost of treating each individual at about $420 per person per year, and that if these costs remain the same, India’s total bill for diabetes alone would be about $30 billion by 2025” (Pharmaceutical Technology 2009).

Montoya (2007) cautions that the “emerging market” trope is a “commonly accepted demographic truism,” and that to succeed, businesses must now appeal to the ethnic market. So instead of a standard regime of HIV treatment, for example, genomicists investigate how vaccines may differ among population subgroups because of genetic differences (Gonzalez et al. 2001). These genetic differences, in turn, are routinely mapped on to ethno-racial differences – a “strategic calibration” that is not simply careless reification of race but part of the long-term strategy of creating markets for drugs (Benjamin 2009). That is, part of what makes a product “novel, useful, non-obvious, and specific” (in the language of patent development) is the introduction of race as a genetic category. Precisely because social scientists have so thoroughly established the notion that race is socially constructed, intellectual property claims can rest on the logic of race-as-genetic because the latter appears to offer something new and valuable (Kahn 2013).

Whether it relates to Amerindians in Mexico or Dalits in India, political assertions about indigeneity and sovereignty are embedded in genomic claims about patrimony. But whose claims will gain traction as authoritative knowledge – those who exercise state power or those seeking to contest it – is directly tied to preexisting social hierarchies. Although this discussion highlights the role of epistemic dexterity as a feature of biopolitics, it is important to emphasize that not all assertions that draw upon genomics carry equal weight. As TallBear explains, “in the ‘real world’ of power and resource imbalances, in which some peoples’ ideas and knowledge are made to matter more than others, genetic markers and populations named and ordered by scientists play key roles in the history that has come to matter for the nation and increasingly the world” (2013:7). So while genomic findings are available to members of different social groups to make competing claims about belonging and personhood, and may on the surface appear empowering to disenfranchised groups, the extent to which those claims become authoritative depends, in part, on who directs the flow of political and economic resources in the first place.

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