How Culture and Science Make Race "Genetic": Motives and Strategies for Discrete Categorization of the Continuous and Heterogeneous

Scientists, medical personnel, and others have recently re-asserted the equivalence of human genetic variation and social categories of "race". This essay identifies strong cultural and scientific motives for creating, defending, and deploying that equivalence. However, the essay employs visual depictions of human genetic variation and critical analysis of scientific and lay vocabularies to show that human genetic variation has a complex structure that cannot be directly fit into a simple category set of race terms. The essay suggests that efforts to equate patterns of human genetic variation and social terms for "race" rely on the rhetorical strategies of casuistic stretching and the deployment of a mediating term through a two-step argumentative structure. The essay closes by discussing the difficulties involved in implementing social policies based on this procrustean category system, utilizing the case of the "race-based" heart disease drug Bi-Dil.