A few days ago I wrote "White supremacists have historically regarded everyone who isn't 'white' as 'black,' and the N-word has been flung at people of many backgrounds." I was a bit vague because although I knew I'd seen it, I didn't have any examples to hand.
The next day I began reading Ruined City, a 1938 novel by Nevil Shute, who's best known nowadays for his 1957 post-nuclear war novel On the Beach. Ruined City is about a successful English banker named David Warren whose life is derailed when he learns that his wife has been having an affair with an Arab prince. Everyone refers to the prince as "black," including Warren, who in a fit of anger drops an N-bomb but then corrects himself. "In that he was unjust, and he knew it; among the six or seven strains that went to make Prince Ali there was no negro blood." That's actually funny - as if it wouldn't be unjust if Ali did have "negro blood" - but I don't think Shute meant it to be.
This terminology is, I believe, more common in British writing than in American, and it's why it's often difficult to tell which race/ethnicity a character is meant to be - for example, Othello - because the writers are sloppy and don't care. The scientifically-minded Shute (he was an aeronautical engineer and several of his novels deal with flying machines) cared enough to be exact in his labeling, but that led to comedy, as it still does. (Are "Hispanics" a "race"? Are Sunni and Shi'a Muslims "ethnicities"?) Most scientists in Shute's heyday held beliefs about race/ethnicity (and sex/gender) that are considered embarrassing today, but they are still with us in slightly different forms.
Although many people, and I include scientists here, are desperate to preserve race as a valid category, I've yet to see any persuasive case made to do that. I can't find the public-radio program that touted BiDil, a handsomely-funded drug for heart failure that claimed to be more effective for "patients who identify as black." It was boosted even before the FDA approved it in 2005, but it bombed, for several reasons. One, it was overpriced, and since it was just a combination of already existing generics, insurance companies substituted the generics. Two, "in every study, however, the amount of variation within each racial group was far larger than the differences between the between the groups ... As a result, 80 to 95 percent of all black and white patients will likely have indistinguishable responses to each medication. Although racial differences might exist, they are irrelevant for the majority of patients" (167). "Whatever the causes of its failure, NitroMed laid off most of its workforce and stopped marketing BiDil in January 2008 [165]."
Despite this, BiDil continues to be touted as a road not taken, if only in principle; GoodRx, the drug discount site, still recommended it as late as 2023. "Some Doctors Want to Change How Race Is Used in Medicine," this NPR podcast reported in 2022, surprised that some doctors don't want to change, because they believe that there are black kidneys and white kidneys. It's tempting, and comfortable for many people, to see racism as a problem only among ignorant hillbillies, but that notion doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Many highly-educated people, not all of them white, won't give up their belief in racial difference until you pry it from their cold, dead hands; and even then, a new generation takes it up.
I don't object to treating "race" as a scientific category because of "political correctness," or even from scientific correctness, though it has been debunked enough times that if you believe in Science you shouldn't rely on it. What I want to know is how it's a useful category, and by "useful" I don't mean "useful for making a billion dollars by repackaging existing generics." I mean something like what bearing it has on any issue of scientific significance. (See the quotations from Noam Chomsky in this post.) What I've seen so far is a complacent assumption that it must be significant somehow, even if no one has any idea what or how.
* David Jones, "The Prospects of Personalized Medicine," in Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense, ed. Sheldon Krimsky & Jeremy Gruber (Harvard, 2013), p. 163. Future page numbers refer to this article.
