Update 2025: This 2012 post anticipated intensifying debates about race and genetics in the 2012-2017 period. The battles did come, but not quite as predicted. Rather than “ethnobiogeny” debates about genetic differences in moralized traits, the major conflicts emerged as political backlash: attacks on Critical Race Theory, dismantling of DEI programs, and white grievance politics culminating in the political realignments of 2016 and 2024. The genetic debates (Nicholas Wade 2014, David Reich 2018) happened but were overshadowed by broader culture wars over racial justice. Anthropology remained largely fragmented and sidelined from these public debates, neither achieving four-field unity nor offering a coherent public message.
For comprehensive current coverage of race and racism, see the Race and Racism in Anthropology page, which covers biological origins, colonial categories, structural racism, colorism, and white supremacy as analytical term.
Race Reconciled: Re-Debunking Race
In 2012, the late Professor Henry C. Harpending commented on this blog about race and human variation, prompting a deeper look at anthropological work on these issues. The 2009 special issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Race Reconciled, brought together geneticists, forensic anthropologists, and biological anthropologists to re-examine race in light of new genetic data.
Key Articles from Race Reconciled
John H. Relethford’s “Race and global patterns of phenotypic variation” deals with skin color as completely clinal and craniometrics where more clustering is apparent, but nevertheless affirms race is “a culturally constructed label that crudely and imprecisely describes real variation” (2009:20).
Keith L. Hunley, Meghan E. Healy, and Jeffrey C. Long, The global pattern of gene identity variation reveals a history of long-range migrations, bottlenecks, and local mate exchange: Implications for biological race, explain “how lumpy the pudding is,” finding neither extreme isolation-by-distance nor serial founder effects, but a combination of these approaches.
Forensic anthropology contributions were particularly fascinating. Ousley et al., Understanding race and human variation: Why forensic anthropologists are good at identifying race, detail how forensic anthropologists can distinguish bones by many criteria: “white males born between 1840 and 1890 can be separated from white males born 1930 to 1980 very well, and they are distinguished by time, and would appear to qualify as different races” (2009:74). This leads them to conclude “there are so many possible distinctive biological races that the concept is virtually meaningless” (2009:74).
Konigsberg et al., Estimation and evidence in forensic anthropology: Sex and race, show how the same set of bones could be identified as Easter Islander, white, Black, or Pacific Islander depending entirely on the context of probabilities. They conclude that “forensic anthropologists are not particularly adept at identifying races when they must deal with a very heterogeneous population at large, and this is the one setting in which a definitive racial identification would be useful” (2009:86).
Clarence C. Gravlee’s How race becomes biology: Embodiment of social inequality provides a way for science to address the lived experience of race:
The toxic effects of exposure to racism in one’s own lifetime include a higher risk of hypertension, diabetes, stroke, and other conditions. These conditions, in turn, affect the health of the next generation, because they alter the quality of the fetal and early postnatal environment. The immediate consequence of this intergenerational effect is a higher risk of adverse birth outcomes, but there is also a lingering effect into adulthood, as adult chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes can be traced in part to prenatal and early life conditions. Thus, the cycle begins again. (2009:52)
Measuring Human Genetic Diversity
Guido Barbujani and Vincenza Colonna’s Human genome diversity: frequently asked questions (2010) provides measurements of human genetic variation:
More recent work suggests that the human species’ FST could actually be lower, between 0.05 and 0.13 for autosomal SNPs, in other words between one-third and one-half of that observed in gorilla (Gorilla gorilla; FST = 0.38) and between Western and Eastern chimpanzee (FST = 0.32) despite humans occupying a much broader geographic area. In short, not only do humans show the lowest species diversity among primates but are also subdivided into populations that are more closely related than any other primate species, with the possible exception of bonobos (Pan paniscus). (2010:14)
The Prediction That Didn’t Quite Land
In 2012, I was concerned about what psychologist Jonathan Haidt predicted in 2009:
I believe that the “Bell Curve” wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this “war” will break out between 2012 and 2017. (Faster evolution means more ethnic differences)
Haidt anticipated debates about “ethnobiogeny”—ethnicity-as-genetics arguments about moralized behavioral traits. This was connected to research by Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending, and John Hawks showing accelerated human genomic change in recent millennia, documented in their 2007 article Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution.
My prediction was that “2012-2017 will either be when anthropology re-discovers its four-field holism and purpose… or when anthropology ceases to be a coherent discipline, eviscerated into camps that are unable to agree on a meaningful message or are simply peripheral to these debates.”
The timing was right—intensifying debates about race and genetics did emerge in this period (Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance 2014, David Reich’s NYT op-ed 2018). But the major battles took a different form: not genetic debates about moralized traits, but political backlash against racial justice movements through attacks on Critical Race Theory, dismantling of DEI programs, and mobilization of white grievance politics. Anthropology indeed remained fragmented and largely peripheral to these public debates.
Related Resources
Comprehensive overview: Race and Racism in Anthropology – Complete coverage from biological origins and colonial categories to structural racism, colorism, and white supremacy as analytical term.
Contemporary perspectives:
- Race Revival (2011) – How attacks on anthropology failed to address structural racism
- Social Construction of Race = Conservative Goldmine (2012) – Why anthropology’s message failed politically
On embodiment and inequality:
- Race Becomes Biology, Inequality Embodied – Clarence Gravlee’s work on how structural racism creates biological effects
- Whiteness as Unmarked Category (2024) – White privilege, intersectionality, and institutional racism mechanisms
Broader context: Power Analysis – Understanding how power systems create and maintain structural inequality