A Critical Analysis of Racial Categories in the Age of Genomics Book

This introduction discusses perspectives on race after the genomics revolution, which posed a serious question to those who had accepted the synthetic or nonnatural foundations of the idea and the phenomenon of race. Some argued that the new genomics data affirmed either the existence of biologically distinctive human subgroups or the need to use these new findings to address apparent health disparities along racial lines. Although some scholars have argued that we should discard the idea of race altogether, the fact remains that it is a widely used concept in social reality. Due to the tensions between biological, medical, and genetic understandings of race, there is no term that properly describes the distinction between a genetically rooted racial concept and a socioculturally rooted racial concept. A new concept, clusivity, is proposed here to make analytical distinctions for further explorations of race in the postgenomic age.