sneaky racism and COVID19 vaccines

3 june

There are many ways to argue against racism. But if you ask any biologist, more or less without thinking she will tell you that the concept of race has no biological reality. If you can not classify people in well defined boxes, then to attribute any trait to any such box is kinda silly, to say the least.

 

The idea behind the biologist reasoning is that if we place people in few of those boxes, and start to measure them, we realize that there is more variation inside the boxes, that between them. So the boxes are not coherent. Imagine that you define two boxes, black skin and white skin. So you go out on the street and make two groups of persons. And then you measure, to begin somewhere, height. You will soon discover that there will be a difference in height (likely to be that black people is taller) but then you will discover that there are some few white people taller that the average of the black people, and some short black ones. To make it more interesting, if you are doing this in The Netherlands, white people are likely to be taller in average (the other way around than in most other countries) So the box skin color orders people, but the box height makes that ordering wrong: you cannnot predict the height of a person knowing her skin color. What’s the use of the box skin color, then?  

That argument is what we biologists have in mind when we say that races do not exist. Obviously you can say that somebody is black, or white, but that classification is pretty useless to predict anything else. And that without starting on the shades of color that skins have. Where do you put a guy like me, not white, nor black, with some mediterranean, some south american aboriginals and some african ancestors? 

And yet, and yet. Of course we want to understand the world out there, and alas, for many of us understand is equivalent to classify, to order reality in boxes. Besides, boxing reality does not have to end up in genocide. It might also help us to realize that there are groups of people in our societies that are structurally discriminated. For different clients I myself have shown that migrants in general and persons with surinamese family is discriminated in the Dutch labor market. So the boxes, even when incoherent for many things, are coherent for others, that could and should make us improve our societies, let alone understand it. 

And yet, and yet. I did sit to write these lines after reading a defense of the use of the Janssen vaccines against COVID19. The argument was that Janssen have been tried in different races, so it is presumably better than other vaccines available. I point the mistaken use of the word race to the writer, and he swiftly thanked me, and said that the Janssen vaccine indeed has been tested with different ethnicities. Ah, ethnicities. Wonders of wonders, online you can read reports on the Janssen epidemiological trials. It was indeed tested in different ethnic groups. But what does that mean? And why does it matters? 

It means pretty much nothing. And still matters. 

The thing is that the ethnic categories that the trials choose are fairly meaningless. They have categories indeed recognizable as ethnic: black, white or american indian; and geographical categories like inhabitant of the USA, South America or South Africa. But think again in the boxes of above. How could we even believe that these six boxes mentioned here cover the differences of humanity? How could I know that somebody like me was actually in the trials and did not die, nor had serious negative effects after having received the vaccine? 

Well, the answer is short. I can’t. There is no guarantee that these boxes “get” me. 

And yet. Given that we know that there are no good boxes out there, but many boxes of different sizes and materials, if I would have been the designer of the trial I would also have tried to spread my sample in whatever boxes the country that I work in calls ethnic group, place of origin or anything alike. Because I do not know if I can catch all the human variation in my trials, but you can bet that I am going to try. 

So here we are, in the messy reality. Races don’t exist, but human variation does. In the face of a pandemic, or the racism that still poisons our societies, we need to account for that variation. The boxes that we can create offer no guarantee of anything. They are proxies, proxies for our fears, or our strengths. 

Is up to us how do we use them.