The
Philosophy
of Literary Form.
The Public Work of Rhetoric_nodrm
The contemporary version of this worldview understands human beings almost exclusively through animal models.
No other animal is subject to the variety and complexity of social, economic, and symbolic forces to which human beings are subjected.
Thus the animal models provide no reason to factor social structures into health outcomes.
Dr. Burchard has heard extensive, detailed critiques of "race" (at this round- table as well as at the "Defining Race" NIH In-House Conference in 2006), but these have moved him only to restate more adamantly what he already "knew," not to step back and reconsider the ways in which he was using the term "race. " I assert that this sense of certainty arises from at least three causes--his passionate commitment to helping Puerto Ricans, his highly con- temporary view that helping Puerto Ricans entails a stance that highlights difference rather than ignores it, and an understanding of what counts in sci- ence as a source of causation (that is, genes, not social structure).
I have used Dr. Burchard as an example here not to belittle him, for I have the greatest respect for his intelligence, his hard work, and his dedication to the health of Puerto Ricans. If there is error here, it is the paradigm that is errant, not the individual, and the relevant paradigm is the paradigm of sci- ence as currently constituted and as passed through the medical school filter.
130 Celeste M. Condit
I have come to believe that there is nothing I could write or say that would convince someone who cared passionately about the health of a minority group, and who accepted the current discursive framework of medical research, that he or she should abjure the utility of "race" in the study of medical genetics.
Scorecard
I have undertaken four major engagements with medical geneticists in an effort to get them to eschew the claim that race is genetic. I did so with the hope that by engaging rhetorically in the scientific realm, I could help stop the formation of a scientific consensus that would then be translated into the public realm as the indisputable scientific fact that race is genetic. I harbored no illusions that my efforts, on their own, would be sufficient. The scientific realm is large, with many players, and my voice is just one, able to be heard in few spaces. It is therefore difficult to evaluate these efforts. Who knows how things would have gone if many more people had engaged in a similar way at many more scientific venues? Nonetheless, a tenuous effort at evalua- tion is required for making any recommendations to others.
It appears to me that of the four engagements, two had some success. The engagement with the SNP consortium was as successful as I could have wished. Those who heard the argument appeared to make on-the-spot choices about what constituted "good science" that were, I believe, different than if I had not spoken. Individual speakers seemed to exhibit some uncertainty about their own labeling choices after listening to my presentation. It seems hard to ask for more from a single fifteen-minute speech. The engagement with the HapMap project achieved some visibility for a different way of labeling genetic variation data, and did so in a large, highly visible project, even if that visi- ble alternative was overwritten elsewhere by the older vocabularies we were trying to replace. One might hope that sustained efforts from multiple voices might ultimately be sufficient for normalizing the new ways of labeling.
These two positive results appear to be enormously encouraging for a pro- gram of rhetorical engagement in science, but that optimistic conclusion would overlook the fact that the audiences for these somewhat-successful engage- ments were scientists with little at stake in the racial labels. Both the HapMap and the SNP consortium truly could achieve their initial objectives with differ- ent (non-race-based) vocabularies and assumptions. Race was relatively tan- gential to the core of their research objectives, so they were willing to enact what they saw as good intentions to avoid what they were already convinced were racist ways of speaking. I simply provided a stimulus to breaking with inertia.
In contrast, with audiences who had more at stake--the medical research- ers working with minority communities--there appeared to be no success at all. These individuals defined their practice precisely in terms of what they
The Process of Remaking Race as Genetic 131
understood to be "race. " Although other people working with minority com- munities can shift to culturally based concepts of ethnicity that are more his- torically fluid and more open to social forces as a causative factor, medical personnel are not free to do that because their practice, their medical train- ing, and their science are defined in terms of bodies. They hold to the concept of race because it gives attention to the people about whom they care, and they impose upon race a genetic definition because biology is the only causal force their training permits them to employ.
The implication of this conjuncture is one that is not wholly novel, but perhaps deserves restatement--that scientific projects are neither simply uni- versal nor merely ideological, but task focused. Rhetorical efforts directed at correcting errors in such projects face the greatest difficulty when they inter- fere with central tasks to which a scientific research stream has been put. This task-focus has daunting implications with regard to the linkage between sci- ence and racism. Whenever science engages tasks that might be enhanced by grouping humans, the contemporary version of science may be predisposed to promote racism, because the contemporary version of science can only present groups as fixed physical entities that are genetically based, and such a version of human groups will, at the least, give aid and comfort to racism. This does not mean that the scientific project or goal is, in itself, racist. The task of ameliorating health disparities makes that point clear. It does mean, however, that the inability of science to envision categorical systems for humans that take account of changing socioenvironmental inputs to human biologies, and to treat the impacts of those socioenvironmental inputs on bodies as seriously as it treats genes, makes the current, restricted version of science prone to reproducing support for racism.
Broader Recommendations
In pursuing these rhetorical efforts, my team and I employed many of the classical tools of rhetorical theory, and we especially employed many of the insights of rhetorical studies of science. We focused on definitional processes35 and attended to audience's motives,36 to identities,37 and to subcommunity boundary marking. 38 Most important, we were scrupulously aware of generic constraints. 39 Rhetoricians have an almost anaphylactic reaction to doing experiments or using numbers, but this is the currency of the scientific realm, and to participate in the scientific sphere may require some use of these lan- guages and methods. At the least, using such methods and vocabularies may facilitate a hearing. If I had spent my fifteen minutes at the SNP conference using historical examples or ideological analyses to tell the conferees that their use of the term "race" might have bad effects promoting racism, I do not think it would have had nearly the impact that presenting them experimental results did. They believe experiments, so using experiments is probably the kind of proof that will have the greatest impact. In a broader sense, this is to say that
132 Celeste M. Condit
even in the technical or scientific sphere, one should argue, as Wayne Brock- riede put it, like a lover, not like an enemy. 40
This may be particularly crucial in technical fields because the zeitgeist of scientific argument is less welcoming of open conflict than that of many pub- lic venues. Furthermore, as Douglass Ehninger pointed out, the most authentic form of argument is one where you put your own beliefs at risk. 41 Through- out this engagement, I was never absolutely certain that my own beliefs were right. I always entertained the possibility that to end health disparities required outing "whiteness" and that a genetic diagnosis for "race" might do this. Although the engagements I undertook did not convince me of that, being open to the arguments of scientists like Dr. Burchard led me to understand the dynamics of the use of "race" in medicine in ways I would not have otherwise fathomed.
A second recommendation addresses the question of choice of audiences. I believed that I wanted to persuade the medical researchers themselves not to use constructions that linked genetics to race, but this was the most diffi- cult audience to persuade, and I was not successful at all with them. Perhaps the direct route is not always the best route in science (as it often is not in other realms). A more useful rhetorical strategy may consist of building allies within the scientific establishment from credentialed but less task-involved groups. Such experts are called by reporters to comment on such issues; they lead grant review groups, train students, and hire colleagues. Sometimes one cannot persuade the people on the other side of the boulder to stop pushing, but one can get others to jam up efforts on their side a bit. I am currently engaging in other activities of that sort.
Entering the largely alien scientific sphere to intervene "upstream" of the appearance of scientific products in the public sphere is a daunting endeavor. Understanding the scientific vocabularies and statistics with the level of knowl- edge necessary to be a credible conversant takes a substantial amount of time and effort. However, once these basics of common communication with the target community are absorbed, the rhetorical dynamics resemble strongly those in the public sphere, as rhetoricians of science have previously sug- gested. This means that activists trained in rhetorical theory wanting to shape scientific constructions already have many tools to draw upon. I hope that more rhetoricians will take up this task, as technological and scientifically based factors will inevitably continue to shape our futures.
Notes
1. Wade, "Race Is Seen. "
2. Risch et al. , "Categorization of Humans," 1-12.
3. Gould, Mismeasure of Man; Marks, Human Biodiversity.
4. Hamilton, "Am I Not a Man? "
5. Bix, "Experiences and Voices"; Hasain, Rhetoric of Eugenics. 6. Tucker, "Burt's Separated Twins. "
The Process of Remaking Race as Genetic 133
7. Berger, "Nazi Science"; Frank, "Rhetorical History. "
8. Farrell and Goodnight, "Accidental Rhetoric"; Killingsworth, "From Environmen- tal Rhetoric"; Segal, Health and the Rhetoric.
9. Ceccaeralli, Shaping Science with Rhetoric; Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures; Gross, Rhetoric of Science.
10. Hedgecoe, "Transforming Genes"; Rosner and Johnson, "Telling Stories"; van der Weele, "Images. "
11. Condit, "How Culture and Science"; Happe, "Rhetoric of Race"; Smart et al. , "Stan- dardization of Race. "
12. Peterson and Horton, "Rooted in the Soil. "
13. Sankar et al. , "Genetic Research. "
14. Condit, "How Culture and Science. "
15. Smedley, Stith, and Nelson, Unequal Treatment. I use capital letters to designate the
noun "White" as a racialized term, but do not capitalize it when it is an adjective or adverb. Failure to capitalize "White" and "Black" when other racial designations are capitalized (African American or Asian American) introduces an asymmetry that can be read as effacing the racial quality of whiteness.
16. Nakayama and Krizek, "Whiteness. "
17. Condit, "'Race' Is Not"; Condit, "How Culture and Science"; Condit, "Race and Genetics. "
18. Bevan et al. , "Informed Lay Preferences"; Condit et al. , "Attitudinal Barriers. " 19. Nguyen, Desta, and Flockhart, "Enhancing Race-Based Prescribing Precision. "
20. Condit et al. , "Attitudinal Barriers. "
21. Bevan et al. , "Informed Lay Preferences. "
22. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives.
23. Lee, Mountain, and Koenig, "Meanings of 'Race. '"
24. Condit et al. , "Role of 'Geneticis. '"
25. This meeting took place November 20-23, 2003, in Chantilly, Virginia.
26. See the HapMap Web site at www. HapMap. org.
27. See http://www. hapmap. org/citinghapmap. html. en for further information.
28. International HapMap Consortium, "Haplotype Map. "
29. This occurs in spite of the fact that the sole graphic presenting separate JPT data
seems to be quite different from the other groupings. Ibid. , Figure 6. 30. Montpetit et al. , "Evaluation. "
31. The latter data is now published. Lynch and Condit, "Genes and Race. " 32. Risch et al. , "Categorization of Humans. "
33. Joralemon and Cox, "Body Values. " Note especially page 32.
34. Segal, Health and the Rhetoric.
35. Lynch, "Making Room"; Taylor, Defining Science.
36. Reeves, "Owning a Virus"; Mitchell, "Sacrifice. "
37. Keller and Longino, Feminism and Science; Happe, "Rhetoric of Race. " 38. Sullivan, "Keeping the Rhetoric"; Taylor, Defining Science.
39. Ceccarelli, Shaping Science; Miller, "Genre as Social Action. "
40. Brockreide, "Arguers as Lovers. " 41. Ehninger, "Argument as Method. "
Works Cited
Berger, Robert L. "Nazi Science--The Dachau Hypothermia Experiments. " New England Journal of Medicine 322, no. 20 (1990): 1435-40.
134 Celeste M. Condit
Bevan, J. L. , J. A. Lynch, T. N. Dubriwny, T. M. Harris, P. J. Achter, A. L. Reeder, and C. M. Condit. "Informed Lay Preferences for Delivery of Racially Varied Pharmacoge- nomics. " Genetics in Medicine (2003): 393-99.
Bix, Amy Sue. "Experiences and Voices of Eugenics Field-Workers: 'Women's Work' in Biology. " Social Studies of Science 27 (1997): 625-68.
Brockriede, Wayne E. "Arguers as Lovers. " Philosophy & Rhetoric 5 (Winter 1972): 1-11. Burke, Kenneth.
The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1973.
------. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
Camus, Albert. "The Myth of Sisyphus. " In The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans-
lated by Justin O'Brien, 119-23. New York: Vintage International, 1983.
Ceccarelli, Leah. Shaping Science with Rhetoric: The Cases of Dobzhansky, Schro? dinger, and
Wilson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Condit, Celeste M. "La 'race' n'est pas un concept scientifique: Quelles sont les alterna-
tives? " ("Race" Is Not a Scientific Concept: Alternative Directions? ) L'observatoire de
la genetique. October 2005.
------. "How Culture and Science Make Race 'Genetic': Motives and Strategies for Dis-
crete Categorization of the Continuous and Heterogeneous. " Literature and Medicine
26 (2007): 240-68.
------. "Race and Genetics from a Modal Materialist Perspective. " Quarterly Journal of
Speech, in press.
Condit, Celeste M. , and B. Bates. "How Lay People Respond to Messages About Genet-
ics, Health, and Race. " Clinical Genetics (2005): 97-105.
Condit, Celeste M. , D. M. Condit, and P. Achter. "Human Equality, Affirmative Action
and Genetic Models of Human Variation. " Rhetoric and Public Affairs 4, no. 1 (2001):
85-108.
Condit, Celeste M. , R. L. Parrott, T. M. Harris, J. A. Lynch, and T. Dubriwny. "The Role
of 'Geneticis' in Popular Understandings of Race in the United States. " Public Under-
standing of Science 13 (2004): 249-72.
Condit, Celeste M. , A. Templeton, B. R. Bates, J. L. Bevan, and T. M. Harris. "Attitudinal
Barriers to Delivery of Race-Targeted Pharmacogenomics among Informed Lay Per-
sons. " Genetics in Medicine 5 (2003): 385-92.
Ehninger, Douglas. "Argument as Method: Its Nature, Its Limitations and Its Uses. "
Speech Monographs 37, no. 2 (1970): 101-11.
Fahnestock, Jeanne. Rhetorical Figures in Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Farrell, T. B. , and G. T. Goodnight. "Accidental Rhetoric: The Root Metaphors of Three
Mile Island. " Quarterly Journal of Speech 48 (1981): 271-301.
Frank, Robert E. "A Rhetorical History of the 1989 Revolution in the German Demo-
cratic Republic: Calling for the People. " Ph. D. diss. , University of Georgia, 1995. Gould, Stephen J. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton, 1981.
Gross, Alan. The Rhetoric of Science. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1990. Hamilton, Cynthia S. "'Am I Not a Man and a Brother? ' Phrenology and Anti-slavery. "
Slavery and Abolition 29 (2008): 173-87.
Happe, Kelly E. "The Rhetoric of Race in Breast Cancer Research. " Patterns of Prejudice
40 (2006): 461-80.
Hasian, M. The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought. Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1996.
Hedgecoe, Adam M. "Transforming Genes: Metaphors of Information and Language in
Modern Genetics. " Science as Culture 8 (1999): 209-29.
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International HapMap Consortium. "A Haplotype Map of the Human Genome. " Nature 27 (October 2005): 1299-1320.
Joralemon, Donald, and Phil Cox. "Body Values: The Case against Compensating for Transplant Organs. " Hastings Center Report 33, no. 1 (2003): 27-33.
Keller, Evelyn Fox, and Helen E. Longino, eds. Feminism and Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Kilingsworth, M. Jimmie. "From Environmental Rhetoric to Ecocomposition and Ecopoetics. " Technical Communication Quarterly 14 (2005): 359-73.
Lee, S. S. , J. Mountain, and B. A. Koenig. "The Meanings of 'Race' in the New Genomics: Implications for Health Disparities Research. " Yale Journal of Health Policy Law Ethic 1 (2001): 33-75.
Lynch, John A. "Making Room for Stem Cells: Dissociation and Establishing New Research Objects. " Argumentation and Advocacy 42 (2006): 143-56.
Lynch, John A. , and Celeste M. Condit. "Genes and Race in the News: A Test of Com- peting Theories of News Coverage. " American Journal of Health Behavior 30 (2006): 125-35.
Marks, Jonathon. Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995.
Miller, Carolyn R. "Genre as Social Action. " Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151-67. Mitchell, Robert. "Sacrifice, Individuation, and the Economics of Genomics. " Literature
and Medicine 26 (2007): 126-58.
Montpetit A. , M. Nelis, P. Laflamme, R. Magi, X Ke, M. Remm, L. Cardon, T. J. Hudson,
and Metspalu, J. P. "An Evaluation of the Performance of Tag SNPs Derived from
HapMap in a Caucasian Population. " Plos Genetics 2, no. 3 (March 2006): e27. Nakayama, T. , and R. Krizek. "Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric. " Quarterly Journal of Speech
81 (1995): 291-309.
National Institutes of Health. Defining Race and Ethnicity in Biomedical and Behavioral
Research. Bethesda, Md. : NIH, April 18, 2006. MPEG. http://videocast. nih. gov/Sum-
mary. asp? File=13179 (accessed April 18, 2006).
Nguyen, A. , Z. Desta, and D. A. Flockhart. "Enhancing Race-Based Prescribing Precision
with Pharmacogenomics. " Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics 81 (2007): 323-25. Peterson, Tarla Rai, and Cristi Choat Horton. "Rooted in the Soil: How Understanding the Perspectives of Landowners Can Enhance the Management of Environmental
Disputes. " Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 139-66.
Reeves, Carol. "Owning a Virus: The Rhetoric of Scientific Discovery Accounts. " In Land-
mark Essays on Rhetoric of Science: Case Studies, edited by Randy Allen Harris, 151-65.
Mahwah, N. J. : Hermagoras Press, 1997.
Risch N. , E. Burchard, E. Ziv, and H. Tang. "Categorization of Humans in Biomedical
Research: Genes, Race and Disease. " Genome Biology 3 (2002): 12.
Rosner, M. , and T. R. Johnson. "Telling Stories: Metaphors of the Human Genome Proj-
ect. " Hypatia 10 (Fall 1995): 104-29.
Sankar, Pamela, Mildred Cho, Celeste Condit, Linda M. Hunt, Barbara Koenig, Patricia
Marshall, Sandra Lee, and Paul Spicer. "Genetic Research and Health Disparities. "
Journal of the American Medical Association 291 (2004): 2985-89.
Dr. Burchard has heard extensive, detailed critiques of "race" (at this round- table as well as at the "Defining Race" NIH In-House Conference in 2006), but these have moved him only to restate more adamantly what he already "knew," not to step back and reconsider the ways in which he was using the term "race. " I assert that this sense of certainty arises from at least three causes--his passionate commitment to helping Puerto Ricans, his highly con- temporary view that helping Puerto Ricans entails a stance that highlights difference rather than ignores it, and an understanding of what counts in sci- ence as a source of causation (that is, genes, not social structure).
I have used Dr. Burchard as an example here not to belittle him, for I have the greatest respect for his intelligence, his hard work, and his dedication to the health of Puerto Ricans. If there is error here, it is the paradigm that is errant, not the individual, and the relevant paradigm is the paradigm of sci- ence as currently constituted and as passed through the medical school filter.
130 Celeste M. Condit
I have come to believe that there is nothing I could write or say that would convince someone who cared passionately about the health of a minority group, and who accepted the current discursive framework of medical research, that he or she should abjure the utility of "race" in the study of medical genetics.
Scorecard
I have undertaken four major engagements with medical geneticists in an effort to get them to eschew the claim that race is genetic. I did so with the hope that by engaging rhetorically in the scientific realm, I could help stop the formation of a scientific consensus that would then be translated into the public realm as the indisputable scientific fact that race is genetic. I harbored no illusions that my efforts, on their own, would be sufficient. The scientific realm is large, with many players, and my voice is just one, able to be heard in few spaces. It is therefore difficult to evaluate these efforts. Who knows how things would have gone if many more people had engaged in a similar way at many more scientific venues? Nonetheless, a tenuous effort at evalua- tion is required for making any recommendations to others.
It appears to me that of the four engagements, two had some success. The engagement with the SNP consortium was as successful as I could have wished. Those who heard the argument appeared to make on-the-spot choices about what constituted "good science" that were, I believe, different than if I had not spoken. Individual speakers seemed to exhibit some uncertainty about their own labeling choices after listening to my presentation. It seems hard to ask for more from a single fifteen-minute speech. The engagement with the HapMap project achieved some visibility for a different way of labeling genetic variation data, and did so in a large, highly visible project, even if that visi- ble alternative was overwritten elsewhere by the older vocabularies we were trying to replace. One might hope that sustained efforts from multiple voices might ultimately be sufficient for normalizing the new ways of labeling.
These two positive results appear to be enormously encouraging for a pro- gram of rhetorical engagement in science, but that optimistic conclusion would overlook the fact that the audiences for these somewhat-successful engage- ments were scientists with little at stake in the racial labels. Both the HapMap and the SNP consortium truly could achieve their initial objectives with differ- ent (non-race-based) vocabularies and assumptions. Race was relatively tan- gential to the core of their research objectives, so they were willing to enact what they saw as good intentions to avoid what they were already convinced were racist ways of speaking. I simply provided a stimulus to breaking with inertia.
In contrast, with audiences who had more at stake--the medical research- ers working with minority communities--there appeared to be no success at all. These individuals defined their practice precisely in terms of what they
The Process of Remaking Race as Genetic 131
understood to be "race. " Although other people working with minority com- munities can shift to culturally based concepts of ethnicity that are more his- torically fluid and more open to social forces as a causative factor, medical personnel are not free to do that because their practice, their medical train- ing, and their science are defined in terms of bodies. They hold to the concept of race because it gives attention to the people about whom they care, and they impose upon race a genetic definition because biology is the only causal force their training permits them to employ.
The implication of this conjuncture is one that is not wholly novel, but perhaps deserves restatement--that scientific projects are neither simply uni- versal nor merely ideological, but task focused. Rhetorical efforts directed at correcting errors in such projects face the greatest difficulty when they inter- fere with central tasks to which a scientific research stream has been put. This task-focus has daunting implications with regard to the linkage between sci- ence and racism. Whenever science engages tasks that might be enhanced by grouping humans, the contemporary version of science may be predisposed to promote racism, because the contemporary version of science can only present groups as fixed physical entities that are genetically based, and such a version of human groups will, at the least, give aid and comfort to racism. This does not mean that the scientific project or goal is, in itself, racist. The task of ameliorating health disparities makes that point clear. It does mean, however, that the inability of science to envision categorical systems for humans that take account of changing socioenvironmental inputs to human biologies, and to treat the impacts of those socioenvironmental inputs on bodies as seriously as it treats genes, makes the current, restricted version of science prone to reproducing support for racism.
Broader Recommendations
In pursuing these rhetorical efforts, my team and I employed many of the classical tools of rhetorical theory, and we especially employed many of the insights of rhetorical studies of science. We focused on definitional processes35 and attended to audience's motives,36 to identities,37 and to subcommunity boundary marking. 38 Most important, we were scrupulously aware of generic constraints. 39 Rhetoricians have an almost anaphylactic reaction to doing experiments or using numbers, but this is the currency of the scientific realm, and to participate in the scientific sphere may require some use of these lan- guages and methods. At the least, using such methods and vocabularies may facilitate a hearing. If I had spent my fifteen minutes at the SNP conference using historical examples or ideological analyses to tell the conferees that their use of the term "race" might have bad effects promoting racism, I do not think it would have had nearly the impact that presenting them experimental results did. They believe experiments, so using experiments is probably the kind of proof that will have the greatest impact. In a broader sense, this is to say that
132 Celeste M. Condit
even in the technical or scientific sphere, one should argue, as Wayne Brock- riede put it, like a lover, not like an enemy. 40
This may be particularly crucial in technical fields because the zeitgeist of scientific argument is less welcoming of open conflict than that of many pub- lic venues. Furthermore, as Douglass Ehninger pointed out, the most authentic form of argument is one where you put your own beliefs at risk. 41 Through- out this engagement, I was never absolutely certain that my own beliefs were right. I always entertained the possibility that to end health disparities required outing "whiteness" and that a genetic diagnosis for "race" might do this. Although the engagements I undertook did not convince me of that, being open to the arguments of scientists like Dr. Burchard led me to understand the dynamics of the use of "race" in medicine in ways I would not have otherwise fathomed.
A second recommendation addresses the question of choice of audiences. I believed that I wanted to persuade the medical researchers themselves not to use constructions that linked genetics to race, but this was the most diffi- cult audience to persuade, and I was not successful at all with them. Perhaps the direct route is not always the best route in science (as it often is not in other realms). A more useful rhetorical strategy may consist of building allies within the scientific establishment from credentialed but less task-involved groups. Such experts are called by reporters to comment on such issues; they lead grant review groups, train students, and hire colleagues. Sometimes one cannot persuade the people on the other side of the boulder to stop pushing, but one can get others to jam up efforts on their side a bit. I am currently engaging in other activities of that sort.
Entering the largely alien scientific sphere to intervene "upstream" of the appearance of scientific products in the public sphere is a daunting endeavor. Understanding the scientific vocabularies and statistics with the level of knowl- edge necessary to be a credible conversant takes a substantial amount of time and effort. However, once these basics of common communication with the target community are absorbed, the rhetorical dynamics resemble strongly those in the public sphere, as rhetoricians of science have previously sug- gested. This means that activists trained in rhetorical theory wanting to shape scientific constructions already have many tools to draw upon. I hope that more rhetoricians will take up this task, as technological and scientifically based factors will inevitably continue to shape our futures.
Notes
1. Wade, "Race Is Seen. "
2. Risch et al. , "Categorization of Humans," 1-12.
3. Gould, Mismeasure of Man; Marks, Human Biodiversity.
4. Hamilton, "Am I Not a Man? "
5. Bix, "Experiences and Voices"; Hasain, Rhetoric of Eugenics. 6. Tucker, "Burt's Separated Twins. "
The Process of Remaking Race as Genetic 133
7. Berger, "Nazi Science"; Frank, "Rhetorical History. "
8. Farrell and Goodnight, "Accidental Rhetoric"; Killingsworth, "From Environmen- tal Rhetoric"; Segal, Health and the Rhetoric.
9. Ceccaeralli, Shaping Science with Rhetoric; Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures; Gross, Rhetoric of Science.
10. Hedgecoe, "Transforming Genes"; Rosner and Johnson, "Telling Stories"; van der Weele, "Images. "
11. Condit, "How Culture and Science"; Happe, "Rhetoric of Race"; Smart et al. , "Stan- dardization of Race. "
12. Peterson and Horton, "Rooted in the Soil. "
13. Sankar et al. , "Genetic Research. "
14. Condit, "How Culture and Science. "
15. Smedley, Stith, and Nelson, Unequal Treatment. I use capital letters to designate the
noun "White" as a racialized term, but do not capitalize it when it is an adjective or adverb. Failure to capitalize "White" and "Black" when other racial designations are capitalized (African American or Asian American) introduces an asymmetry that can be read as effacing the racial quality of whiteness.
16. Nakayama and Krizek, "Whiteness. "
17. Condit, "'Race' Is Not"; Condit, "How Culture and Science"; Condit, "Race and Genetics. "
18. Bevan et al. , "Informed Lay Preferences"; Condit et al. , "Attitudinal Barriers. " 19. Nguyen, Desta, and Flockhart, "Enhancing Race-Based Prescribing Precision. "
20. Condit et al. , "Attitudinal Barriers. "
21. Bevan et al. , "Informed Lay Preferences. "
22. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives.
23. Lee, Mountain, and Koenig, "Meanings of 'Race. '"
24. Condit et al. , "Role of 'Geneticis. '"
25. This meeting took place November 20-23, 2003, in Chantilly, Virginia.
26. See the HapMap Web site at www. HapMap. org.
27. See http://www. hapmap. org/citinghapmap. html. en for further information.
28. International HapMap Consortium, "Haplotype Map. "
29. This occurs in spite of the fact that the sole graphic presenting separate JPT data
seems to be quite different from the other groupings. Ibid. , Figure 6. 30. Montpetit et al. , "Evaluation. "
31. The latter data is now published. Lynch and Condit, "Genes and Race. " 32. Risch et al. , "Categorization of Humans. "
33. Joralemon and Cox, "Body Values. " Note especially page 32.
34. Segal, Health and the Rhetoric.
35. Lynch, "Making Room"; Taylor, Defining Science.
36. Reeves, "Owning a Virus"; Mitchell, "Sacrifice. "
37. Keller and Longino, Feminism and Science; Happe, "Rhetoric of Race. " 38. Sullivan, "Keeping the Rhetoric"; Taylor, Defining Science.
39. Ceccarelli, Shaping Science; Miller, "Genre as Social Action. "
40. Brockreide, "Arguers as Lovers. " 41. Ehninger, "Argument as Method. "
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