Catherine Lee
Catherine Lee is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Faculty Associate at the Institute for Health at Rutgers University. Her research areas include race and ethnicity, gender, immigration, law and society, and health and medicine.
She is currently finishing a book on family reunification in immigration policy from the mid-nineteenth century to today and examining the construction of race and ethnicity in biomedicine and health policy.
Abstract
“Challenges to the Social Constructionist View of Race
in the
Post-Genomic Era”
Groundbreaking studies of race and ethnicity
such as Racial
Formation in the United States demonstrated the social
and political basis of these concepts. This scholarship helped
to firmly cement social construction as the prevailing perspective
in the social sciences for researching race and ethnicity.
Despite its seemingly unquestioned dominance, there are two
potentially threatening challenges to the continued preeminence
of social constructionism in the social sciences.
One
challenge arises from the apparent success of social constructionism
itself. Stated as some sort of sociological mantra, a reference
to social constructionism can sideline more critical analyses
of race-making processes, reducing race to a static, essential
category. How can race scholarship continue to capture dynamic
and fluid, not rigid, relations and processes? The second challenge
comes from the growing salience of biological, and even genetic,
interpretations of race. Scientific breakthroughs such as the
completion of the Human Genome Project and new developments
in biomedical research such as pharmacogenomics are challenging
a strict constructionist view of race. Do findings of genetic
variation or formulations of an “ethnic drug” impugn the view
that race is a social construction?
This paper
considers these questions and developments by looking in depth
at the impact of increased immigration and shifting demographics
in the post-1965 era and at studies of racial difference in
science and medicine. The paper examines the assumptions about
race that immigration scholars make in suggesting that the
United States is experiencing a shift in the “color line” that
marks the line of significance in its racialized hierarchy
from white/non-white to black/non-black. While attempting to
capture the fluidity and historical variability of the meaning
of race, many of these works have essentialized race. The paper
also explores how biomedical researchers use race in their
investigations and uncovers that scientists elide social and
biological constructions of race, which lead to fuzzy and imprecise
meanings in addition to biological reductionism. The paper
concludes by exploring whether these considerations are unique
to this post-1965, post-genomic era and considers how scholarship
on race can move forward given the challenges to the social
constructionist view of race.
This topic will be presented on Friday, April 17th at 10:15 a.m. as part of the Panel I discussion "Race, Otherness and the Body."
Select Publications
“‘Race’ and ‘Ethnicity’ in Biomedical Research: How do Scientists Construct and Explain Difference in Health?” forthcoming in Social Science and Medicine, 2009.
“Discriminatory Charging Practices in the San Joaquin County: Examining Race, Ethnicity, and the Death Penalty," Journal of Criminal Justice 35(1):17, 2007.
“The Value of Life in Death: Multiple Regression and Event History Analyses of Homicide Clearance in Los Angeles County,” Journal of Criminal Justice 33(6):527, 2005.
“International Norms and Domestic Politics: A Comparison of Migrant Worker and Women's Rights in South Korea” with Dong-Hoon Seol and John D. Skrentny, Korean Studies Forum 1(1):139, 2002.
“Assessing the Capriciousness of Death Penalty Charging” with Robert Weiss and Richard Berk, Law and Society Review 30 (3): 607, 1996.
