That Andrew Sullivan, in 2020, believes that sickle cell is a race-linked trait is simultaneously flabbergasting and utterly inevitable.
(I’m on a bus on my way to dinner with my kids, so can’t elaborate at length. But quickly, SC is a geographically linked trait, more common in some “white” populations than some “black” ones. It’s not a racial trait.)
Okay. Back from dinner. A little more on this.
Sickle cell is common in places where there's a lot of malaria, for easily googlable reasons, and uncommon in places where there isn't. Which, in the US, correlates with "common in people of African descent, not in people of European descent." But that's an accident of history.
Imagine a town in the USA that was founded by Sicilian immigrants in the early 20th century, with a recently-arrived black population of immigrants from Zimbabwe. In that town, doctors would learn quickly to treat sickle cell as a "white disease."
To put it another way: It's likely that Americans whose last names end in vowels have higher sickle cell rates than Americans whose last names don't. Does that mean that "last name ends in a vowel" is a scientifically coherent racial category? Of course it doesn't.
The question isn't whether, on average, in the aggregate, black Americans have a higher preponderance of ANY genetically-linked trait than white Americans, because that question's answer is so obvious as to be fatuous. (Curly hair! Brown eyes!)
The question is whether the 19th century conception of race as a coherent scientific—not sociocultural, but biological and genetic—category is sustainable in the 21st century. And the answer to THAT question is no.
And for Sullivan to offer "but sickle cell!" as a riposte to that answer is an indication of just how unserious, how sophomoric, how unrigorous, his thinking on this subject is.
Sullivan presents himself as an iconoclast on the subject of race and genetics, and that lulls some people into thinking he actually understands the subject and is Asking Important But Taboo Questions. He doesn't and he isn't.
Just one more quick thing: Apparently, according to the prevailing scientific view, the sickle cell mutation is actually at least FOUR different mutations, which arose at at least four different times in four different places, three of them in Africa. link.springer.com/article/10.100…
So not only do we know that there are regions of Africa where sickle cell is absent, and regions outside of Africa where it's present, but it's also apparently the case that sickle cell has independent genetic origins in a bunch of different places.
And for the yoyos swarming my mentions to insist that Sullivan was right—that he was making a narrow, measured, technical argument, and that I'm misrepresenting him, I have only one question. It's a simple one.
Do you agree that the 19th century conception of race as a coherent scientific category—as a category whose essence is biological and genetic rather than social and cultural—is intellectually unsustainable?
That's it. That's the question on the table. Everything else is guff.
(I would have saved myself considerable irritation over the last twelve hours, BTW, if I'd waited until I was off the bus to send the first tweet in the thread. If I had, I'd have written it as "race-dependent," not "race-linked." Consider this an errata slip.)
