The Return of Biology

This chapter analyzes the complex and ambivalent implications of the post-Human Genome Project “return of biology” for the theory and practice of race and ethnicity. Genetically informed accounts of difference risk reinforcing essentialist understandings of identity; yet they can also serve to undermine notions of racial or ethnic purity, highlighting instead the inextricable mixedness of all human populations and the genetic uniqueness of every individual. The chapter traces developments in biomedical research, forensics, genetic genealogy, and identity politics, and it concludes by outlining a constructivist response to the new objectivist and naturalist accounts of race and ethnicity.