Race as Witchcraft. An Argument against Indiscriminate Eliminativism about Race

In this chapter we address the problem of whether we should adhere to indiscriminate radical eliminativism about race and erase any reference to human race from scientific and medical discourse. Our answer is that total and indiscriminate eliminativism would be a mistake. Our position, however, is not based on the thesis that there are such things as human races. Quite the contrary, we show that the response coming from the sole field of study entitled to determine the ontological status of human races, i.e. population genetics, is that, loosely speaking, there are not such things as races. Still this conclusion should not put an end to the story. Also if race is on a par with witchcraft, we show not only that there are some phenomena that we cannot adequately explain without resorting to a non-referring concept, but also that some of these phenomena are biological phenomena. In particular, race is a biologically significant and ineliminable variable from social epidemiology; the mere fact that races “do not exist” is simply not relevant enough to decree that the concept of race should be eliminated from epidemiology in the face of its epistemological indispensability as a variable tracking the effects of all of the causal pathways going from racism to disease.