I recently came across a public statement by a University of Chicago department. No doubt you’ve read many similar ones over the past few years, but this one manages to be spectacularly embarrassing. It opens with:
The Department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago condemns police violence against Black people, a long-standing epidemic in American society that is finally – and painfully – being broadly recognized for what it is: an institutionalized system of brutality, intimidation, harassment and control by the state against its own citizens.
Of course we all condemn excessive police violence, but most of us know an “epidemic” is a sudden increase from a normal rate, and therefore cannot be “long-standing.” I’d hope PhD geneticists would know the correct metaphor is “endemic.”
More important, this reads like an adolescent rant, choosing words to inflame emotions rather than communicate information. Everyone knows—although the U of C human genetics department claims to have only recently discovered—that police are run by governments to maintain public order in the US, not to go to other countries to control their citizens. So, yes, police are an institutionalized system to control the state’s citizens. To make a rational argument, rather than just ranting, you need to establish how much of the control is bad (say preventing innocent Black people from strolling in wealthy neighborhoods) rather than good (stopping people of any color from killing each other).
Similarly, if you’re polite you say a major job of the police is to deter crime. But “deter” and “intimidate” are close enough in meaning not to split hairs. The point is what the police are deterring or intimidating people against, not which word you choose. The police are authorized to use force, including deadly force. Yes, that’s “brutal.” “Harassment” is gentler than brutality, but like brutality the point is whether or not it’s justified, not whether you call it low-violence intervention or police harassment.
If the statement had stopped there, with no actual content, just a bunch of angry words strung together, I would have dismissed it like many similar philippics. But what got my attention is that I cannot recall ever reading posturing this hypocritical. If this had been written by non-white residents of a high-crime area oppressed with racist police violence, I could have overlooked the rhetoric and assumed it represented sincere anger. No one should be caught between violence from criminals and violence from the people fighting criminals.
But the U of C human genetics department is in the middle of Hyde Park. Outside the White House and nuclear missile silos, Hyde Park is the most overpoliced place in the country. Chicago has more police officers per capita than any other city in the US. Hyde Park gets the most attention of any neighborhood in Chicago because it is a wealthy island in a large sea of low-income, mostly non-white, high-crime areas. On top of that, the University runs the largest and best-financed private police force in the US.
The human genetics statement is sermonizing for thee-not-me. Department members tell each other on the University website to call for police escorts if they feel unsafe—which generally means seeing someone who looks as if they come from outside the police fortress—a service unavailable to residents in the places George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others died. And believe me, the U of C human geneticists want those armed escorts to control scary individuals, via intimidation and harassment, even brutality if necessary. Department members don’t have to call 911 for police response, in Hyde Park it’s hard to be more than 100 yards from a “blue light” panic button to summon the guys with guns—and if that’s too far, the University provides an instant-response phone app.
The statement makes no mention of reducing policing in Hyde Park, nor sharing protection equitably among Chicago neighborhoods. The “long-standing epidemic” is conveniently blamed on a ubiquitous abstraction—systemic racism—rather than anything requiring apologies, sacrifices, contributions or even useful suggestions from the statement’s authors. “Let them eat cake,” seems empathetic in comparison.
It gets worse, much worse. The statement goes on to promise to identify and eliminate any individual racism. From most sources this would be thoughtless bluster. But it has a much uglier meaning for human geneticists. It is the central idea of eugenics. To solve a social problem, you eliminate individuals manifesting the trait. Disabilities, mental illness, crime, poverty—tackle them by eliminating disabled people, the mentally ill, criminals and poor people.
“Eliminate” can mean kill—as with the Nazis—or remove from the gene pool by forced sterilization—as was common in the 20th century US—or bribe people not to procreate—as by subsidizing birth control and abortion for poor women, or offering reduced sentences to criminals who agree to be sterilized.
Now it’s possible “eliminate” in the statement is not meant in a genetic sense. It does refer to eliminating “individual racism” rather than “individual racists” or “individual racist genes.” Perhaps the department has in mind a thought police to send individual racists to re-education camps, or for the government to control citizens against manifesting racism with brutality, harassment and intimidation. But that seems inconsistent with the statement’s first paragraph. Moreover, why would anyone care about the opinions of human geneticists on the issue?
Even in the best possible interpretation, this is a disturbing threat from human geneticists. When doctors look for genetic correlates with disease, it’s to understand the conditions better and to improve therapies. There’s no assumption that genetic components to health problems mean they are uncurable, that the only solution is to eliminate the genes or their carriers. Many genetic conditions are treatable, and the number increases every day, thanks to the work of human geneticists.
Similarly, there could be things that correlate with individual racism—genetic factors or cultural, economic, educational or other. But the point of identifying individual racism and correlating it with other factors is not to eliminate anyone or anything. It’s to improve understanding of individual racism and find ways to mitigate its effects and perhaps one day cure it. There is a place in the world for punishing individual racists, but no place in the department of human genetics. Human genetics plus “elimination” equals something no one should want.
This brings me to my final point, the biggest reason I dislike the statement. Human geneticists who study genetic correlates to individual racism have to camouflage her work in jargon and avoid any public mention. The same goes for applying human genetics to any social issue—poverty, crime, war. For some reason what everyone accepts in medicine, that genetic analysis is useful for understanding and treatment, inspires unreasoning censure when applied to more than one individual at a time.
Great scientists like Edward O. Wilson and James Watson were savagely and successfully attacked for intelligent and useful work in this area. The great social scientist and popularizer Charles Murray got the same treatment. I don’t say all, or even any, of the specific things these men wrote is true, but at worst their writings were useful starting points for debate, not heresies to be stamped out in horror. This was done without loud and clear objection from human geneticists.
Human genetics holds the same potential for social problems as for individual medical problems. Realizing that potential requires human geneticists—especially at elite institutions like the University of Chicago—to have the courage to educate a public deeply misinformed about their science, and to defend people who discuss that science rationally from mob reaction. We need researchers and expert popularizers who are not afraid to speak plain truth.
Sadly the statement instead includes a one-sided account of the history of human genetics, mentioning only the sins and errors, not the great accomplishments and heroes. No names are named, but most lay readers will assume the criticism applies to the Wilsons, Watsons and Murrays rather than to the Charles Davenports and Rudolph Hesses. This is the one topic in the statement on which a human genetics department has expertise, and that expertise is abused.
Here is the statement I would have been proud to see the department issue:
Racism, police violence and crime are problems at the forefront of public discourse. Our department members have a range of opinions on these topics. We do not regard the answers as self-evident nor the debates closed. We do not enforce a departmental viewpoint.
We do not claim any special expertise on these issues in general. However all of us hope that study of human genetics; including correlates to crime, poverty, violence, racism and IQ, among other things; will lead to better understanding of problems and better ways of dealing with them. Some of our members are actively working on projects that may someday promote this effort.
We emphatically reject the idea that the goal is to use genetic information to eliminate people or genes, or to segregate or to punish. We know these ideas have been propounded by some human geneticists in the past, leading to, or at least providing scientific cover for, horrible crimes. We use genetic research to understand and to treat.
The department of human genetics dedicates itself to public education and open debate. We salute the contributions of scientists like Edward Wilson, James Watson and Charles Murray. Regardless of how we feel about the specifics of their work—and we disagree among ourselves on some of it—these are sincere, intelligent researchers whose work should be either built upon or refuted. We further pledge to make our work as accessible as possible to the public, without disguising it to avoid stirring up trouble.
