The history, and continued existence, of racist practices in science and medicine have been undergoing long-overdue scrutiny in recent years. From the adaption of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for the small screen in 2017, to a continued reckoning with the US history of sterilizing racialized communities, to a discussion on the presidential campaign trail of black women’s maternal mortality rates, the medical establishment’s alternate neglect and violence toward racialized populations is finally being brought to light.

Faced with increasing popular awareness of this history, scientists, academics, corporations, and government officials have converged on genetic science as the solution to questions of racism in health care. This trend sees genetic science as a vehicle for targeting research, health regimes, diets, vitamins, and supplements to populations historically neglected by traditional medical and health science — namely raced and marginalized minorities. But this trend, which I call the “genetification of race,” is also having the perverse effect of re-entrenching race as a socially and biologically “real” category.

Examples include research like the Kaiser Family Foundation’s “Key Facts on Health and Health Care by Race and Ethnicity” primer, and scientific studies that seek to establish links between racialized groups and the prevalence of diseases like prostate cancer. These studies use racial categories in a simplistic way, without adequately acknowledging that the real causes of disease are environmental, structural, and political — but have been made to manifest in racializing ways.