Breaking Free of the Grasp Racism Has On Our Genes
Brisnid Pardo
Breaking Free of the Grasp Racism Has On Our Genes
The perils of injustice and racism on our genes have been discovered a little too late since its grasp has been extraordinarily powerful enough to embed its mark on past, present, and potentially future generations. Researchers have been going about trying to categorize people in the wrong ways. Race is a social construct and cannot be backed up by science in a concrete and replicable manner. NY Times biology writer Carl Zimmer reports on how early 1900’s geneticists tried to back up outdated notions of race through genetic markers but “now a century later, after sequencing millions of human genomes, scientists say that those notions do not hold up”. Researchers had a racist theory to prove, but found it difficult to do so. Our science has been deeply embedded with racism and tested hypotheses to justify racist outcomes. There are many influences in genetics that often get overlooked, including the biological effects brought on by environmental factors, specifically pollution and trauma in the concept of epigenetics.
Newark is the largest city in New Jersey, the second-most racially diverse municipality after Jersey City, and also one of the oldest cities in the United States. In the East Ward of Newark lies the Ironbound, a large working-class and multi-ethnic neighborhood, populated largely by Portuguese and Latin American immigrants and their descendants.
Zimmer brings about another concept to consider, for instance, environmental variables. Historically, the Ironbound has been a dumping ground for all types of environmental pollution. The Ironbound is conveniently home to New Jersey’s largest garbage incinerator, the contaminated land site for a former Agent Orange dioxin factory, multiple industrial facilities, active truck routes, rail lines and more. The list of its inopportune location spans on as it is also in close proximity to the most contaminated part of the Passaic River, one of the country’s most polluted waterways, as well as its proximity to close flight paths of Newark Airport. In 2015, ABC News reporter Anthony Johnson reported on a study stating that “Newark has one of the highest rates of children suffering from asthma in the state, with reports suggesting that 1 out of every 4 children is suffering. Much of the problem appears to be in the Ironbound section…” Research has demonstrated that both genetics and environmental factors are involved in the development of asthma, according to the Global Allergy & Airways Patient Platform. The Ironbound is a prime display of environmental racism, where low-income communities that are home to people of color suffer in the name of “economic progress”.
We learn in biology class that genes get passed down from our parents to us. When you move onto deeper topics in biology, you learn about gene expression and hereditary traits. There are genes embedded into our DNA that we may never express, however, there are factors that can push the body to limit or provoke the expression of such genes. For instance, epigenetic changes can lead to the decrease of the expression of a certain gene, leading to increased risk of cancers associated with that gene. The CDC breaks down epigenetics as the study of how behaviors and environment has the ability to cause changes to the way your body expresses your genes. According to a research article titled “Epigenetic Modifications in Stress Response Genes Associated with Childhood Trauma: “...trauma can get intergenerationally passed on through epigenetic mechanisms, such as methylation. Specifically, childhood trauma has been associated with alternation in methylation patterns in human sperm, which may induce intergenerational effects”. There is evidence that shows that trauma can affect gene expression, which also poses the possibility of it being passed down for generations.
It is to no surprise that living in a troubled world plagued with racism and xenophobia provides sociocultural stressors to many, including those living in underprivileged and underrepresented communities. Systemic racism causes trauma, which carries the possibility of this trauma being passed down for generations, quite literally. Connie Mulligan from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida unfolds the studies of the effects of systemic racism on genetics, stating that “no study has yet identified a change in a biological pathway or gene that is specific to one race and would account for racial differences in the prevalence of a disease” and where we see racial disparities in health, it could be tied to the damaging sociocultural factors like discrimination and injustice. Mulligan also states that “people who have endured more trauma because of racial oppression will also have accumulated more trauma-associated epigenetic marks…” The reality is that for so long we have tried grouping people based on our genes alone, but there are a myriad of factors that can affect them and have nothing to do with the social barriers we have constructed to separate us.
As a proud first generation Latina from the Ironbound, I am an advocate for the power of building resilient communities and contributing positively to the world around us. I believe that successfully combating systemic racism and related trauma can lead communities to heal our traumas quite literally, by releasing the grasp the injustices have on us and by creating new epigenetic marks that lead to the restoration of our health.
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Works cited:
Systemic racism can get under our skin and into our genes (wiley.com)
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