In public health research, tracking folk racial categories (in disease risk, etc.) is a double-edged tool. On the one hand, tracking folk racial categories is dangerous because it reinforces a problematic but fairly common belief in biological race essentialism. On the other hand, ignoring racial categories also runs the risk of ignoring very real biological phenomena in which marginalized communities, likely in virtue of their marginalization, are sicker and in need of improved resources. Much of the conversation among epidemiologists and (...) philosophers of medicine concerning the issue of tracking folk racial categories in public health research springs forth from largely black/white binarized health inequities. While health inequities between black and white Americans are certainly a very important topic, I am interested in investigating the complications to this conversation about the potential harms of tracking folk racial categories in public health research generated by the consideration of Indigenous identities in the US—groups whose health inequities are typically tracked based on the folk racial category of “Native American” or “American Indian,” but whose unique identity categories and community membership problematize the current spectrum of approaches to tracking folk racial categories in epidemiologic research. This paper will draw on scholarship by and about Indigenous people in the US context to address an undertheorized facet of the conversations concerning the potential harms of tracking folk racial categories in public health research, including the potential undermining of American Indian sovereignty and Indigenous epistemologies. I will end on some methodological considerations inspired by the inclusion of Indigenous identities in the US in the conversation about tracking folk racial categories in epidemiologic research. (shrink)

The use of racial categories in biomedicine has had a long history in the United States. However, social hierarchy and discrimination, justified by purported scientific differences, has also plagued the history of racial categories. Because “race” has some correlation with biological and genetic characteristics, there has been a call not to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” by eliminating race as a research or clinical category. I argue that race is too undefined and fluid to be useful as a (...) proxy for biology or genetics. (shrink)