Reflections on ‘race’ and the biologization of difference

In this article Gibel Azoulay critiques the tenacity of the correlation between ‘race’ as a socio-political notion and ‘race’ as a biological entity in academic circles in general and medical research in particular. Legacies of nineteenth-century scientific racism percolate into the public sphere, facilitating a uniquely US American cultural consensus that imagines and markets external physiological features as gross criteria for making distinctions, highlighting the medicalization of race in pharmaceutical, medical and genetic research.