In 2020, strict public health measures to prevent the spread of the newly discovered coronavirus came unexpectedly for most people. In the same year, the Black Lives Matter Movement provoked a public outcry following the murder of George Floyd while being arrested. In 2014, the similar case of Eric Garner had already exposed another dimension to the framing of health: people used asthma, fatness and heart disease as an explanation for Garner’s death whilst playing down police brutality. This uncovered ongoing notions of personal failure to prevent lifestyle diseases along with the responsibilization of individuals for their own health – while often ignoring historically shaped social structures and inequalities. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, explicit links of racial bias and health inequities became apparent again. Not only did it reveal a connection between ethnicity, socio-economic vulnerability and infection, it also showed how the rationale of individual responsibility flags health as a result of proper choices by responsible individuals in a society.

Aiming to uncover the roots of such notions and how these were shaped historically, this workshop set out to analyze the co-constitution of race and health in globalization processes between the 19th century and the present day. Through different examples, speakers illustrated the entanglement of race and health, migration and development. They discussed health discourses and practices that contributed to create racial boundaries, asking how racist concepts shaped notions of health, and how these discourses continue to be mutually constitutive to migration, citizenship, and belonging from the late 19th century to the current SARS-COV-19 pandemic.

The first panel asked how social sciences perpetuated racial concepts and biological determinisms. Following the example of constitution types in mid-20th century Dutch Anthropology, FENNEKE SYSLING (Leiden) showed how the concept of bio-typologies both undermined and reproduced racialized conceptualizations. Despite the rise of genetics during the 1950s, Dutch anthropologists drew on German psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer’s approach in “Körperbau und Charakter” (Physique and Character, 1921), which introduced physical constitution types establishing a direct link between biological traits and predispositions to certain pathologies. Since they were seen as inherent to all populations, these bio-typologies partly undermined notions of hierarchically organized races. In 1951, however, they were used to argue in favor of continuing the study of race as an overarching category in the 2nd UNESCO statement on race, facilitating additional research on racial differences in the former Dutch West Indies and further reproducing racialized concepts.

CÉCILE STEHRENBERGER (Wuppertal) addressed how social science disaster research equally produced links between indigenous communities and certain pathologies. She analyzed how concepts used to medicalize and pathologize local communities strongly echoed colonial stereotypes and reproduced an essentialized view of certain ethnicities and social groups in research on behavioural and psychological response to disaster and crises. Her contribution focused on the concern for psychological effects of disaster and how they were problematized scientifically by newly emerging social science disaster research groups in a highly politicized and militarized US cold-war context. Here, the knowledge generated through studying disaster survivors was meant to produce practical knowledge that was considered useful to control collective behaviour in case of war and crises. Stehrenberger gave the example of the 1970's Ancash earthquake in Peru to illustrate the efforts of trained scientists to study and treat the psychological condition of disaster survivors, problematizing their psycho-pathologization, and the research-conduct in make-shift survivor camps that were perceived to be ideal “laboratory-like”, confined study groups.
Both examples demonstrated how social sciences did not elude but were in fact shaped by underlying notions of race and the colonial condition, which were perpetuated and even further solidified in the research conducted at the time. This perspective was also echoed in the following Panel addressing the making of race and health in life sciences.

SANDRA WIDMER (Toronto) showed how the racial discourse was mapped onto development concerns and how colonial interests and racism operated in mid-19th century public health management. She traced the history of nutrition research conducted by colonial government institutions in the South Pacific, offering insight into the example of the former British/French colony Vanuatu and the former Australian colony Papua New Guinea. Shaped by the deeply rooted Eurocentric narratives of superiority, modernization and development as economic growth, colonial intrusion was legitimized and endorsed scientifically. In this context, a shift from subsistence to widespread wage labor economy was considered preferable for Pacific Islanders. Thus, research on nutrition and food systems in the Pacific was mainly conducted to aid socio-economic interventions and provide a scientific basis for colonial government-imposed programmatic individual behaviour change. Widmer's case confirmed how in search for evidence of otherness, supposedly rational sciences racialized bodies and created false images feeding into the narrative of racial difference.

Addressing a different but similarly problematic and influential bio-historical narrative of so-called isolated populations as a useful tool for medical research, VERONIKA LIPPHARDT (Freiburg) drew attention to the shockingly recent case of the Roma in Europe. She analyzed the conceptual and methodological construction of the Roma as such an “isolated population” and problematized their supposed usefulness for medical and genetic research. By pointing out biased sampling practices and the ethically problematic use and circulation of collected data, she dismantled both the assumptions of the Roma’s isolatedness and usefulness for research. Through the ongoing construction of their proclaimed otherness, genetic research practices continue to contribute to the stigmatization and racialization of the Roma in Europe. This highlights how, up until today, genetic research exploits ethnic minorities in order to gain knowledge that benefits a supposedly universal scientific cause.

Looking at similarly problematic assumptions of exploitability of a supposed difference and genetic objectivity, ROBERTA BIVINS (Warwick) described a paradoxical phenomenon in the mid-20th century UK. Here, incoming migratory movements and especially ethnic minorities were celebrated as an arrival of “genetic diversity” and an opportunity for medical and genetic research on one hand, whilst being problematized politically and met with exclusionary border regimes on the other. Revisiting the case of Bangladeshi family reunifications in the UK and Bangladesh between 1985 and 1991, Bivins explained how the technology of DNA fingerprinting was originally intended to help with proving identity to the state but was revoked as an accepted verification method once it proved Bangladeshi claims to citizenship. She discussed how from the 1960s onwards, distrust in foreign identity documents led to an increasingly medicalized UK border and tools such as genetic screening, genotyping or DNA fingerprinting have become part of a border practice aimed to prove identity through bodies rather than documentation. Her example disclosed multifold problems: It showed how arbitrary immigration systems continue to reduce some people to their inescapable, bare bodies, as this crude biological reductionism usually only applies to non-Western citizens having to prove familial relationship by blood while other modes of belonging flourish in the West.

Another dimension of border control is its legitimization by the prevention of contagion. Drewing attention to the notion of contagious newcomers and exclusionary measures in- and outside of past pandemics, ALISON BASHFORD (Sydney) pointed to the fact that since the mid-19th century, quarantine and immigration acts have been inextricably linked – irrespective of how their racializing effects played out. Such large-scale public health measures, as new as they seem from the perspective of the Coronavirus pandemic, reappeared from the borders, where they had never fully disappeared. Raising further research questions, the conversation addressed voluntary and public modes of preventing contagion. Thus, epidemics such as tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, which have been associated with the implementation of individual practices to inhibit transmission, might be worthwhile to analyze from the perspective of racialized quarantine border policing and through the lens of todays’ normalization of quarantine. Such analyses might uncover similarities regarding the two-sidedness of the Coronavirus pandemic given the nationalisation of isolation management and responsibilization of citizens by some states, preceded by a striking trust in voluntary quarantining practices. Pointing to an inherent challenge to the history of medicine and disease, Bashford asked how historians may pay heed to the fine line between raising critique concerning unequal access to healthcare and excessive border monitoring of immigrants. But at the same time acknowledging certain medical “hard facts” such as the epidemiologically proven efficiency of quarantine measures in containing local outbreaks of infectious diseases.

In past outbreaks such exclusionary measures informed notions of contagious newcomers as disease carriers. REBECCA BRÜCKMANN (Bochum) presented the history of the 1867 yellow fever epidemic in the US-Gulf South. In the mid-18th century, yellow fever went from being used as a justification for enslavement – as Black bodies were falsely perceived as immune – to a means of reinstating white unity after the union war. In the 19th century, strangers and newcomers to cities were considered dangerous and cities placed a range of isolation measures (shotgun quarantines) against each other. Brückmann also pointed to the link between race, health and capitalism as becoming immune in the 19th century was precedent to being worthy of financial investment and gaining upward social mobility for white immigrants including e.g., figuring as responsible slave owners while natural Black immunity was considered unearned. Through the case study of Galveston, Texas, Brückmann argued that already two years after the end of the Civil War and class reconstruction, fighting against yellow fever brought white Southerners to reach out to the Northerners to form a national body of white unity and ultimately consolidated segregation in the very moment in which Black Americans took their immunity as an argument for their mobility.

Turning to another prominent pandemic in US-history, NINA MACKERT (Leipzig) linked the ceasing third wave of the Spanish flu 1919 with the white supremacist attacks known as Red Summer in the same year, revealing the co-constitution of race and health in spatial practices and quarantining strategies. During the great migration in the early 20th century, segregated housing practices in Chicago merged with the policing of migrant bodies in spreading the flu due to both their habits and living environment. Resulting in the policing of rules of conduct and stigmatization of influenza victims, Mackert demonstrated that through adopting these responsibilizations and participating in what is known as black uplift, African Americans stabilized their citizenship status.

The concluding discussion revolved around how contagious disease, its public control and the responsibilization of individuals intersect. So far, questions regarding responsibilization and lifestyle of individuals in their relation to public health management of infectious diseases have received little attention. This workshop started a fruitful discussion as to how these seemingly different phenomena intersect, and how race plays into it. On the one hand, during pandemics such as Corona, though also during the yellow fever epidemic and the Spanish flu, quarantining strategies and (self-)responsibilization became crucial in preventing contagion. On the other hand, quarantine measures persist beyond pandemic moments, fusing into racialized immigration regimes and medicalized border practices.

Bringing together health and race as mutually constitutive concepts, this workshop provided new insights into the topics of scientific instrumentalization of race, the continuing search for and reproduction of biological differences and exclusionary border policing in the wake of quarantine measures. Participants criticised the (Western) fascination with categorizing and separating groups that are framed as different – thereby reproducing an underlying assumption of otherness, manifested in the search for difference and the persisting idea of a usefulness of this constructed otherness. Ultimately, all contributions exemplified how notions of race and health are not only assumed but also perpetuated in both social and life sciences, revealing how historically established asymmetric power relations act as a prerequisite for research to be conducted in easily accessible populations and exploitable vulnerable groups.

Conference overview:

Panel I: Social Sciences

Fenneke Sysling (Leiden): Race and Constitutional Types in Mid-20th Century Anthropology

Cécile Stehrenberger (Wuppertal): Race, Health and Disaster (Research), 1949-2021

Panel II: Life Sciences

Sandra Widmer (Toronto): Post-War Pacific Islands Nutrition Research and the Framings of Public Health: On the Racialization of Healthy Bodies and Behavioural Change in the Context of Land Anxieties

Veronika Lipphardt (Freiburg): How “Isolated Populations” are Racialized in Medical Genetics. The Case of the Roma

Roberta Bivins (Warwick): Proving or Polluting Identity? Piloting DNA Fingerprinting for Family Reunification in Britain and Bangladesh 1985-1991

In Conversation

Alison Bashford (Sydney): Making Race and Health in Quarantining Strategies

Panel III: Epidemics

Rebecca Brückmann (Bochum): Reconstructing Biopolitics: The 1867 Yellow Fever Epidemic in the Gulf Region

Nina Mackert (Leipzig): Pandemic Space: Race, Health, and Responsibility during the Spanish Flu