ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how scientific practices have contributed to a powerful infrastructure that maintains a focus on race as the predominant axis for differentiating human populations and for understanding the meaning of genetic variants for this concept. It describes the techniques of "excavating" difference from the human genome and the practices of naming and sorting that entrench race as a fundamental category in genomic medicine. Race emerges in the relationships that are drawn and the racial rubric determines the kinds of question asked and the possible permutations of the comparisons drawn. Only by excavating the full range of social and environmental factors that contribute to disease and that interact with the human genome can we intervene on persistent inequity and health disparities. Merely a tool to eradicate cumbersome noise, statistical race in the context of genomic medicine does little to disrupt the durable categories of differences built by excavating the genome for race.
