How Trump’s Executive Order Threatens Scientific Understanding of Health Inequities
Joseph L. Graves Jr.
On March 27, 2025, President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order entitled, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The stated purpose of this order is to prevent “replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” One of these so-called distorted narratives is the idea that race is social construct and not a biological reality. The Trump administration considers this scientific fact to be part of a divisive, race-centered ideology that Americans should abandon.
One must ask: Why this idea is so threatening to the “Make America Great Again” agenda? The answer is simple. In the MAGA point of view, if humans do not have biological races, and if these races do not significantly differ in their behavioral and physical attributes, how can we explain the glaring racial disparities that exist within American society? These disparities include (but are not limited to) wealth, educational attainment, and health. Trump and his allies essentially want to make such disparities “disappear” by executive fiat. If you cannot study them, then you cannot report on them. Thus, it is no accident that the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are actively cancelling research that documents historical and ongoing racial disparities in our society.
In the absence of rigorous sociological studies, Trump and his allies hope to resurrect biologic race as the key explanatory variable that underpins patterns of morbidity and mortality. Of course, to achieve this, they must discount decades of research that confirms Homo sapiens does not contain biological races. Throughout the history of biology, definitions of race have always been ambiguous. There are clearly some species for which these criteria—physical, geographic, genetic, and phylogenetic similarities and differences—hold up well. However, biological definitions of race cannot be accurately applied to subgroups of humans, especially not to subgroups based on social definitions of race[i]. This is because social definitions of race arbitrarily use physical, geographic, cultural, and linguistic criteria. The modern, scientifically accepted consensus is based upon many lines of genetic and evolutionary evidence: the amount of genetic variation that occurs within human populations is much greater than between populations, and human populations cannot be considered evolutionarily unique lineages. In short, human genetic variation is continuous and cannot be unambiguously apportioned into biological races. Two recent blue-ribbon panels initiated by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have underscored the lack of concordance between our social definitions of race and human biological variation.
It is no accident that the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are actively cancelling research that documents historical and ongoing racial disparities in our society.
I decided to write Why Black People Die Sooner because, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that invalidates the social racial categories that exist in Western societies, the medical community does not fully recognize the significance of this fact. I began working on this issue more than twenty years ago in response to an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times written by Salley Satel. Satel, a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and a lecturer at Yale University School of Medicine wrote: “In practicing medicine, I am not colorblind. I always take note of my patient’s race. So do many of my colleagues. We do it because certain diseases and treatment responses cluster by ethnicity.” Her lack of clarity on how human biological variation acts to determine predisposition for disease was apparent by how she confused the concepts of “race” and “ethnicity.” It is also clear, that over the last twenty years, Satel has not changed her position on this. In a recently published piece in National Affairs, she claims that recent initiatives by medical organizations such as the American Medical Association (AMA) to address historical injustices in the practice of medicine are simply acts of “political correctness” that harm the training of physicians.
If Satel were alone in this view, Why Black People Die Sooner would not be necessary. However, racial medical misconceptions still exist. More urgently, they must be addressed to improve how all patients are treated within both biomedical research and clinical practice. My book explains the origin of these misconceptions, how they harm us, and what must be done to fix them.
Joseph L. Graves Jr. is the MacKenzie Scott Endowed Professor of Biology at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, and the author of Why Black People Die Sooner: What Medicine Gets Wrong About Race and How to Fix it.
[i] A. Montagu, Mankind’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (Harper Brothers, 1942); A. Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a World View (Westview, 1993); A. R. Templeton, “Genetics and Recent Human Evolution,” Evolution 61, no. 7 (2007): 1507–19; G. Coop, 2022. “Genetic Similarity Versus Genetic Ancestry Groups as Sample Descriptors in Human Genetics” (2002), https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2207.11595; J. L. Graves Jr. and A. Goodman, Racism Not, Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (Columbia University Press, 2022).
