摘要：W.E.B. Du Bois was an American sociologist. He was the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard and was a cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He wrote a collection of essays in 1903 called The Souls of Black Folk that denounced the idea of White Americans being genetically superior to Black Americans.1 In 1906, Du Bois wrote that social determinants of health were the real cause of disparities in health between African American and White Americans, not race or any other biological variables.2 One hundred years later, the full sequencing of the human genome proved him correct when it demonstrated that all humans (regardless of race or ethnicity) shared 99.99% of their genetic material.3 This begs the question, why are we still talking about race as a biological variable causing disease when the genetic differences between races encompasses only 0.01% of the complete human genome?.
