Racism’s Guts? The Physiology of Oppression

by Shannon Sullivan

Can a person’s belief in racial hierarchy—for example, that white people are superior to Black people—be embodied in their gut? I wondered this after having an “aha” moment while reading Elizabeth Wilson’s book Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body. Chapter two of her book examines the psychology of the stomach and the intestines and, in particular, their role in severe depression experienced by a gay man as he confronted homophobia. It hit me that the gut, and the body more generally, are far more “mentally” sophisticated than I had imagined and that this sophistication is not reserved for the brain. Maybe the social-political world literally helps structure and constitute human physiology, such that the effects of both domination and oppression can be found in people’s bodily functions.

In a nutshell, that is what my book, The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression, is about, but I didn’t know how to develop the idea at the time. And my spouse gave me a strange look confirming that the idea was, at best, half-baked. At worst, as I worried, the idea sounded oddly racist, as if I were saying in a confused fashion that race and/or being a racist is determined by biology. And if there is one thing about race that everyone is supposed to know by now, it’s that it is not biological. It is a social construction. On this view, race and racial categorization are a set of social beliefs (including mistaken ones about biology) that are backed by institutional structures and public policies, but there is nothing biologically real about them. If we didn’t realize that before 1950, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) made it perfectly clear at that time. In the wake of World War II, experts assembled by UNESCO issued a 1950 Statement on Race that declared that there is no biological basis for race and thus no scientific grounds for racial categorization or racism. Associating race and biology was what the Nazis did to justify Jewish genocide. Disassociating race and biology thus was a necessary way to fight Nazism, anti-Semitism, and all other forms of racism. The only way to talk about race and biology—unless you are a Nazi or a white supremacist—supposedly is to insist that they have nothing to do with each other. (The irony here is that after 1950, the medical sciences generally continued to operate as if race were biologically real, sometimes by talking about “populations” and population genetics, rather than “races.” But maybe it’s not so ironic after all. Racism and white supremacy are incredibly tenacious, which is a big part of what this book is about. It is going to take a lot more than conscious, rational argumentation to eliminate racism, white supremacy, and their offshoots, and we are fooling ourselves if we think otherwise.)

As for my half-baked idea, I still thought there was something important about it, but I kept it to myself for a while. Wilson’s book doesn’t discuss race or racism, but it showed me how social-political situations can literally shape a person’s physiological functions and, in turn, how a person’s physiological functions can be an unconscious way of responding to the world. What could that mean about a world—our world—which is suffused with race, racism, and white privilege, I wondered? What could that mean about the physiological constitution of people’s bodies—my body—as a white woman in that world?

I argue in the book that while race is not biological in a static or ahistorical way, it becomes biological in and through racist oppression. In a related fashion, it argues that sex/gender categories of male and female are not biologically given or determined, yet sex/gender becomes biological in and through sexist oppression. This happens in an intersectional fashion. This means that a person’s race is not separate from and then added onto her gender. Race and gender instead dynamically inform and co-constitute each other—as do other socially relevant aspects of our identities, such as sexuality, religion, nationality, class status, and more. In the United States and many other nations, for example, to become a white woman generally means something different physiologically than it means to become a Black woman.

But what does that mean? And why is it important to think about? For starters, it means that the oppressive effects of racism and sexism are going to be even harder to eliminate than we likely thought. And it’s important to realize this so that we don’t overlook a key place that racism and sexism have put down their roots. Very tough roots, it turns out. Even if we could snap our fingers and magically eliminate all racism and sexism today—all racist and sexist beliefs, as well as all racist and sexist institutions, policies, and structures—racism and sexism would not disappear. Their effects would endure in our bodies for years, even for generations. For example, they would endure in the shorter telomere length that African American women have on average in comparison with white women of the same age. Telomeres are the ends of chromosomes, and they shorten over time as the body wears down. This produces a person’s physiological age, which might not be the same as their chronological age. Two women could have been born in the United States in 1969, and in 2019 they would have the same chronological age of 50. However, on average, an African American woman’s shorter telomere length means that her physiological age is 57 ½ while that of the white woman is 50. This difference wasn’t present or biologically mandated when the two women were born five decades ago. But it is part of their different biological make-up at age 50, contributing to the lower life expectancy for African American women than white women in the United States.

Wilson’s book also led me to read more about the gut. It turns out that biologists and medical and health scientists have known since the early 1990s that sexual assault tends to fundamentally change people’s gut functioning. “People” here typically means women, given the higher rates of sexual assault experienced by women than by men. And “gut functioning” is not a metaphor. It literally means the gastrointestinal system: how the tissues, muscles, and fluids of the stomach and intestines process—or not—the food and liquid that is put inside them. The gut can take on a different character depending on the patterns and habits of its functioning, and women and men tend to have different gut characters because of the frequency of sexual assault in our world. “Character” here is not metaphorical. I am talking literally about the psychological and moral qualities distinctive to an individual and how those are shaped by gender in a sexist and male privileged world. Those qualities are found in a person’s gastrointestinal tract, which can “tell stories that people cannot or will not tell, either because they are unable, forbidden, or choose not to tell,” as epidemiologist Nancy Krieger has argued. It’s no coincidence, for example, that women suffer from disproportionately high percentages of functional gastrointestinal disorders, such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and Crohn’s disease. (“Functional” means that the disorder is not caused by a diseased or damaged organ, e.g., from a severe virus or a car wreck.) The gut is a human being’s largest external—yes, external—surface through which we take in the world, and women’s guts often tell us that they want to spew it out.

A person’s character also can be found in other aspects of their physiology, such as their hips, pelvic floor, heart functioning, and epigenome. The main chapters of Physiology focus on these areas of the body, and one chapter in particular follows up on my initial idea that white persons’ stomachs could be racist. I find the epigenome particularly interesting because of its connections to genetics. Our society has been fixated on genes for a while, culminating in The Human Genome Project, which fully mapped the human genome between 1990-2003. The public understanding of the project—perhaps also the scientists’ too—was that once we fully understand all of the genes that make up a human being, we’ll be able to predict and cure diseases as well as know why a person acts the way that they do. (The fixation on finding a “gay gene” has been particularly intense, in my view.) But genes aren’t the entire story. They don’t exist apart from an epigenome, which is the set of chemical modifications to DNA and various proteins that regulate the expression of a gene. The epigenome is fundamentally impacted by both physical and social environments. Think of the epigenome as like a knob that can turn the “volume” of a gene completely up or down or somewhere in between. A person could have a particular gene, but it might not be expressed (“turned up”) at all depending on environmental factors. In that case, it would be as if the person didn’t have the gene. In addition, in some cases the environmental effects on a person’s epigenetics can be passed down from one generation to another.

Epigenetics can help us understand racist disparities in health for African American women, particularly their high pre-term birth rates, which often persist across generations. I said “racist” rather than “racial” since it is racism, not merely race that produces the health disparities. The daily stressors of racism and white privilege that take a physiological toll on an African American person’s telomeres, for example, also can impact their epigenome. In the case of African American women, environmental stressors play a significant role in whether genes associated with premature labor are expressed. While everyone can and does have stress in their lives, there is something else going on in the case of African American women. “There is something about growing up as a black female in the United States that’s not good for your childbearing health,” as neonatologist Richard David explained, “I don’t know how else to summarize it.” The impact of this “something” not only affects the genomic health of an African American woman, moreover. It also can be epigenetically passed onto her daughters and granddaughters via transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. While such inheritance is more common for plants than mammals, there exists evidence that direct epigenetic inheritance occasionally occurs for mammals too. What we are learning is that the harmful effects of racism, white privilege, and white supremacy are very biologically durable. They not only can alter the health of one generation, but it is possible that they also are passed down transgenerationally.

As is probably obvious, Physiology is not a feel-good book. Racism and sexism are far more intractable than we’ve probably imagined. That isn’t necessarily cause for despair. It does, however, point to the need for specific strategies to cope, endure, and perhaps even thrive in ongoing situations of oppression. Those strategies can and should include not only changes in health policies, but also forms of embodied movement and physiological therapy (as distinguished from “physical therapy”) to transform biologically unconscious habits, as the book’s conclusion discusses. If there is one thing that I hope readers take away from the book, which perhaps is somewhat uplifting, it is an appreciation of the human body’s amazing psychophysiological complexity. We often mistakenly assume a very biologically flat understanding of the body, as Elizabeth Wilson has claimed, when in fact our biologically unconscious habits are tremendously psychologically dynamic and multidimensional. This makes the physiological body an important site for feminists, critical race scholars, and others who care about social justice to do their work. Biology isn’t the entire story, of course, and it needs to be approached not just sympathetically, but also critically. However, we discard it at our peril given the need to learn more about how racism and sexism constitute our unconscious habits. Those habits are thoroughly physiological, which means that we have a lot to learn about the stories that our bodies can tell.

Shannon Sullivan is Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy and Health Psychology at UNC Charlotte. She is author or editor of nine books, including Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (2007), Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism (2014), The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression (2015), and White Privilege (2019).