African Americans experience perennially high rates of chronic metabolic disease, premature death, and prolonged disability. For decades, explaining the social patterning of health inequalities has been the purview of social epidemiology, a field that has increasingly featured biological and genetic measurements alongside social classifications such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and economic class. In this intermingling of the biological and social, scientists can transform the social into the biological and back again. Race is a conceptual medium through which complex social relations can be morphed into biological truths in both explicit and implicit ways. Leer Más