There are always biological factors at play, but this premise of "race" as applied by anyone ever is always basically mythological and not related to biological differences in a meaningful way that isn't (at the risk of sounding dismissive, for which I apologize up front) racist. Sickle cell is actually the perfect example of this. The people of Namibia and Angola look the same to me. They're even from neighboring countries. And yet their cultures are very different certainly, their languages are different, one has high sickle cell prevalence and the other does not... So are black people from Namibia and Angola the same race if they don't have that genetic variation in common? What about other genetic things they don't share? What about the genetic things they share with white Americans? Are a black person from Tamil Nadu, a black person from Ethiopia, a black person from Mali, and a black person from Papua New Guinea the same "race"? They don't look the same to me aside from having dark skin. Are my black neighbors the same race? They also don't look the same aside from having dark skin. Probably none of them are carriers of sickle cell trait. Is there something identifiable they all share that they don't also often share with white populations?
In this case sounds like dummkopfs decided to adjust the test to normalize black peoples rates of kidney disease to those of white people.
I'll be over here banging my head against my desk.
But it seems we agree that my highly generalized social construct wouldn't invalidate the biological factors at play that expose more specific racial groups to higher/lower risk of certain conditions.
My fear is that we have to make certain we are only removing the social constructs and not the biological ones when we purge racial considerations from medicine. Quality of patient care will inevitably suffer otherwise.