The beginning of the second millennium coincided with the highly celebrated completion of the draft of the human genome. In conclusion of the race to identify the entire genetic sequence of a representative human genome in 2000, President Clinton, flanked by then director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, Francis Collins, and Craig Venter, then president of Celera Genomics, took the opportunity to reject any assertion of a genetic basis for race. In the epigraph, President Clinton recites a position that becomes the 99.9 per cent mantra among leading researchers in genomics and the general media on lessons learned from the completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP): race does not exist in our genes – we are all the same. Given this unequivocal chorus on race and genetics, it is surprising that more than a decade of developments in human genetics and biomedicine have resulted in a dogged focus on the search for population differences at the molecular level. Although the scientific community has repeatedly affirmed that the vast majority of the human genome is synonymous among human beings, scientists continue to emphasize that the key to understanding the genetic basis for common, complex diseases and variability in drug response lies in the minutiae of genetic differences among groups. Inspecting the incongruity of the mantra of sameness and the increasing salience of racial and ethnic identification of research populations is useful in identifying how concepts of race are operationalized and, in particular, how ‘technologies of racialization’ that highlight, demarcate and exact difference from the human body – phenotypical characteristics such as skin tone, eye shape and blood type – are increasingly supplanted by molecular signatures.