illustration by artist calida (www.artistcalida.com)

My family is the real-life version of the Griswolds from National Lampoon’s. More space cadet than rocket scientist. The kind of people who are really good at getting in their own way.

You’ve seen us before. At the rest stop wondering how we drove 40 miles in the wrong direction. At the movies bragging about how we’re smarter than everyone else with our store-bought sodas and garbage bag full of homemade popcorn. Hours late to all the events we didn’t RSVP for.

So, several months ago, when I started suffering from chemo brain — short-term memory loss and a decline in cognitive abilities due to chemotherapy — I wasn’t sure whether the drugs were to blame or my Garcia genes. Let me provide a sketch of the patriarchs of our family for a little context.

My dad, Joe, has belt-attached holsters that sit on both hips. One is for his cell phone and the other is for his glasses. That in and of itself is pretty funny, because my dad wears his pants so high that his belt is typically above his belly button. But the real reason I bring this up is because he purchased the special holders to keep track of his phone and his specks, which he loses all the time. Invariably, though, one, if not both, of his hip-slung carrying cases winds up empty, and helping him retrace his steps goes something like this:

Joe: “Did you see where I put my glasses?”

Me: “Nope. Where did you have them last?”

Joe: “On my face.”

Those older ATMs, the ones where you insert your card in the machine, were a cruel joke for my dad. For some reason, he never caught on that the loud, methodical beeping at the end of the transaction was a reminder to grab your card. I can’t count how many times he’d go out to get money only to return with no card, cursing under his breath, because the machine sucked it up.

And it’s not just memory loss that gets the better of the Garcias. We have an uncanny knack for offending folks just by being ourselves, getting all the family gossip wrong, and landing in the most bizarre situations.

Take my uncle Tony, my dad’s younger brother. He’s gotten peed on by a Tiger, once choked a cab driver in Italy he thought was trying to cheat him, and is convinced that a rooster on the farm where he and my dad spent their summers as kids wanted to kill him.

This is the same uncle who wears a one-piece adult-size snowsuit indoors during winter because his historic home in Germantown, Pa., is too costly to heat. Get Joe and Tony together and forget about it.

When my cousin Calida and I moved to New York more than 10 years ago, our dads volunteered to drive the U-Haul. Why this was even allowed is beyond me.

this is exactly what my uncle's indoor snowsuit looks like

Conservative columnist William Saletan, after analyzing a National Cancer Institute study that reveals African Americans with gender-based cancers have a “significantly worse overall survival rate” than whites, concluded that the likely reason is genetic differences in our racial makeup.

The NCI study found that black Americans are 21 to 61 percent more likely than whites to die from ovarian, breast, and prostate cancers, even when dynamics such as income, education, and access to medical care are factored in.

The findings could point to any number of things, such as our community’s disturbing history of late-stage diagnoses, which could be the result of a misguided but reasonably understandable mistrust of the medical community.

Saletan, however, argues that it’s our DNA. There’s just one problem with his theory: It’s wrong.

There is no gene that equals black or white, or any race for that matter. When it comes to the human genome, we’re all pretty much the same. Here’s what Saletan has to say:

“Denying that race is real or that genes play a role in racial differences is just as simplistic as pretending that race explains everything or that discrimination has vanished.”

He goes on to proclaim that people are afraid to acknowledge genetic differences along racial lines for fear it will “lay a scientific foundation for segregation.”

Hello? The Bell Curve? The Tuskegee Experiment? The African slave trade?

We don’t have to look far to see how race and “DNA coding” can be dangerously manipulated for financial or social gain. And when it comes to medical classifications, that notion just smacks of so-called genetic inferiority. Saletan wastes no time supporting this idea, too.

In discussing his theory on biology and black Americans, he references a column he wrote two years ago about race, heredity intelligence, and the reasons white American kids have higher IQs than black American kids. They have bigger brains, he claims. So, from his perspective, if biological determinism manifests itself in intelligence, it makes sense that it would extend to health outcomes, too.

But here’s the real deal: Discussing genetic differences based on race sidetracks us from the issue at hand, which is closing the cancer survival gap, the original purpose of the study. The fact is that a more comprehensive analysis is needed, and this is where documenting the health trends of ethnic and racial groups becomes important. It is indeed worth exploring.

There’s little doubt, for instance, that obesity and stress exacerbate illnesses among African Americans, as does our diet. To make matters worse, African Americans don’t regularly visit a doctor, nor do we develop long-term relationships with medical professionals. Probably that mistrust creeping up again. But these issues are as much about social and environmental influences as they are about personal choices and lifestyle practices.

Saletan doesn’t appear to consider any of this before pronouncing our racial makeup the culprit. If you ask me, it’s because focusing on DNA is an easy way out. If people can point to a scientific explanation for why blacks don’t fair so well when battling cancer, then we don’t have to scrutinize our nation’s health care system or examine external contributors to poor survival outcomes.

The biggest danger, as Raina Kelley wrote in her column for Newsweek, is that we’ll start talking about medical conditions in terms of “us or them.” And, as history shows, that sort of deviation is just a big fat waste of time for everyone.