Welcome, everyone, to the
Tanner Lectures on Human Values.
This is one of Harvard's
great intellectual traditions,
a tradition that celebrates
the outstanding contributions
of a single thinker
who comes to address us
and connects us more
closely to one another
and the wider world of ideas.
The Tanner Lectureship
was established
at Cambridge University in 1978.
And it takes place annually at
nine universities in the United
States and abroad.
It is named for
Obert Clark Tanner.
Born in 1904 and raised in a
small mountain town in Utah,
he was the youngest
of 10 children.
And he got his
entrepreneurial start
making class rings in
his mother's basement.
He went on to become a
remarkably successful business
owner, the head of
the OC Tanner Company,
a leading manufacturer
of recognition awards.
Among the simple rules of the
company, according to Tanner,
was to enjoy living
while earning a living.
Throughout his lifetime,
Tanner took his own directive
to heart, broadening the
scope of his intellectual and
philanthropic interests.
A lover of philosophy,
he made donations
to create philosophy rooms
in 11 different college
and university libraries.
He also generously supported
art and art making, most notably
through the design
and construction
of unique fountains,
including Harvard's
own well-known and
award-winning Tanner Fountain.
Tanner's was a
life, in his words,
of "adventure and
variety," a life
distinguished by a profound
and abiding concern
for the human condition.
He saw these lectures
and, I quote him again,
"as a search for a better
understanding of human behavior
and human values."
"This understanding,
he went on to say,
"may be pursued for its
own intrinsic worth.
But it may also eventually
have practical consequences
for the quality of
personal and social life."
And so we gather
annually to seek
a better understanding
of ourselves
and our place in the world.
It is an event both
welcome and welcoming.
And I hope it
energizes each of you
as it energizes me
year after year.
I want to thank the Harvard
Tanner Faculty Committee
for making an inspired choice.
And I want to thank the staff of
the Mahindra Humanities Center
for planning today's event.
And now I want to
welcome to the podium
to introduce our distinguished
guest, our own very
distinguished Dean of the
Law School, Martha Minow.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Drew.
The Tanner Lectures
are a significant event
here and at the
other institutions
where they occur
because they remind
us all that human
values have to be
at the center of our inquiry.
Brilliant, controversial,
and profoundly valuable,
these are the words used by
one review of Dorothy Roberts'
award-winning book
Killing the Black Body.
Now a classic work,
this 1998 book
traces violence
against black women
to practices under slavery,
when white males benefited
financially and otherwise
by raping black women,
selling their children,
and dominating
them and their families.
Forced hysterectomies,
court-ordered contraceptives,
soaring rates of
sterilization, these
are further chapters of the book
and the story that she tells.
The stigma and the process
by which stigma is produced
has been the center
of attention,
as Professor Roberts explores
how black women have fought
back against the
encroachment on their bodies
and their
self-determination, how
stigma operates to make race
and gender and marital status
and more actual signs, actual
realities of subordination.
And here's the real trick that
she is the expert in exposing,
how the processes by which the
stigma is produced are erased,
erased by the activities of
people engaged in good faith
and maybe not good
faith in the activities
of professionalization and the
activities of claiming to help.
Medicine replicates
and exacerbates
race-based disadvantages.
So does law.
Internationally
recognized as a scholar
and a public intellectual
and a social justice
advocate, Dorothy
Roberts, therefore,
studies the interplay of gender,
race, and class, with law
as a terrain.
She has truly transformed
public thinking and policy
on reproductive health,
child welfare, and bioethics.
She has many, many titles.
I'm going to say a few of them.
She is a Professor of Africana
Studies Law and Sociology
at the University
of Pennsylvania.
She directs the Penn program
on Race Science and Society.
She received the 2015
Solomon Carter Fuller Award
from the American
Psychiatric Association
for providing significant
benefit for the quality of life
of black people.
She crosses the boundaries
between disciplines
and between theory and practice.
She integrates
knowledge, and that's
another one of her titles.
Shining light and outrage, she
exposed the shattered bonds,
the color of child welfare.
She pursued in
Fatal Invention how
science, politics,
and big business
recreate race in
the 21st century.
She's addressed HIV/AIDS.
She's addressed maternal
and child health.
She is, I am proud to say, a
graduate of the Harvard Law
School, as well as
of Yale University.
And she also works in policy,
chairing the Black Women's
Health Imperative,
working with the National
Coalition for Child
Protection Reform,
serving on advisory
boards, and more.
I learned that she has not only
spoken at NIH and Russell Sage,
more importantly, she's done a
TED talk, a really, really good
one.
And she's a blogger.
And she's involved with film.
And she understands that
for change to happen,
every medium has to be used so
that more and more people can
have the tools to
see and challenge
racial bias and the
replication of the power
relationships in the very
disciplines and professions
that were meant to advance
health, truth, and justice.
I am privileged to count her
as a friend, co-author, alum
and inspiration, please come
up to the podium, our Tanner
lecturer.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much.
Thank you, President Faust,
for that introduction
of the lecture and
inviting me and Martha,
for your very warm and
insightful introduction.
Thanks Homi Bhabha
for the invitation
as well and to the
Mahindra Center
for all that you've
done to get me here
and the selection committee for
selecting me for the lecture.
I'm really grateful and honored
to have this opportunity
to talk about work I've
been doing for a long time,
but then to think
about how it relates
to some new developments
I haven't had
a chance to write about yet.
And I'm so happy
that you also invited
such wonderful respondents
to comment, Evelynn Hammonds
and Pilar Ossorio, and
Anne Fausto-Sterling.
I really look forward to your
comments and our discussion.
Let's see.
What is the relationship
between biology and society?
This question has set
the fundamental framework
for science for
more than a century.
At the close of
the 19th century,
scientists, like British
biologist Francis Galton,
also known as the
father of eugenics,
created a wall between
these two realms
by separating nature,
the biological,
from nurture, the
social, and then claiming
that the unequal
social order was caused
by the difference
in biological traits
that socially privileged and
socially disadvantaged people
were born with.
Today science is undergoing
a spectacular paradigm shift
that's radically
altering the way we
understand this basic boundary
between biology and society.
In fact, the boundary
is kind of exploding.
Dramatic new knowledge, acquired
over the last several decades
about the way genes function,
renders untenable the view
that heredity can be
separated from society.
More than that, discoveries
about epigenetics,
brain function, and the
microbiome, among other things,
demonstrate that the social
environment profoundly
affects biological processes
so that society actually
becomes embodied.
Now, some scholars have
heralded this biosocial moment
as a clean break
from the past schism
between biology and society.
I'd like to reframe this
revolution in science
to scrutinize how it departs
from old biosocial thinking,
but also to look at how it
drags along parts of the past.
To begin with, it's not true
that the old paradigm ignored
the interplay between
biology of human beings
and the societies they live in.
Whereas the new biosocial
science embraces it.
Scientists, using
both paradigms,
what I'm calling
the old and the new,
investigate the
connection between biology
and the social order and
employ biological knowledge
to improve society.
Even before they
discovered the gene,
scientists in Europe
and the United States
supported unjust
social hierarchies
by claiming they were
biologically determined.
For example, Thomas
Jefferson, we
could call him a
biosocial scientist.
He was a naturalist, as well as
a politician and a statesman.
And he-- and a
political philosopher.
And he approached the
question of slavery
from both a biological and
a social point of view.
In Notes on the State of
Virginia, published in 1781,
Jefferson explained that, quote,
"the real distinctions which
nature has made," close quote,
between blacks and whites
made it impossible for
them to live together
as equal citizens.
"This unfortunate difference in
color and perhaps of faculty,"
he wrote, "is a powerful
obstacle to the emancipation
of these people."
Mainstream science
now largely disavows,
but not completely,
the old biosocial ways
of thinking, like eugenics,
evolutionary explanations
for gender inequality, and
biological concepts of race,
as profound misinterpretations
of the relationship
between biology and
society that we now know
have supported horrific
acts of inhumanity.
The emerging biosocial
science investigates
instead the impact of social
environments on human.
Bodies rather than
explain social inequality
as biologically predestined,
these scientists
show how social
inequality produces
disparate biological outcomes.
Now, to simplify and emphasize
the distinction I'm making--
and this is simple.
It's more complex than this.
But just to get out the idea
of this basic distinction I'm
making between the
old and the new,
one posits that
biological differences
produce social inequality
while the other, that
social inequality produces
biological differences.
It's this inversion of
the causal relationship
between biology and social
inequality that distinguishes
what I'm going to
call the old biosocial
and the new biosocial sciences.
The distinction I'm making
revolves around their theories
for explaining the relationship
between biology and society.
And that's a distinction that's
not bound by historical time
frames or academic disciplines.
Relating the biological
to the social,
then, is not itself
antiquated or modern.
It's not scientific
or unscientific.
It's not just or unjust.
We must ask, what are the values
underlying differing approaches
to the relationship between
biology, society, and justice?
Can we identify the features
of biosocial ideologies
and practices that make
them ethical or unethical?
Can this analysis
help to ensure that
the new biosocial
revolution doesn't repeat
the injustices of the past?
Without the scrutiny
of its assumptions,
methods, and indeed its values,
the new biosocial science,
like the old, risks reinforcing,
rather than contesting,
today's unjust social order.
In today's lecture, I'll
examine the ethical flaws
of the old biosocial science.
Tomorrow I'll examine the ethics
of the new biosocial science
by testing to what extent
it replicates or contests
the errors identified today.
Now, let me say a few
words about the contours
of my scientific
and ethical inquiry.
First the science--
biosocial science
spans a gigantic and expanding
range of research projects
that explore the
complex interactions
between the social
environment and human biology.
Just as we were waiting
to come into this lecture,
it was pointed out that
there's a whole section
of biosocial science
I've left out.
There's not time
enough to cover it all.
But I'm particularly
interested in some
of these scientific
projects that
claim to explain the
relationship between biology
and social inequality,
in particular.
Second, the ethics-- in the
decades following World War
II, than the Nuremberg Code,
the Declaration of Helsinki,
and the Belmont Report
established ethical standards
to help govern science
going forward, in an effort
to prevent the atrocities
that many scientists committed
in the past, especially the Nazi
regime prior to World War II.
Biosocial research raises
a number of ethical issues.
How should scientists
protect the autonomy
of research subjects,
whose blood is drawn,
cheeks swabbed,
and brain scanned?
What about the privacy of
the biosocial and social data
they collect,
store, and analyze?
What are valid and
invalid uses of all
this biosocial information by
courts, insurance companies,
and government agencies?
These are all fascinating
and important questions
biosocial researchers
must address.
But I want to evaluate the
ethics of biosocial science
according to the
principle I think
is most at stake in
scientists' claims
about biology and
social inequality,
and that is the value
the principle of justice.
Justice is achieved when our
society's institutions respect
everyone's human rights equally
and don't systematically
distribute advantages, such
as education, health care,
and housing, and disadvantages,
such as police profiling,
incarceration, and pollution,
to groups of people
according to their positions
in hierarchies of power.
I'm evaluating both the old
and the new biosocial sciences
according to this ethical
principle of justice,
although I recognize that the
meaning of justice is unsettled
and that old biosocial science
emerged before it was widely
accepted that scientists
should be governed
by ethical principles at all.
I'm not interested in
judging biosocial scientists
for violating the set of
principles that governed them
at the time.
I'm interested in examining
how the assumptions, theories,
and methods have
advanced or impeded
the moral norm of justice.
My objective isn't
to denounce science
that investigates the interplay
of biology and society.
I support that science.
But I want to think more
strategically and imaginatively
about how it can proceed in
a way that actually achieves
its asserted aim to reduce
social inequalities.
To advance an ethical
future of science,
I'll conclude tomorrow, we
need a more radical rethinking
of the relationship between
biology, society, and justice.
So let me begin with the
scientific invention of race
as a biological division
of human beings,
as an example of the
old biosocial science,
because it's such
a foundational form
of this scientific paradigm.
Embedded in the
biological concept of race
is the claim that the inherent
characteristics of individuals
determine their
status in society.
European typologists
invented race
and claimed it was a
biological trait, rather than
a political
relationship, in order
to justify European
subjugation of other peoples
through conquest,
slavery, and colonialism.
Transported to
Revolutionary America,
the biological
concept of race served
an important
ideological function.
Biological differences were
essential to justifying
the enslavement of Africans
in a nation founded
on a radical commitment
to liberty, equality,
and natural rights.
White Americans had to
explain black subjugation
as a natural condition, not
one they imposed by brute force
for the nation's
economic profit.
Genetic determinism, the theory
that genes program individual's
phenotypes, including their
behaviors and abilities,
is often conflated with
the old biosocial science.
But race preceded
genetic determinism.
The belief that race
is part of nature
profoundly influenced Western
biological and social sciences
and shaped their understanding
of the relationship
between biology and society.
Evolutionary biologist
Joseph Graves
points out that biological
determinism, in fact,
predates not only the
20th-century disciplines
of evolution and genetics, but
even the 19th-century formation
of biology as a science.
"Biological
determinism," he writes,
"survived and flourished
during the turnover
from supernaturalist to
scientific explanations
of human origins and potential."
The biological race concept
is a creationist belief
that has amazingly survived
major scientific revolutions
since the Enlightenment
and, in fact,
survives today in some of
the most advanced genomic
and biomedical research.
The trial judge who
convicted the Lovings in 1959
for violating Virginia's
ban on interracial marriage
explained, "almighty God
created the races, white, black,
yellow, Malay, and
red, and he placed them
on separate continents.
And but for the interference
with this arrangement
there would be no cause
for such marriages."
His view mirrors the scientific
understanding of race
as an innate attribute produced
by human evolution that
exists prior to and
separate from society.
The resilience of the
creationist concept
of biological races surely was
critical to the transmission
of the creationist concept
of biological determinism
into modern science.
Making race revolve
around biology
constructed it as an
innate, permanent,
and inescapable status.
In a respected text,
Anthropology, Biology,
and Race, first
published in 1923
and then reprinted
in 1948 and 1963,
the influential
anthropologist Alfred Kroeber
stated the nature of race as
a matter of hereditary fact.
Quote, "to the question
of why a Louisiana
Negro is black and long
headed, the answer is ready.
He was born so.
As cows produce
calves and lions cubs,
so Negro springs from Negro
and Caucasian from Caucasian.
We call the force
at work heredity."
As an inherited
status, race seems just
to be passed down simply
through the biological process
of procreation.
But because race is actually
a political category,
white lawmakers never left
reproducing it to heredity
alone.
One of America's very first
laws enacted in Virginia in 1662
helped to determine
racial boundaries
by regulating the inherited
status of children.
So the law notes this
biosocial quandary.
To quote the
preamble to the law,
"whereas some doubts have
arisen whether children
got by an Englishman
upon a Negro woman
should be slave or
free," then the statute
goes on what do we do
about this problem?
The statute clarified the
matter by conveniently
declaring that the children's
status followed the condition
of their enslaved mother.
So black women gave birth
to enslaveable children,
even if their
fathers were white.
White settler colonists
altered English laws
of inheritance and kinship
to devise the delusion
that enslaving
their own children
followed the laws of nature.
The biological claim
that race is inherited
cast black women's bodies as the
producers of their children's
subjugated political position.
Centering the reproduction
of slave status
on black women's wombs
served dual purposes.
It excused state violence
against black women
as necessary to manage their
procreative labor, which
produced the property needed
to maintain the slave system.
And at the same time, it
attributed the suffering,
slavery inflicted
on black people,
to the inferior qualities
black women supposedly
transmitted to their offspring.
Medical researchers of the
day elaborated the claim
that race is inherited
by investigating
racial differences in disease.
The racial concept of disease,
that people of different races
suffer from different diseases
and experience common diseases
differently, was
presented as proof
not only that race
is biological,
but that biological distinctions
between races, particularly
black pathology, caused
racial inequality.
After attending the University
of Pennsylvania Medical School,
Dr. Samuel Cartwright practiced
in the deep South in the 1850s
and became a well-known
expert on what
was then called Negro medicine.
Cartwright argued
that slavery was
beneficial for black
people for medical reasons.
He claimed that because
black people had
lower lung capacity than whites,
forced labor was good for them.
He wrote in a
medical journal, "it
is the red vital blood
sent to the brain that
liberates their minds when
under the white man's control.
And it is the want
of sufficiency
of red vital blood that chains
their minds to ignorance
and barbarism when in freedom."
By converting race into
biological difference,
Cartwright made
enslavement of Africans
seem like a form of freedom
and made black freedom seem
like bondage.
After slavery ended,
white scientists
blamed black people's
deteriorating health
on a biological incapacity
to adjust to freedom.
Locating blacks' inferior status
and biological susceptibility
to the changing
social environment
provided a reason to
retain white supremacy.
Instead of dismantling
the social order inherited
from slavery, scientists
argued that the best way
to improve the condition
of emancipated blacks
was through either
benign neglect
or coercive medical
intervention.
This updated biosocial
theory excluded
from scientific
inquiry, at least
for the mainstream scientists,
the reality that, at the time,
whites were violently
reinstating black people's
slave status through Ku Klux
Klan terror, the convict lease
system, and voter
disenfranchisement.
Just as Cartwright explained
the symptoms of black oppression
as caused by
race-specific disease, so
he explained black
resistance as a symptom
of race-specific disease.
Cartwright coined the
term drapetomania,
combining Greek words for
runaway slave and crazy,
to describe the mental disorder
that caused enslaved blacks
to flee plantations.
Because, after
all, if enslavement
was good for black
people's health,
then an enslaved
person would have
to be crazy to run away from it.
A biologically
normal black person
should be happy to be enslaved.
Just as Cartwright
corrected for race
in his measurement of
human lung function,
by the way, a practice that
continues in medicine today,
he corrected for race in his
understanding of human freedom.
In a speech to the National
Press Club in 1986,
James Baldwin pointed out that
the noble savage of Africa
had to become the happy
darky in the Americas.
To quote Baldwin,
"if I wasn't happy,
then there was something
wrong with slavery.
So I had to be happy to
keep the master happy."
Baldwin goes on to note the
moral and epistemological
perversion entailed in the
racial delusions needed
to make the master happy.
"We are living with
these myths until today,
and it corrupts the view
from here," he said.
Out of this profound
misapprehension
has come a system of
thought which makes
reality very hard to reach.
Scientists invented
the concept of race
as an inherited trait
that naturally produces
and reproduces the racial order
in which black people serve
white masters.
With this system of
biosocial thought,
scientists kept white
people happy by helping
them avoid the reality
of their nation's origins
in violence against
black people.
Now I want to turn to a more
recently developed, yet closely
related, biosocial
science that emerged
after the discovery of the gene.
In 1911, prominent biologist
Charles Davenport, who--
I mentioned University
of Pennsylvania,
so I'll mention Harvard.
He was a Biology Professor
at Harvard at one point.
Equal opportunity here.
Davenport defined
eugenics as "the science
of the improvement of the
human race by better breeding."
At the turn of the 20th
century, scientists
proposed the rational
control of reproduction
to improve the population
and advance society,
based on the premise that
genes determine individuals'
socially relevant traits.
Eugenicists' biosocial
agenda, which
spanned a broad range of public,
health, criminal justice,
education, and
immigration policies,
confused social privilege with
innate biological superiority
and social disadvantage with
innate biological inferiority.
The founder of eugenics,
Francis Galton,
mistook inherited
social privilege
for inherited intelligence,
when he wrongly
assumed that the British
elite achieved their stature
owing to what he called
their innate genius.
He argued that fitness in humans
depended on general ability
or intelligence and
proposed to show
that a man's natural abilities
are derived by inheritance.
Like the myth that racial
caste is inherited,
Galton's claim that
social class is inherited
is a profound
misapprehension that a race
is the reality of violently
enforced structural inequality.
Galton's distinction
between nature and nurture
lay the foundation for
his biological theory
of social class.
By separating nature, the traits
that children are born with,
from nurture, everything
that influences children
after they're born,
Galton could claim
that children's social
positions are determined
by their inherited traits and
not by the social structures
that advantage or
disadvantage them.
This imaginary break
between nature and nurture
permitted eugenicists to avoid
the obvious empirical problem
of controlling for the myriad
impacts social inequality has
on children's experiences
and life chances.
As the geneticists' manifestos,
signed by 22 scientists
and published in
Nature in 1939, noted,
"there can be no valid basis
for estimating and comparing
the intrinsic worth of
different individuals--"
that means intelligence--
"without economic
and social conditions
which provide approximately
equal opportunities
for all members of society
instead of stratifying them
from birth into classes with
wildly different privileges."
The make believe that scientists
can isolate, test for,
and quantify inherited
propensities that determines
success in an unequal
society scaffolded
eugenicists' claim that
social inequality originates
in biology.
There is no way to prove that
any one social position is
caused by inherited traits
in an unequal society.
You can do it in a
lab with rats maybe.
But you can't do it
with human beings.
Galton's eugenicist ideas found
fertile ground in America.
Eugenics became mainstream
science in the United States
before it was embraced
as the biosocial logic
of Nazi extermination.
Like the biological
concept of race,
eugenics was politically
useful to defend
the white capitalist regime.
In the early 1900s,
the descendants
of Northern European settlers
sought to maintain control
over an exploited workforce of
Southern black sharecroppers
and urban factory workers from
Southern and Eastern Europe.
Eugenics provided a
forward-looking scientific
framework to justify the
efforts of white elites
to preserve the unjust social
order they had violently
erected.
White elites were
also pathologically
obsessed with preserving
their racial purity.
And eugenicist science
went hand-in-hand
with Jim Crow laws that
officially segregated people
by race.
Eugenics and Jim
Crow, after all,
were progressive
reforms that relied
on modern biosocial science to
strengthen the social order.
On the same day in March
1924, the Virginia legislature
enacted two laws that jointly
promoted the state's eugenicist
and white supremacist agendas.
Virginia's anti-miscegenation
law, the Racial Integrity Act,
prohibited anyone who
wasn't white from marrying
a white person in order to
discourage contamination
of the white race
from racial mixing
and to reserve for white people
only the privileges of marriage
to a white person.
That was the law that
the US Supreme Court
held unconstitutional
finally in 1967 in the Loving
versus Virginia decision.
Now, along with that
act, Virginia lawmakers
passed an act to provide for the
sexual sterilization of inmates
of state institutions
in certain cases.
And that authorized the
forced sterilization
of people confined
to government asylums
because they were
deemed feeble-minded.
The compulsory sterilization
law was the subject
of the 1927 case Buck versus
Bell, in which Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes gave eugenicist
science the imprimatur
of constitutional law in
his infamous declaration,
"three generations of
imbeciles are enough."
Like Samuel Cartwright's
defense of slavery and the myth
of the happy darky,
Justice Holmes' rationale
for sterilizing Carrie Buck
against her will relied
on the pretense that the state's
violation of her body was
for her own good, as
well as society's.
Holmes explained, "it is
better for all the world
if instead of waiting to execute
degenerate offspring for crime
or let them starve
for their imbecility,
society can prevent
those who are
manifestly unfit from
continuing their kind."
Eugenicist science provided
a biological explanation
for Carrie's disadvantaged
status as one of the, quote,
"shiftless ignorant
and worthless class
of antisocial whites
of the South,"
to quote Harry
Loughlin's deposition
testimony in the case.
And it gave them a biological
excuse to forcibly contain her.
According to
eugenicist thinking,
forced sterilization
protected society
from the biological threat posed
by genetically defective races
and classes.
The biosocial logic
of race and eugenics
not only obscures
the violence required
to uphold structural
inequality, it
converts those subjected
to state violence
into biological
threats to society.
Frantz Fanon wrote in The
Negro and Psychopathology,
"the Negro symbolizes
the biological nature.
To suffer from a
phobia of Negroes
is to be afraid of
the biological."
I recall Fanon's words
frequently these days
when police officers
routinely explain
why they killed unarmed black
victims by describing them
as having threatening
non-human bodies.
The Charlotte, North
Carolina officer
who shot 24-year-old
Jonathan Ferrell 10 times
as Ferrell approached him for
help after his car crashed,
described him as a zombie.
Darren Wilson told the Ferguson
Grand Jury investigating
his killing of
18-year-old Michael
Brown, "the only way
I can describe it,
it looks like a demon."
The notion that race is
biologically reproduced
makes black women's wombs
an especially dangerous
biological threat.
Politicians, policymakers,
sociologists, demographers,
public health
experts, and the media
cast black women's fertility
as an urgent social problem.
They routinely point the
finger at black women's
childbearing as the cause of
their children's disadvantages
and deficits and
propose policies
to restrict black woman's
fertility as the remedy.
Tens of thousands of black
women across the country
were sterilized without their
voluntary consent in the 1960s
and 1970s as part of
government programs
that viewed their children
as burdens on society.
The North Carolina
Eugenics Board
operated well into
the 1970s, by then
focusing the scalpel
on black women
who received public assistance.
A 1990 Philadelphia
Inquirer editorial
proposed Norplant, a long-acting
chemical contraceptive,
as the answer to the staggering
rates of black child poverty.
And in 2013, not
1913, the Center
for Investigative
Reporting revealed
that 150 female inmates in
California's state prisons
had been sterilized
between 2006 and 2013
without obtaining
required ethics approval.
The doctor in charge
justified sterilizing
the incarcerated
women by pointing to,
quote, "what you save
in welfare paying
for these unwanted children
as they procreated more."
He was willing to tell
the reporter that.
In the 1990s, black
mothers' crack cocaine use
became a primary explanation for
high rates of both black infant
mortality and child poverty,
although these disparities long
predated the crack epidemic.
Biomedical researchers
falsely claimed
that these women gave birth
to so-called crack babies, who
lacked any social
conscience and were
destined to lives of welfare
dependency, illiteracy,
and crime.
Instead of transmitting
immutable deficiencies
through their
genes, these mothers
were set to inflict
similar damage in utero,
dooming the next generation
of black children to what one
columnist described as, quote,
"a life of certain suffering,
of probable deviance, of
permanent inferiority."
The exact biological
mechanism by which
black mothers produced their
children's inferior status
became irrelevant.
Another reporter wrote, "call
them welfare babies, crack
babies, or deficit babies.
But what by whatever term, they
constitute a new bio underclass
of infants, who are
disadvantaged almost
from the moment of conception."
Since then, medical researchers
have definitively discredited
the crack baby myth.
The infants exposed to
crack cocaine in utero
have grown up now, and
they're not the monsters
they were predicted to become.
The negative outcomes they
exhibited as newborns,
originally attributed
to drugs, actually
resulted from structural
inequities experienced
by all mothers and children
in their neighborhoods, lack
of access to high-quality
health care, shoddy housing,
malnutrition, exposure
to environmental toxins
and stress.
But the damage had been done.
District attorneys
across the country
concocted an
assortment of charges
to punish these women
for fetal crimes.
And child welfare agencies
removed thousands of babies
from their mothers to
warehouse in hospital wards.
A public health problem turned
into a criminal justice matter
to be solved by locking up
women instead of providing them
with better health care.
Over the last several years,
an anti-abortion billboard
campaign in cities like
Atlanta, Chicago, and New
York literally reiterated
the familiar message
that black women's wounds
pose a biological threat,
"the most dangerous place
for an African-American
is in the womb."
Ironically, these
billboards were
trying to exploit the
history of reproductive abuse
of black women by using
rhetoric that comes straight out
of the eugenics era.
The old biosocial science
casts only socially
disadvantaged people,
never those in power,
as biological
threats to society.
Scientists tend to focus
on black people as research
subjects to investigate
the innate predisposition
for violence and other forms
of anti-social behavior.
The atrocities white
people have systematically
inflicted on other
human beings are
far too numerous and
horrific to recite.
We need only recall
the postcard image
of tortured and burned bodies of
black lynching victims hanging
from trees, as grinning white
onlookers point up at them.
Yet black scholars who proposed
to study the biological reasons
for white people's
propensity to violence
are considered crackpots.
Black psychiatrist Frances
Cress Welsing's theory
of color confrontation, which
links white people's urge
to dominate others to a
genetically defective lack
of melanin, is considered--
see, that gets a laugh.
It's considered illegitimate
by mainstream biosocial
scientists.
But why-- well, think
about it, seriously.
Why is her theory
any less plausible
an explanation for the
racial order in America
and around the
world than theories
that rely on black people's
genetic defectiveness?
The universal condemnation
of the Nazi Holocaust
put an end to mainstream support
for eugenics as empirically
and ethically flawed science.
But eugenics'
biosocial underpinning,
the belief that social
inequalities originate
in biological
differences, has survived.
The Galton Foundation closed
down The Eugenics Review
in 1968, only to revive it
as the Journal of Biosocial
Science the following year.
The American Eugenics
Society waited until 1973
to change its name
to the Society
for the Study of Social Biology.
Decade after decade,
prominent scientists
have used eugenicists'
favorite measure
of inherent worth, intelligence,
to make biosocial claims.
In the 1970s, Berkeley
psychologist Arthur Jensen
argued that black students'
innate cognitive inferiority
limited the efficacy of
federal education programs.
There was no point in spending
tax dollars in improving
education for black
children, he said,
because they were innately
incapable of greater
academic achievement.
The 1994 controversial
bestseller The Bell Curve--
Intelligence and Class
Structure in American Life
by Richard Herrnstein
and Charles Murray
rehashed the claim that
race and class disparities
stem from immutable differences
in inherited cognitive ability,
which could not be eliminated
through social interventions.
Today, as biological
and social scientists
gain unprecedented access
to research participants'
genetic information,
they're revisiting
eugenicists' claims
about intelligence
and linking specific genotypes
to educational attainment.
A study published this year
in Molecular Psychiatry
claims its findings
marked, quote,
"a turning point in the social
and behavioral sciences."
Why?
Because their findings,
they say, make it possible,
quote, "to predict educational
achievement for individuals
directly from their DNA."
The authors proposed that
polygenic scores may soon
become a useful tool for early
prediction and prevention
of educational problems.
These scientists aren't using
children's social positions
to predict their intelligence
or their educational attainment
as eugenicists did.
But they are using
genetic tests to explain
why socially disadvantaged
children achieve
less academically.
Unlike eugenicists,
many researchers
currently study the
genetics of intelligence
and argue that
their findings can
help to reduce social
inequality by identifying,
through these tests,
which children need
educational
interventions the most.
But given the persistence
of glaring race and class
inequities in public
education, it seems far fetched
that our society would be
more motivated to devote
extra, rather than even
fewer, resources on children
deemed by tests
to be genetically
predisposed to
lower intelligence.
We're more likely to
address children's
unequal educational
attainment by distributing
educational resources
more equally.
World War II also brought the
disavowal of scientific racism.
UNESCO's landmark 1950 and
1951 statements on race
rejected the Nazi
doctrine that some races
are superior to others.
But they failed to abandon
the concept of biological race
altogether.
Instead scientists began to
distinguish the ideological use
of race for repressive purposes
from the scientific use
of biological race for
legitimate research.
50 years later, the
mapping of the human genome
seemed to herald,
once again, the demise
of the biological
race concept, when
President Clinton and
the scientists involved
in the project declared,
it proved race could not
be identified in our genes.
Yet the science that
emerged from sequencing
the human genome reflects
just the opposite,
an explosion of interest in
race-based genetic variation.
In many labs,
scientists use race
as an unquestioned organizing
principle for their collection,
analysis, and reporting
of genetic data,
with an astounding lack
of scientific rigor,
routinely confusing the
latest socially determined
census categories for
genetically determined
biological groupings.
For example, a study published
in the American Journal
of Obstetrics and
Gynecology in 2007
attempted to test the
hypothesis that, quote,
"black race, independent
of other factors,
increases the risk of
extreme preterm births."
It's hard to fathom what the
researchers meant by black race
and how they could
have possibly isolated
this ambiguous biological
essence from the wide range
of environmental
factors that can cause
women to deliver prematurely.
The revival of the
biological race concept
reached outside academic
circles in 2014,
when former New York Times
science journalist Nicholas
Wade published a manifesto in
favor of race-based genetics.
In A Troublesome Inheritance--
Genes Race and
Human History, Wade
claims that the human
species is divided
into three principal races,
Africans, Caucasians,
and East Asians.
And he says they
evolved separately
to be genetically predisposed
to distinctive social behaviors
that, in turn, determine
the types of institutions
each race developed.
According to Wade--
and you can kind of
guess where this is going
without reading the book.
But just in case you
didn't follow the logic,
"Europeans evolved to create
open and innovative societies.
Jews are genetically
adapted to behaviors
required for economic success.
Chinese people are
programmed for conformity.
That makes them
obedient to autocrats.
And Africans remain mired
in their innate propensity
for violent tribalism."
For Wade, it is instinctual
social behaviors
that explain why resource-poor
countries, like Japan
and Iceland, are wealthy, while
more richly-endowed countries,
like Nigeria and
Haiti, are, quote,
"beset by persistent
poverty and corruption."
He is breathtakingly
silent about the role
of European conquest,
slavery, and colonialism
in producing these
global inequities.
In several widely cited
articles in prominent journals,
biomedical researchers
argued that it
was essential to investigate
health-related genetic
differences among
racial groups in order
to treat the health problems
of minority patients
effectively and equitably.
These scientists distinguished
their use of race
as an inherited trait from
its racist incarnations
on the basis of their
advanced methods
and their good intentions.
This defense assumes that race
is a natural category that
only becomes problematic
when it falls
into the hands of racists.
But race is the
product of racism.
Racism is not the
product of race.
The problem is that
scientists' misinterpretation
of the political
category supports racism
by perpetuating the view that
racial inequalities are caused
by innate differences
rather than unequal power
arrangements.
The current revival of
biological concepts of race
mimics past deterministic
explanations
for racial inequality
by making race
seem more real at the molecular
level than at the social level.
Seeing race as an
innate trait resolves
the current
contradiction between
a colorblind political
ideology that
claims racism has ceased
to matter in our society
and the despicable racial gaps
in health, wealth, and welfare
that are very plain to see.
Yet again, in the words
of Evelynn Hammonds,
"the appeal of a
story that links race
to medical and
scientific progress
is in the way in
which it naturalizes
the social order in a
racially stratified society
such as ours."
Today this scientific
approach to race
provides a soothing
genetic explanation
for the racial
inequities that persist
in a supposedly
post-racial society.
So what is the relationship
between biology and society?
I've argued that the old
biosocial science, exemplified
by eugenics and the
biological concept of race,
answers this question in a
way that impedes justice.
The old biosocial
science is grounded
in a profound misapprehension
of the relationship
between biology and
social inequality.
Brazilian educator
Paolo Freire observed
in Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, "dehumanization,
although a concrete
historical fact,
is not a given destiny but
the result of an unjust order
that engenders violence in
the oppressors, which in turn
dehumanizes the oppressed."
Old biosocial scientists
have explained
the historical fact
of dehumanization
of oppressed people
as a given destiny
rather than the result of
unjust power arrangements.
This is not just
an empirical error.
This is an ethical one.
The old biosocial
science separates nature
from nurture in order to locate
the origin of social inequality
in inherited traits
rather than imposed
structural societal structures.
It theorizes that
social inequality
is reproduced in the
bodies, especially the wombs
of socially
disadvantaged people,
rather than in the reinvention
of unjust ideologies
and institutions.
It identifies the problems
stemming from social inequality
as oppressed people's
biological threats
to society rather than as
the structural impediments
and state violence inflicted
on oppressed people.
And it addresses social
problems by intervening
in oppressed people's bodies
to fix their perceived
biological deficits rather than
ending the structural violence
that dehumanizes them and
maintains the unjust order.
The abominable practices
that ensued in the past
from the old biosocial science,
such as forced sterilizations,
medical experimentation,
internments,
and exterminations,
stemmed not only
from the bad intentions of the
scientists who participated
in them, but from the unethical
logic of the science itself.
The old biosocial
science, to borrow again
the words of James Baldwin,
is a system of thought
that makes the reality
of social inequality
and the structural
violence that maintains
it very hard to reach.
With this argument in mind,
I'll close today's lecture
about the old
biosocial science that
holds that social
inequality is caused
by biological differences.
Tomorrow I'll discuss
the new biosocial science
that investigates how
social inequality produces
disparate biological outcomes.
Is the new biosocial
science, I'll ask,
a systems thinking
that makes the reality
of social inequality
easier or harder to reach?
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Good afternoon.
I'm Evelyn Hammonds,
Professor of the History
of Science and African-American
Studies here at Harvard.
And I want to begin
by thanking Dorothy
for this stimulating and
rich opening lecture.
Dorothy and I have
been traveling
for a long time over the
same historical terrain,
exploring and uncovering the
complex ways in which race
and science have
troubled and destabilized
the lives of African-Americans
in our nation's history.
And I'm really honored
to have this opportunity
to engage with her today
and over the next--
tomorrow as well.
Dorothy comes at this
topic through her training
as a legal scholar.
While I do so from
the perspective
of the history of science
and African-American studies.
So in my comment,
I want to emphasize
some of the distinctions between
our two academic disciplines
and the ways in
which they approach
this long and
complicated history.
So I'll try to
raise a few points
that I hope will offer some
additional historical context
to the many points that
Dorothy makes in this lecture.
And then I want to raise some
questions for our discussion.
So first, I think Dorothy's
main question, what
is the relationship between
biology and society,
is a very, very complex one.
And she wants to
answer this question
by beginning to
examine what she calls
the old biosocial
science, which posits
that biological
differences produce
social inequality, versus the
new biosocial science, which
posits that social
inequality produces
biological differences.
And she continued that the
distinction between the two
is not bound by historical
frames or academic disciplines.
But of course, as
a historian, I'm
going to argue that looking
at the historical context
is critical to understanding
this important distinction
she's drawn between the old
biosocial sciences and the new.
Of course, at the center
of these questions
is the long history of
race in the United States,
a history that
depends critically
on the changing meaning of
race over time in the US.
We really don't have time today
to discuss the complex changes
in how race concepts have been
defined differently over time.
So what I want to do
is sort of briefly
weave in a few moments in the
history of the race concept
that I think illustrate
the work that race
does in linking biology
to society and to issues
of social justice
in the US context.
Third, I just want
to say Dorothy also
asked us to think about what
is the ethical relationship
between biology,
society, and justice.
And here I will
argue in agreement
with Dorothy that,
quote, as she noted,
"without scrutiny of its
assumptions, methods,
and indeed values, the
new biosocial science,
like the old, risk reinforcing,
rather than tackling--"
though, I would say undoing--
"today's unjust social order."
So let me start with the
old biosocial science.
I hope that what I have to
say is not too redundant.
But I'm trying to weave a
bit of a narrative here.
So of course, we begin
in the American context
with Thomas Jefferson
in the 18th century.
And of course, he
was speaking from
a natural philosophical
tradition, where
the classification
of races emphasized
a hierarchical
ranking of humans,
with Europeans at
the top, Africans
at the bottom, especially
enslaved Africans.
His intervention was
certainly an important moment
in US history
because it introduced
the issue of African slaves'
so-called natural and inherent
biological and
social inferiority
into our national discourse.
And this discourse put front
and center the idea that, quote,
"innate biological differences
necessarily reflect
the innate social differences."
But over the course of
the 18th and 19th century,
there were some
significant shifts
in scientific beliefs
about race due to the rise
of scientific medicine, the
emergence of formal disciplines
of biology and the
social sciences,
and developments in statistics,
anthropology, and psychology.
Physicians also played
a prominent role
in linking race to biology
in the 19th century, led
by Samuel Cartwright, but
certainly not only Samuel
Cartwright.
Physicians were endless
in their comparisons
of disease differences
between whites and blacks.
The historian John Holland
notes that physicians simply
assumed that there were
innate biological, mental,
or physiological causes for
the differences they observed.
And they assumed that the cause
of differences between whites
and blacks was racial.
And no further explanation
or exploration was needed.
Therefore, I would argue that
by the end of the 19th century,
white physicians had little
interest in understanding
what we would now call health
disparities because the answer
to why such disparities existed
was explained by the observed
racial differences, which
were just a reflection of how
African-Americans, for example,
lived and how they died.
The 19th century, then, race
was an indivisible essence,
where biology and
culture were joined.
Or as one scholar noted,
quote, "race was everything,"
end quote.
Moving forward, as George
Stocking, Jr. noted, quote,
by 1900, while there was
no generally accepted
answer to the
question, what is race,
for both the scholar
and the citizen,
race was an integrated,
physical, linguistic, and
cultural totality."
In the 20th century,
I would argue,
that what we have witnessed is
how this integrated totality
that was race began to unravel.
Most significantly, biologists,
sociologists, anthropologists,
and physicians began to ask
similar and different questions
about the relationship
between biology and society.
For example, in the 1920s,
leading social scientists,
biologists, and
anthropologists alike
voiced the need to study the
Negro again during this period,
noting that previous studies
conducted in the 19th century
were imprecise, ill-defined,
and simply could not
get to the deeper social
or biological problems
that the Negro embodied.
More modern scientific methods
were needed, they claimed.
There was much
discussion at this time
about the relative contribution
of biological and social
processes to heredity.
And the Negro was seen
as the ideal embodiment
of these processes.
In 1926, when the National
Research Council formally
established the Committee
on the Study of the Negro,
white elites on this
committee saw biology
as a powerful set
of practices that
offered a way to solve the
social problems presented
by the Negro.
Now, of course, this
perspective was forcefully
challenged by the great
African-American intellectual
W.E.B. Du Bois, who was among
the first African-American
scholars of a long
line to follow
to question the ways in which
white elites had used biology
as the answer to the
unequal social conditions
that African-Americans
were forced to endure.
Now, certainly Franz
Boas, the anthropologist,
and his students in
concert with Du Bois,
distinguished between race,
language, and culture, arguing
that any biological
meaning ascribed to race
was nevertheless thoroughly
open to social influence.
In addition, as
Dorothy has noted,
the emergence of eugenics was
probably the most important set
of ideas and practices
that codified
a naturalistic perspective
about US society.
And there's much to
say about its influence
on biology in the US.
But I want to make a
slightly different point that
was first made by the
historian Peggy Pascoe.
And she noted that historians
have described something
of a war that happened between
the culturalists, represented
by anthropologist like
Franz Boas and his students,
against the eugenicists and
the biological determinists.
And most histories argued
that by World War II,
with the excesses of
Nazism, culturalists won,
and the eugenicists lost.
Race was indeterminable
biologically, as Boas wrote.
Quote, "it is not possible to
assign with certainty any one
individual to a definite
group," end quote.
Now, some biologists
joining his view even
argued that race as
applied to human groups
should be dropped from
the vocabulary of science.
But Pascoe noted that what
the culturalists were saying
was not that there was
no such thing as race,
but rather that race was
nothing more than biology.
It was just differences
in phenotype,
in blood, hair type, bone,
skin, color, and the like.
And culture was
far more important
than these mere
biological things.
They considered biology
to be of little importance
in understanding human
beings, American society,
or any society.
So I would suggest that in the
post-world War II period, up
until the middle of the 20th
century, race as biology
was under siege in the
biological sciences.
Though, as Dorothy
notes, it's not so much
happening in medicine
and public health.
Biology in this
period was no longer
sought after to explain
language, custom, intelligence,
character, or civilization.
Race as biology, as
Gunnar Myrdal would argue,
was all that was left.
And it was meaningful
only because
the visible physical
characteristics used
to identify races
were used by racists
to sustain racial hierarchies.
Meanwhile, I think another
point we have to consider
is that these were academic
discussions and debates
about biology and race.
Pascoe's and others' analyses
of specific court cases
offer, I think,
one important view.
But they also show us that these
academic debates had little
to do with what was happening
outside of the academy
on the streets of America.
On Main Street America, the
link between race and biology
was just as total as
Stocking described in 1900.
Lay people did not
need biology to sustain
a particular view of race,
that it was biological.
As Tom [INAUDIBLE]
argues, quote,
"this work was done by
anti-miscegenation laws,
a vigilant state bureau
of vital statistics
that aggressively enforced
racial boundaries, issuing
birth and death statistics,
census takers, job
discrimination, separate
school systems, and if all else
failed, bloodhounds and
lynch mobs," end quote.
So I, too, like Dorothy, am
haunted by the persistent way
in which the recent spate
of police confrontations
with African-Americans is
permeated with language
that describes African-Americans
as biological and social
threats.
But such language and
imagery, I would suggest, too,
really reflect the
deep sedimentation
of race as biology into
our national consciousness
and interpersonal communication.
So to sum up the points
I'm trying to make,
I suggest that we see race
as an ever-changing lens
through which the relationship
between biology and society
has been viewed
throughout US history.
It is an especially
dense transfer point
between biology and society.
And it reifies the fraught
and contested relationships
between them.
So now I want to turn
briefly to the question
that Dorothy asked
us to think about,
what is the ethical relationship
between biology, society,
and justice?
So I want to turn to the
historian of biology Philip
Pauly, who argued
that by the 1920s,
the elite white male
leaders of American biology
saw their project
as an expression
of American thoughts, values,
anxieties, and aspirations.
As such, thinking about
biological objects and subjects
glided easily for
them into thoughts
about human society, social
evolution, the preservation
of threatened species, and the
needs to educate and uplift
the American public.
And Pauly put it
this way, quote,
"biologists have expressed
a continued desire
to culture American life.
It has included not
only the preservation
of health and
combating of disease,
but also the enhancement
of possibilities
for both present and
future generations
associated with
sexual, reproductive,
and genetic technologies.
Finally, it has
entailed efforts more
narrowly cultured
to present Americans
with a naturalistic
perspective on life
and to persuade them
that they are organisms
who have the capability
to use intelligence
to deal with the modern world.
These desires," he suggests,
"have formed foundations
for articulating and realizing
the promise of American life,"
end quote.
So for Pauly,
academic biologists
built into the
profession this notion
that a biologist
should be concerned
and must be concerned with
culturing American life.
And I think while Pauly's
point is provocative,
it does fail to
capture that from 1900
well into the late 20th century,
race remained a critical object
that biologists used to
sustain a naturalistic account
of social issues in the
US, despite changing race
relations.
And some would suggest
that biologists are not
primarily interested anymore
in questions such as what kind
of biological element
African-Americans
are in US society or
the biological character
of the American people in the
ways that eugenicists were.
But now their interest is more
in manipulating and improving
American society.
Their science is linked
to technology, industry,
and profits more
broadly, as Pauly notes.
These new practices
leaves all views
of race unanalyzed in the
academy and the streets,
where as biologist
Ruth Hubbard quipped,
social facts continue to be
conflated with natural facts.
And [INAUDIBLE]
concurred, noting
that there is a complicated
circle of meaning and practices
that tie the natural human
body to the political.
Or as Donna Haraway
would put it,
the political made the natural.
And the political
undid the natural.
There's another strain also
in post-World War II biology
that is perhaps pertinent
to Haraway's point.
And that's the history
that Diane Paul and others
have described of politically
left geneticists, who
in the post-world
War II period argue
that there was a link
between biological progress
and social progress.
These biologists, as Paul
notes, argued that, quote,
"the biological
improvement of mankind
presupposed the transformation
of social relationships."
So I don't have time to
talk about the long history
of the debates among
biologists about these ideas.
But I think these arguments
could provide a way
to think about the links between
the old biosocial science
and the new.
So to end, I want return to
Dorothy's first question,
what is the relationship
between biology and society?
I want to ask a different
question, what kind
of relationship do we want
between biology and US society?
And how can we achieve it,
if we knew what we wanted?
I wonder if we
might discuss what
the specific ethical issues
are for biologists and for US
society.
Now, my thought is that
one direct ethical issue
is to consider the
locus of control that
appears in characterizations
of the black body
as natural, characterizations
which continually make
African-Americans responsible
for their individual
circumstances.
In the old biosocial
science there
was little room for notions of
distributive justice or ethics,
since natural states
could not be modified,
only explained with greater
and greater precision
by increasingly more
powerful biological sciences
and scientists.
In the end, I guess I
ask, who provides answers
to the question of what
kind of relationship
we want to have between
biology and society?
I hope we can have a
discussion first about who's
included in the
"we" and secondly,
how we can think about the
ways in which we might bring
citizens and biologists
together to examine
the old biosocial science
as we walk into the new.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
So I think what
happens now is Dorothy
gets to say a few words.
And then we'll have a
discussion with questions
from the audience.
Well, thank you, Evelynn,
for those excellent comments
and expansion, elaboration,
and a different perspective
on the questions that I was
asking and talked about.
I think that--
I think I see our two
perspectives as, in a way,
being two sides of the same
coin but working together.
So I'm looking at the way in
which a common way of thinking
about the relationship between
biology and social inequality
traverse these various eras.
And that's why I said
it's not bound by time.
The fact that the
eugenics era is supposedly
ended at World War II doesn't
mean that those ideologies
don't persist in science today.
So that's what I meant.
But my goal was,
in a way, to show
how a particular
philosophy, ideology, way
of thinking about the
relationship between biology
and society has persisted
in various forms
over various historical periods.
And I heard your
comments as pointing out
the importance, which I
absolutely agree with,
in looking at how
those ideas have taken
different forms during different
historical periods in response
to the particular political and
social and cultural conditions
of the time.
So I think they are both--
not to try to be super
conciliatory or something,
but I think they're both
reaching the same conclusion,
which is that this is a
powerful way of thinking
that has had a profound
impact on science and society
that has persisted.
And it's persisted
in part because it's
able to reform in
response to society
and what's going on in society
and then to even support.
It's in response, but also
maintaining certain types
of relationships in society.
All of this is changing.
But there is a consistent
ideology and perspective
on the relationship
between society and biology
that I think we can
discern and distinguish
from a another paradigm, even
though my goal tomorrow is
to look at how that new
paradigm is distinguishable
and in which ways
it continues some
of the flaws of the
old biosocial science.
And when I say
flaws, I mean the way
in which it has supported unjust
relationships in our society.
I also want to say
as a bit of preview
that tomorrow I do take up
where you left off, asking more
the question, who decides, who's
part of the discussion of how
we want the relationship
between biology, society,
and justice to look?
Are biological and social
scientists up to the task
without bringing in other
disciplines and people
outside of academia to
answer these questions?
So I will focus on
that more tomorrow.
And I agree with you that is
a very important question, who
asks and answers these
more fundamental questions
about the just society
we want to envision?
And what is the role
of science in that?
What role will science play?
Scientists themselves
can't answer that question
all by themselves.
So that's something I
want to take up tomorrow.
And I'm glad that you
brought it up tonight.
So should we proceed
over here now?
OK.
Are we on?
Questions?
Professor Bhabha?
Thank you both
very much for those
provocative and interesting
views which are particularly--
thank you, particularly
significant because
of their interdisciplinarity.
And in fact, your final comment
was precisely about that,
can you resolve
this within the kind
of disciplinized areas or
the disciplinary areas,
or do you have to go out?
My question really is about--
focuses on two issues here,
one, which is an open question,
about the race cost
concept of the Chicago
School of Sociology.
So this is not
biosocial sciences.
But it is social
sciences, right,
and the way in which it
dealt with the question
of the street, as you
put it, the Main Street.
And in that work,
as I recall it,
of the Chicago
School of Sociology,
the question of culture is
extraordinarily important.
And psycho dynamics
are very important,
no question of perception.
So my second
Question takes off from the
metaphor that Evelynn used,
which is about
changing the lens,
looking, taking
a different view,
and suggesting that the
whole question of perception
is on the street.
And the way in which projection
on the body, on the black body,
brings together, in some ways,
the cultural, the biosocial,
as well as the ethical.
And of course, that's
the central issue
of Frantz Fanon in
Black Skin, White Masks.
The kernel of his argument is
when a child turns to his--
to her mother and says,
look, a black person.
Look, a black body.
And here you get both the
scientific, the biological,
and the phenomenological
coming together.
And I suggest this
because of your invitation
to think more broadly that this
then leads Fanon, for instance,
to try and understand
some of the questions
that you've raised by
turning to phenomenology,
very different from the
philosophical traditions
in which the ethics that you've
talked about, on the one end,
and a certain kind of
psychoanalysis on the other.
So this is just a way of
suggesting that the body itself
becomes the kind of
nexus of projection.
And then the notion
of the street
or where the encounter, the
racial encounter takes place
is a complex
implication of some kind
of biological common sense and
an effective identification.
Thank you very much.
Wow, there's a lot there.
But starting-- tomorrow,
I want to talk more
about the question of
disciplinary integration
because the new
biosocial science comes
with more interdisciplinary work
between biological scientists
and social scientists.
And there is an
expectation that merging
biological and social
sciences is going
to produce something radical.
And tomorrow I'll
question whether that's
the case, similar to Evelynn's
question about who answers
these deeper questions,
and how do we
get to a point of even imagining
something beyond the way
that scientists have answered
these questions in the past.
But today I focused
mostly on biologists.
But it's not the case at
all that only biologists
have supported and perpetuated
these views about race
and about the relationship
between biology and society.
That's part of my comments
tomorrow will be that in a way,
they can come together and
support the old views that they
both had.
Social scientists have used
biological explanations as well
as biologists for
social inequality.
But you raised another question
about the focus on culture
as opposed to biology
as an explanation
for black people's
inferior status
in America or the
social problems
that black people experience.
And there is in many
Americans' view about race,
and this was
empirically supported
by Ann Morning's research--
she's a sociologist at NYU.
She looked at not only biology
and anthropology textbooks,
but she also interviewed
professors and college
students.
And many of the college students
conflated culture and biology,
as if culture is inherited.
They didn't say it
in biological terms.
In fact, they were taught
not to say that race
is a social construction.
It's not an innate
biological trait.
It's not a natural
biological category.
But yet, when they described
why there were differences
between black people
and white people,
they described culture
as if it were inherited,
cultural explanations as if
they were inevitable, natural,
and inherited.
And there are some
sociologists who have described
culture the same way as well.
Now, the point about Fanon's
point of encountering--
the white child encountering
the black person on the street
and why that evokes
a certain response,
I wasn't sure if
you were suggesting
that there is something natural
at all about that response.
I didn't think you were.
I was talking about projection,
about how a body image comes
to become a visual icon of a
certain kind because of these--
Yes, exactly.
But that clearly is--
whatever the parents
says to the child
is going to train
the child to think
about black bodies
a certain way.
And here I'll mention
another sociologist's book
that's very illuminating,
Osagie Obasogie's book
Blinded by Sight?
Blinded by Sight.
Blinded by Sight, a study of
people who were born blind
and how they see race.
So even though they've
never seen anybody,
they've never seen
race with their sight,
they have been taught by
their parents and others
that one can see race.
If they have sight, they
would be able to see race.
And that-- his
interviews produce
all sorts of interesting
insight into how
parents teach their children.
I've always said--
well, I think parents
teach their sighted
children the same thing.
How to-- what it means to see
a black body, what that means
clearly is something that
is taught and then creates
these ways of thinking.
Or not creates
it; it perpetuates
these ways of thinking about
race as a biological essence
that produces social, says,
produces culture, produces
health inequities, produces
all of these differences
in well-being that we see.
So I would just add, I think
that the point you were making,
Homi, about biological
common sense, to me,
that's simply a
reflection of the work
that race does in our
society to make us
think we have some
biological common sense, that
to believe that it is
something that we all
share, we all understand.
There's no need for explanation.
We all get it.
A certain hair type,
a certain nose shape,
a certain physical shape,
a certain skin color,
even though you can
look around this room
and there are many, many skin
colors of many, many people
of different ancestries here,
it doesn't matter because our,
quote unquote,
"biological common sense"
tells us something else, right?
And so that is the work
that race has done.
And that is the way
in which, to me,
race operates in a
society that believes--
and that belief has come about
because these deeply sedimented
practices that recreate and
reform it over and over again,
that there is something
there to this biology, that's
called biology anyway.
And I love how you say belief.
It's a belief.
I more and more compare it to
a religious belief, a faith.
It's a faith about the biology.
But I absolutely agree.
It's grounded in a
prior belief that
then shapes what people see.
It's so powerful.
It's very powerful.
So powerful.
Now it has that [INAUDIBLE].
It might.
Mm-hmm.
Trump voters there.
Mm-hmm.
I'm sorry.
I can't see.
It's hard to see.
Though, there's
a hand over here.
But--
OK, I'm sorry.
There's a hand.
I looked that way and
[INAUDIBLE] look this way.
You, sir?
Thank you very much
for this discussion.
I want to ask you both whether
you think that scientists that
questioned use of
racial categories today
may ironically be related
to the, shall we say,
ostensible acceptance that
race is a social construct,
a sense of acceptance today
that race is a social construct?
So Jonathan Klein, I think,
put this more eloquently
in his book Race In a Bottle.
As a merely social
category, race
does not command the
attention of the life sciences
with their focus on purportedly
natural and objective
phenomena.
Hence, ironically, as biomedical
researchers accept race
as a social construct,
they may also
disavow, consciously
or not, responsibility
for rigorously interrogating
the racial categories
that they employ.
Now, quickly, this may be
a question better posed
for tomorrow, since we're
talking about scientists today.
But I believe that we can see
this point being made already
in what you call
the old biosocial.
So in response to Frank
Livingstone in 1962,
Theodosius Dobzhansky
wrote that you
say that mankind has no races
plays into the hands of race
bigots, to which
Livingstone simply replied,
I fail to comprehend
how a position, which
denies the validity
of a concept,
supports anyone
using that concept.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
I think it is true that
misunderstandings about what
sociologists mean when they say
race is socially constructed
have supported the persistence
of the biological concept
of race in many ways,
in ways you mentioned,
and in other ways as well.
First of all, many
people interpret
race as a social
construction to mean
that the biological reality of
race is socially constructed.
So there is a real
division of human beings
that happened as a result
of either God declaring it
or evolution into
identifiable races.
And then that gets interpreted
by different societies
in different ways
at different times.
But they're constructing a
real biologically distinct set
of human beings.
They're constructing what
it means for human beings
to be biologically separated
into natural races.
That also was clear
in the interviews
that Ann Morning did
on college campuses
that many students
were interpreting
what their professors
told them that way.
But it's also
emerging in the way
in which conservative
commentators are using
new genomic research that can--
some have interpreted
as confirming
the biological division of
human beings into races.
I won't get into how.
I don't believe it
does confirm it.
But they're taking that new
science, using new algorithms
and computer methods
and DNA databases,
to confirm that race is
a biological reality.
But it is merely
constructed in society.
Therefore, there's no need
for government programs
to take race into
account, there's
no need for affirmative
action or reparations
or any other kind of state
redress for racial inequality
because that is just
a social construction
that we can debate whether
we believe it or not.
They're making it sound
like social construction is
a belief, but the
reality is that race
is a real biological category.
So again-- but to me, that's
a misinterpretation of what
sociologists and others mean by
race is socially constructed.
Race is only
socially constructed.
It's not biological and
socially constructed.
It is only socially constructed.
And maybe-- there's
a need for all sorts
of work in defining
what race means
and what social construction and
the biological effects of race.
All of that is really important
for scientists and others
to clarify what they mean by
these categories and the way
that they operate and the
relationship between biology
and racial inequality.
I see a couple of hands.
Professor Bobo, is your hand up?
[INAUDIBLE]
Sure.
Hi.
Thank you both for a
terrifically provocative
session so far.
I look forward to more.
I'm trying to draw
together several questions.
And I guess I'll
put it this way.
You've started to
broach on it already,
and it's part of the
note you started on.
Why haven't advances in
understanding the human genome
eliminated the race concept?
And kind of subsidiary
to that is--
and you've alluded to
it now-- that there
are some people, very
sophisticated people,
and people I think you would
have a hard time classifying
as problematic racists,
vehemently advocating in favor
of the basic Bloom and
[INAUDIBLE] categories
of races, like Neil Risch, that
they believe they can prove
to you that there are different
vulnerabilities to illness,
different vulnerabilities to
certain types of outcomes that
attach to our traditional
geographic ancestry notions
of the major racial groups.
And so part of the
question is, how do we
disentangle that, when
someone who's got what
looks like pretty good
politics, is aggressively
advancing the scientific
case for reinvigorating
a notion of race?
Kind of related to
that, I worry more about
how the pursuit of scientism is
leading many social scientists,
really in an unreflective
way, to inadvertently embrace
some pretty hard assumptions
about racial distinctions.
And so if you can
get your big grant
to get an MRI in the basement
of your psych building,
and go, wow, everybody's
afraid of black people,
well, I don't know.
You're half a step
away from biologizing
what the American brain is
doing with its perception
of these phenomena.
And have you thought about the
implications of doing that?
So this is what really worries
me in the current moment,
that we haven't brought
this level of sophistication
to the discourse.
And so the last
troubling thought
will be my argument has always
been from this point forward,
that you have to insist that
people have a progressive race
politics.
And then if you don't at the
outset declare that the purpose
of what we're--
the beginning presumption
is that race actually
does not exist.
We should have a world where
there are not organized
inequalities along these lines.
We created them.
They're going to be
here for a while.
They're hard to undo.
Therefore, I have
to use the concept.
I can't escape it.
But let's understand
the endpoint
is the elimination of this
not through the John Roberts'
vehicle by ignoring
it, it will go away,
but through some much more
forward-thinking explicitly
progressive logic.
Yeah.
Well, why has it pers--
You're absolutely right that
there are many, many scientists
who are continuing to use a
explicitly biological concept
of race in their research, who
claim that they can identify
races from genetic databases.
But most of that science
begins with an assumption
that races exist,
and then they look
for differences between them.
And even the types of
scientific maneuvers
that group people by
genetic similarity,
they still import all
sorts of assumptions
in the way the DNA was collected
and the algorithms that they're
using, the numbers of groups
they ask the computer to find,
just so many ways that many
scientists don't see that they
are importing these assumptions
in every aspect of their work
that claims to prove that
race is a biological category.
You're also right that
the justification many use
is that this is going to benefit
minority people's health.
And some even frame it as a
social justice or civil rights
kind of act to increase
attention to minority health
to produce medications
that are specifically
for black people and
other groups of color
in order to redress prior
neglect of minority health
and that this will help
too and health inequities.
But-- and you're also right that
sociologists are increasingly
using these categories and tools
without doing what sociologists
are supposed to do, which is
scrutinize how they're related,
or at least scholars of
science and sociology
and history of science people.
But they're not so much.
It's really a sociologists
and anthropologists--
I'll blame the sociologists.
--who are doing this.
Yeah, they're really doing this.
Historians of science
do a much better job.
They do.
And so this is
something, I think,
that we have to continue
to push against.
And what-- often this is--
when I say something like
we have to push against it,
or what you said,
people will say, well,
now you're being ideological.
We want to be more scientific.
But it is more scientific
to have definitions
of the categories you're
using and to think
through the theories
to justify why you
are using certain categories.
In many of these studies,
there are all sorts
of contradictions and just
holes in the reasoning that
need to be fixed.
There are lots of reasons
why I think it's going on.
You suggested some of them.
There is a financial
incentive for getting
funding if you have some
kind of biological aspect
to the project.
And unfortunately, that
biological aspect often
is added without
the kind of scrutiny
that we've been talking about.
Again, it's not to
say that we shouldn't
understand the relationship
between biology and society.
It's that the
biological is often
added without any scrutiny
about what that relationship is.
Or I shouldn't say any scrutiny,
enough scrutiny, and also
questions about the values.
Often the kinds
of- the statement
you made about having up
front a value of ending
racial inequality or a
value of a way of thinking
about human beings without
dividing them into races, that
is criticized, again, as
political, as ideological,
as if the old biosocial science
weren't from its origin,
to every single
historical period
that Evelynn talked about
completely influenced
by the politics of the time.
So it's not about are
we going to add value,
are we going to add ideology.
It's what again--
Expose it.
Expose it, and then
how do we proceed
in a way that promotes justice
rather than hinders it.
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Shields?
So--
Oh.
Hi.
So I want to try and raise
a couple of questions
that I think address this--
these methodological
issues about the use
of race constructs in
genomics research and I hope
will also get us to the issue
of distributive justice.
Yes.
So I'm thinking back to the
first paper, an early paper
that I and Evelynn and Pat King
and Rayna Rapp and Caryn Lerman
wrote in 2005 on the use of race
variables in genomics research.
And starting from
back then, we raised
that we could take the
use of race variables
in genomics research, the
use of self-identified race
variables in genomics
research as a poor proxy
for human genetic heterogeneity.
Now, I think that--
and at that time,
people were using 30
ancestry informative markers.
That's where the science was.
Now we're doing whole genome
wide association studies.
I think I want to
put a challenge out
there to those of us who are
deeply committed to eliminating
health disparities and
are social scientists.
Population structure is real.
So to do a high-quality
genetic study,
you need to account for
population structure
in your analyses.
And population
structure is due to-- it
tracks with geographical
ancestry, right, because
of drift and intermarriage
and mountain ranges
that get in the way of
people meeting and so forth,
so-- and deserts, right.
So people like Neil Risch
what they have shown
and with programs
like structure,
you can actually use programs
that group people in ways that
are not biased and that
will group people according
to underlying
population structure.
And in many cases, those can
overlap, to a large degree,
depending on your
underlying samples, right?
Yeah, right.
They had that project
in 74 Yoruba--
Right, exactly.
--standing in for all of Africa,
even though that was ridiculous
But Sarah Tishkoff, for example,
has done a lot of elegant work
where she's had huge
samples of self-identified
African-Americans.
She's had many more
samples of people
of different parts
of Africa and shown
that self-identified
African-Americans would range
from 1% to 99% African ancestry
according to different markers,
right?
So we know that there's--
the overlap is not what Neil
Risch said it was 10 years ago.
So we know that
there's problems.
But we, as social
scientists, can't
be throwing out the
baby with the bathwater
and say that there's no
population structure.
So it's not race.
And we can talk about it in
terms of geographical ancestry.
And geographical
ancestry will overlap
with individual self-identified
race or ethnicity
to varying degrees, right?
So we can all be in
agreement with that.
Yeah.
So, what I think
our challenge is
in terms of doing
research that may help,
as a disparities researcher,
what I want to do is
I want to not have
self-identified
race in our statistical models
as basically a sponge proxy
variable for
centuries of racism.
Because when you find that
that variable is significant,
what you have is absolutely zero
information that's informative.
That gives you zero
leverage for what
to do to reduce that odds
ratio that black folks are
10 times more likely
to have diabetes
or whatever it might be.
It gives you zero
information for action
to reduce inequalities.
So we want to disaggregate that
variable into here's population
structure.
And here is
disproportionate exposure
to these environmental assaults,
these social situations,
poor housing, inadequate access
to healthy green vegetables,
inadequate access to safe
places to walking and exercise,
and so forth.
We want to disaggregate that
self-identified race variables
into all the social and
environmental exposures that
disproportionately are visited
upon black people in America
because of social inequality.
Then we have actually data
that can inform interventions
to improve the outcome.
Does that make sense?
It does make sense.
But what you're doing
is being much more
careful about why
you're interested
in these populations,
however you define them,
in order to get
data that will help
answer a particular question.
So those kinds of questions
have been answered,
as you know, historically
just by using the hypothesis
I pointed to, black race
independent of other factors.
Every part of that
is so ambiguous,
it tells you nothing.
So you're absolutely right.
You have to specify--
think scientifically
about what would
answer the particular
question you want.
And self-identified race
might help with certain--
even though that could mean
many different things as well.
But that might help with
some particular questions.
A population
structure might help
with other kinds of questions.
Maybe you need some
combination of the two
in order to answer
another type of question.
But I think what many of
us, and including yourself,
are asking for is more
careful thought about what
these categories mean and
why they are producing
these disparate outcomes.
But I would argue that they're
inappropriate for analysis
investigating the
etiology of disease.
Self-identified
race variables are
inappropriate in those analyses.
But to Larry's question,
I think they're
essential for monitoring
health disparities
because those are the socially
meaningful groups in terms
of monitoring health
disparities and the health
of different subpopulations.
But I'd really be interested in
hearing Steve's point of view
in terms of the use of--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Oh, yeah, he's
introducing me tomorrow.
We don't need
self-identified anything.
Geneticists can--
we study Sweden,
and one of the geneticists
say, well, this guy
has a Finnish grandmother.
These are bad proxies
for gene chips.
And to Larry's point, eventually
what you really want to know
is on this $30 gene chip,
what are your risk variables?
Have you visited
a Russian prison?
Because you're coughing.
But let me just say
one other thing.
But what is really bizarre to
me in all of this is that--
and I don't know--
90% of human genetic diversity
exists in Africa, right?
So humans hung out
for 200,000 years,
fructifying and diversifying.
And then once or twice,
maybe 50,000 people
crossed from the Horn of
Africa, a tiny little fraction
of human genetic diversity.
And then for
African-Americans, obviously,
because of the behaviors
of slave owners,
there was all kinds of
other genetic admixture.
So Neil Risch is
a great scientist.
But I don't get
the fetishization
of this particular
proxy for something
that's medically important.
And it should just go away.
We're not quite there yet.
We don't have the gene
chips yet, but we will.
It should just go away.
Look, I come from a really
bottlenecked population,
Ashkenazi Jews.
We know it historically.
We've got lots and lots of rare
alleles, Tay Sachs and this
and that.
African-Americans are
incredibly genetically diverse.
Of course, yeah, definitely.
And so there's a set of
cognitive processes that--
and historical
processes and things
that I think humanists
and social scientists
are in a better position to
understand than scientists--
that lead skin
color or hair to be
these proxies for
all kinds of things--
and I agree with you--
that they don't actually
stand in for in any way.
So there's a kind of
cognitive impenatrability,
even among physicians, right.
Oh, absolutely!
They're taught to
take race into it.
So it is.
It's preposterous to
think of black people
as a homogeneous race that's
separate from other groups
of people because of all the
genetic diversity in Africa,
which is more-- as Sarah
Tishkoff has shown,
more diversity within Africa
then all the genetic diversity
around the globe.
So that's-- it's
ridiculous to do that.
Although, unlike
Africans, we do have
some Neanderthal admixture.
That's-- well, we could.
[LAUGHTER]
Some bad habits in the past.
[LAUGHTER]
But like I said, who's
going to study that?
But anyway--
[LAUGHTER]
But--
Somebody will.
In addition to all--
what you geneticists
like to call admixture,
but mixing of people
throughout human history,
especially in the United States.
So it gets even more
preposterous to call
African-Americans
a race of people.
But on the other hand,
it is still the case that
self-identified race
represents the way--
there's self-identified race as
the way people identify you as
well, which we should include.
That may have even more to
do with health disparities.
But my point is the
social grouping of race
has an impact on health.
So even if you know
someone's genes,
it's not going to give
you the information
about the way in which
racism has structured the--
so many aspects of their
life that affect health.
That's the reason why
I'm resisting the idea
that the social category of
race or the political category
of race is not-- we
can do away with it.
It's not relevant to
studying health inequities.
Obviously it is.
But it's not-- we don't-- the
way in which it's incorporated
into medical practice,
in some ways--
I was thinking when you
said, things have changed.
But there's certain
aspects of medical practice
that seem to come straight out
of Samuel Cartwright's time.
Well, because I
think there's been--
we can talk about the
debates that biologists
and anthropologists
were having certainly
in the early 20th century.
Physicians were not involved
in the conversation.
So that thing is a separate--
in my view, a separate tradition
that, because of the way of
the conception of the body is
always being shaped by culture
and biology and culture
working together, was
something that, I think,
was a very prominent
feature of their practice.
And so that's why I think
you can look at the PubMed
and see how far you can
go into the 20th century
and still see people
characterizing
their work by all racial
categories of caucasoid
and Mongoloid and all of those.
It goes very far into
the 20th century,
much further than
people like to think.
So I want to turn to a
different question, though.
And that is the question of--
I think one of the important
things that happened--
these debates have been great.
They've really opened up for
intellectuals and academics
how to think about race
as a social construction.
But my concern is
does it also increase
the gap between what
people in the street
understand, especially in the
US context, and the academy?
A lot of people will
sit here right now
and say, yeah, you can
say that all you want.
I know it when I see it.
And I know what it
means when I see it.
And I believe in it.
And that's something
that's still, I think--
so where do we go
with that as we--
we get increasingly more
sophisticated in how we
talk about race in the academy.
But just as Ann Morning
showed, first, our students
aren't quite getting it.
Even when they take
a course on it.
Even when they take
a course on it,
but that happens
with many things.
Yes.
But it does say
to us as educators
and those in the academy
that we have a problem here.
We're increasing a
gap of understanding
between how we talk about
this, how we address questions
of race in our work,
and back to the sort
of common popular
notions of race
that are continually repeated
in the media and social media
and by other sets
of social practices.
I'm concerned that we are not--
these conversations, while
I think incredibly useful,
may not be closing that.
And so--
I think that's true.
And just to add to it, I
think part of the reason why--
Larry Bobo asked,
why is it that this
is so persistent in science?
Part of it is because the
scientists learned this
as well when they were younger.
And there is such a strong--
it's almost hard to describe.
But I don't-- but you can almost
feel the resistance of many
people in the academy of letting
go of the idea that race is
a natural division
of human beings.
So it's-- and doctors as well.
They've learn this
already before they
get into the academy.
So it's important for
the academy, as well as
the gap that may be
increasing between the academy
and other people on what
they think about race.
So which means
that, unfortunately,
the research that is
sequencing people's genomes
might show very
definitively that you can't
divide human beings by race.
We have an alternative
in genetics
to grouping people by race.
What impact is that really going
to have, though, in the way
that the politics in the
United States is shaped?
I find that people sort
of latch onto the science
to confirm what
they want to see.
And it presently hasn't
had the kind of impact
I think many people think
it would have on the public.
On the other hand,
as we've seen,
scientific theories
have been able--
like we were talking about
during the eugenics era.
They have had a
very powerful effect
on social policy and culture
and popular ideas as well.
And I think this is a
perennial question, how
do we who are committed
to social justice
and envisioning
another way of thinking
about the relationship
between human beings
and a more equitable
and humane way,
how do we impact on
the way that people who
aren't in the academy think?
Now, part of it, I
think, is that there
are lots of people
outside the academy who
are advocating for a more
just and humane world.
And I think more and more
people in the academy
need to hook up with
people outside the academy
to work on these.
First of all, those people
are closer to the grassroots.
They're called grassroots
organizations for a reason.
They have more of an effect
than we do in our institutions
on how the popular
culture imagines
race and everyday
people imagine race
and other aspects of our life.
So part of the
answer, I think, is
for not only more
interdisciplinary
work not only between
social scientists
and biological sciences, but
also people in the humanities,
but also more work between
people in the academy and those
who aren't in the
academy to put forth
a better way of thinking
about human beings,
how we relate to each other.
There's one question
here and then Charles.
Hi.
So I was actually--
Oh, where is it?
--class of 2016 in a class
taught by Professor Hammonds
during my senior spring.
So I just graduated, and I'm
currently doing an MSW program,
and I'm working on an
inpatient psychiatric unit.
So I think a lot
of my perspective
and approach to this
right now is very applied.
And what I'm particularly
interested in
is speaking of on the
street rhetorics of race
right now, the idea
of a racial battle
fatigue and racial
trauma being something
that's also being historicized.
And so I guess my question
is, how can we responsibly
be responding to--
responsibly be responding to the
ideas that are floating around
in popular discourse
of race and trauma
and then doing that in a
way that doesn't necessarily
biologize or presume trauma?
For example, when patients
come into my unit,
how can we strike the
balance of understanding
the role of trauma and, I think,
the historical understanding
that we have of race,
particularly as it interacts
with the field of medicine and
also biological notions of it?
Yeah.
Well, that's something I'm going
to talk about more tomorrow,
because I think what
you're describing
is more in the realm of the
new biosocial, which recognizes
that social inequality has
traumatic effects on people's
bodies.
And I am concerned about how
to study that, understand
it, including the
biological processes,
without forgetting
what caused the trauma.
There's a tendency, as I'll talk
about tomorrow, to then focus
on what's in the body
causing the trauma
as opposed to the practices that
institutions and systems that
caused the trauma
in the first place.
And so there are theories like
post-traumatic slavery syndrome
that describe the traumas
that African-Americans
are experiencing
today but sometimes
slip in to making it seem as
if they are the result of harms
that took place a century or
centuries ago that have then
been reproduced within the
bodies of African-Americans
still today.
That's very different
from recognizing
that there have been
traumas inflicted
since the time of slavery,
through all the periods
that Evelynn talked about,
and that are currently
being inflicted today.
So I think the way we--
this goes, again,
to the relationship
between what our bodies are
experiencing and society.
And I'm not sure exactly how
to translate that into what
a doctor does in the clinic.
But I think it is
important for doctors to--
for part of their training
to be to think carefully
about whether the trauma that
their patient is experiencing
is because of something
innate in the patient,
or whether it's
because of something
that's structurally
unjust that's
going on in the patient's life.
There's a couple of
medical professors,
Helena Hanson at NYU and
Jonathan Metzl at Vanderbilt.
And I've also
co-authored an article
with Jonathan Metzl on
this topic of teaching
medical students
structural competency
instead of cultural competency.
A cultural competency tends
to have medical students focus
on what's different about
their patient's lifestyles
that is causing the
problem as opposed
to the unequal social structures
that are causing the problem.
And I wrote an article
called "Structural--
with Jonathan Metzl, "Structural
Competency Meets Structural
Racism," where we do give some
proposals at the end about what
medical students and
doctors can do to approach
their patients from a structural
perspective as opposed
to a cultural or purely
biological perspective.
Professor Rosenberg?
Late in the game
to say anything.
Go right ahead.
I did want to just reflect
for a second on this word
construction, which
we keep using.
And it's very-- this whole
tension of this conversation,
in a way, turns on the word
construction, which has
the implication of arbitrary.
And arbitrary, in
a sense, is lesser.
There's some tension
between a hierarchy
of epistemological legitimacy,
in which biological is here
and the social is merely
or just constructed.
Exactly.
And that's why biomarkers are
so sexy in some ways, which
Larry was talking about.
And it's not a question really.
It's just, I was
just sitting here,
and I noticed that
word kept being used.
And in a sense,
we are performing
the social construction
of race as a group.
Right.
Yeah, I think that's very,
very true, that constructed
is seen as less
important, less powerful,
having less authority than
biologically determined.
And so I could
quote you people who
have made that
distinction that in order
to support policies that are
against affirmative action
and focused more
toward viewing race
as a biological
distinction and not
a political category,
where they make explicitly
the distinction
between race being
a real biological
aspect of human beings,
but merely constructed.
And so there is
so much confusion
about that word constructed.
I think we really
do need to think
about another way of describing
what we're talking about.
I used-- in my book
Fatal Invention
I use the word invent
as another way.
But there-- I think
we need to think
about what these words mean,
how they're being interpreted.
But they certainly--
the idea that race
is socially constructed
is being interpreted
in a way that those of
us who use it to describe
the political meaning of
race, the political invention,
origins, maintenance
of race, that it
is an arrangement of power.
It's a form of governance.
We don't mean what many people
think that socially constructed
means.
But I think there's
another piece.
That's a very important point.
We talk about the
socially constructed,
but I also think there's an
enormous confusion about what
biology is.
And so that's why
I tried to turn
to what Phil Pauly
described in his book
about biology and
American culture.
They're always
linked, this project,
of what is culture in the
US context with something
that the early leaders
of American biology
were trying to
professionalize it and give it
a particular-- this practice
is a particular status
among the sciences.
We're aware of and linking
it to American life--
was doing a certain
kind of work for them.
So-- but when people think of
biology, it's the hard part,
or it's this floor.
And everything else
is the constructed
as opposed to something
relational or something that--
a set of practices
that are continually
reforming or re-framing
or tools or presenting
new tools that do different
kinds of work that are linked
to other kinds of tools.
We're not-- the biological is as
unexamined as the constructed,
Right.
That's very true.
So everybody uses
the word biological
as if we understand
what we mean.
And we don't actually mean
the same thing all the time.
Yes, that's very true.
And it tends to mean for many
people that it's deterministic.
It determines
something, that it can
be separated from the social.
So part of what I'm going
to talk about tomorrow
is the potential of the new
biosocial framework to question
what biology is.
And how can we
tap that potential
to actually move toward a
more just way of thinking
about the relationship
between biology and society?
Fortunately, often the old
definitions creep back in,
and we're not taking
advantage of this moment
where we can rethink
what biology even means,
what socially constructed
means, and what
are the relationships
between the two.
[LAUGHTER]
Anne Fausto-Sterling?
Yeah, just to throw a little
more language in there.
One of the ways I like
to talk about the biology
is to argue that--
and particularly to talk
about individual bodies that
display some kind
of disease that
is seen more frequently in
one group than another group--
is to talk about the biology,
the biological state,
or the medical state having been
produced by social structures.
So biology is not a
given, but is something
that is produced by a set of--
a particular biological
state is produced over time
as people are just whispered
to me developmentally
by a set of social forces.
So that notion of
producing bodies, I think,
is an important way.
I like it better
than constructing
because constructing
does have in the metaphor
that notion of arbitrary.
You could take boards
and hang them vertically,
or you could hang
them horizontally.
But bodies are produced
in particular ways
by their physiology interacting
with the social structures
which are affecting
the physiology.
Yeah, that's
revolutionary to think
about it that way as opposed
to the old way of thinking.
But how to take that, go with it
is the question, I think, yeah.
Professor Bhabha
gets the last word.
No, I don't want the last word.
I want just to say
that in talking
about this notion
of construction,
something that we
have not mentioned
is the attractiveness
of the stereotype.
Oh, yeah.
[INAUDIBLE] people
find stereotypes.
Even amongst
oppressed people, they
will construct their
own stereotypes.
That's my point about
projection around body image,
the importance of
visuality in making
the connection between science
and the street, [INAUDIBLE]..
But my function here is to
thank you both very much,
and thank you, audience, and
to look forward to tomorrow.
Thank you.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks.
Thanks, Evelynn.
