Thu April 22, 2021 from 4 to 5:30 pm: Ann Morning (NYU Sociology)
The impact of science on everyday beliefs about race
The session will be followed by two parallel debrief sessions (5:30-6 PM): a general in the same Zoom as the lecture, and one for trainees that focuses on the recommended readings, organized by NeuroPIL.
This lecture will focus on racial conceptualization, meaning the web of beliefs that individuals hold about the nature of race. This complex of ideas includes notions of what race is; which groups constitute races and what distinguishes them from each other; how races originate, and how we "know" who belongs to which race. Since the 20th century, science education has played an important role in how everyday people conceptualize race, and I explore its impact in two forms. First, I will examine 80 biology textbooks published in the United States from 1952 to 2002 to uncover how high-school education has taught race. Second, I will report on my interviews with college students in the U.S. and Italy about the nature of racial difference and how they believe it is shaped by human evolutionary history.
Recommended Readings:
1. Bolnick, Deborah A., Duana Fullwiley, Troy Duster, Richard S. Cooper, Joan H. Fujimura, Jonathan Kahn, Jay Kaufman, Jonathan Marks, Ann Morning, Alondra Nelson, Pilar Ossorio, Jenny Reardon, Susan M. Reverby, and Kimberly TallBear. 2007. "The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry." Science 399-400.
2. Donovan, Brian M., Rob Semmens, Phillip Keck, Elizabeth Brimhall, K. C. Busch, Monica Weindling, Alex Duncan, Molly Stuhlsatz, Zoë Buck Bracey, Mark Bloom, Susan Kowalski, and Brae Salazar. 2019. "Toward a more humane genetics education: Learning about the social and quantitative complexities of human genetic variation research could reduce racial bias in adolescent and adult populations." Science Education 1-32.
3. Yudell, Michael, Dorothy Roberts, Rob DeSalle, and Sarah Tishkoff. 2016. "Taking Race Out of Human Genetics." Science 351:564-565.
4. Yudell, Michael, Dorothy Roberts, Rob DeSalle, and Sarah Tishkoff. 2020. "NIH must confront the use of race in science." Science 369:1313.