The "Racial" Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future

II. Science Constructs “Race”

PART TWO Science Constructs "Race" In the last decades of the [nineteenth] century, both theories of racial supremacy and scientific and technological gauges of human worth were widely accepted by European politicians and intellectuals.... A tautological relationship developed: scientific and technological achievements were frequently cited as gauges of racial capacity, and estimates of racial capacity determined the degree of technical and scientific education made available to different non-Western peoples. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Race is the phlogiston of our time. Ashley Montagu, The Concept of Race Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand. And why should it have been otherwise, especially during the period of extraordinary European ascendancy from the late Renaissance to the present? ... [T]here emerged a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural personality, national or religious character. Edward Said, Orientalism It is now almost forty years since biologists and anthropologists began to point out why explanations of human variability in terms of "racial"l inheritance were not useful. Moreover, for an even longer time scientists have recognized "the incompatibility between race and natural selection ... so that if one's major aim were to discover the races of man, one has to disregard natural selection," as Frank B. Livingstone points out in his essay in this section. In the first essay of this section, Stephen Jay Gould points to the cultural beliefs of David Hume, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and other Enlightenment figures that shaped research on race differences prior to Darwin's writings . Then he reanalyzes the data of the founder of the science of craniometry, 82 / Science Constructs "Race" Samuel George Morton, and identifies the "fudging and finagling" in Morton's interpretation of his data that enabled him to come up with spurious claims about the intellectual inferiority of blacks and Indians (and, not surprisingly, women). Since Morton published the data Gould uses, we may assume that he did not intend to deceive. Instead, the social expectations that he shared with the dominant scientific community shaped the way he understood his data. (Gould also reports on his subsequent discovery that his own beliefs evidently led him to a small bit of "fudging and finagling" in his reanalysis of Morton's figures!) Anthropologist Gloria A. Marshall shows that the racial categories scientists use are highly shaped by the folklore of their particular cultures. For example, there is the case of a group of japanese who do not differ biologically from their countrymen but who persistently have been perceived by them as racially different and inferior. In fact, it is a long history of class oppression that has made them different. S. L. Washburn analyzes the many ways in which culture shapes observable racial differences-in which culture shapes biology, we might say. Frank B. Livingstone explains why race is no longer a useful concept for modern biology; population genetics explains everything that can be explained about variations in populations. Livingstone's argument is not a secret to biologists and physical anthropologists. Why is this concept still used in biology, physical anthropology , medicine, and public health? The persistence of the idea of race has unfortunate consequences in a number of scientific and policy areas. In the excerpt from Not in Our Genes, R. C. Lewontin , Steven Rose, and Leon j. Kamin review the history of the IQ controversy, drawing attention not only to the knowingly fraudulent claims of Cyril Burt's famous twin studies (originally exposed by Kamin) but also to the failure of scientific journals to exercise the level of critical scrutiny over the writings of Burt and his supporters that are standard for criticisms of racist claims as well as for research reports in less controversial fields. It is also clear, however, that while scientists have been among the most powerful legitimators of scientific racism, they have also been among its most devastating critics. Nancy Krieger and Mary Bassett show that when it comes to explanations of racial differences in health levels, not only the persistence of...