Radical Challenges to Racial Science

• In Event: Ethnic Studies and STS: Connections, Interruptions, Innovations

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze a persistent problem in the field of race and biomedicine: the ongoing need to critique, complicate, and contest studies that explain racial inequality and difference via appeals to racial biology. I perform a comparative analysis of documents published by Science for the People (SftP), a radical science movement calling for socially just science done not in the name of profit but in service to the people. SftP provides a useful site to examine these challenges, for the way its members study and critique racial science has shifted. Previously, these challenges came primarily from critical biological and biomedical scientists who sought to reveal the essentialist and deterministic logics embedded in dominant scientific fields, theories, and methods. They now come from above and below, as SftP endeavors to call attention to critiques from communities of color and racial justice movements that demonstrate how structural inequalities become located on and in the body. Across these challenges, there are models and insights into how the interrelationship between the social and biological might be reconceived. These re-visions, and the points of convergence and divergence among them, are the focus of this paper. Analyzing articles, meeting minutes, and correspondence that critique racial and racist science, I demonstrate that despite considerable change and transformation in the science and technology used to investigate and explain human difference and disparities, SftP’s critiques of biological and genetic determinism remain consistent. New modes of inquiry and intervention emerge, however, when the critiques of those rendered essentially different or inherently less than are privileged in these otherwise academic debates.

Author

• Bridget Harr, Bates College