Race, Class, and the Neurologic Construction of Antisocial Behavior

• In Event: Dystopian DNA? Public Education, Genetics, and the Popular Imagination

Abstract

Overview and Objectives
Historically, biological theories of violence have operated consistently as a racial project (Omi & Winant, 1994), threading racist understandings criminality through a lens of biology in order to engender new and reinforce existing racial dynamics. The recent incorporation of neuroscientific and genetic technologies, however, have helped revive this provocative research program, ostensibly eschewing its past associations with biological determinism and scientific racism. Surely technoscientific tools of today are more advanced than the techniques used by research programs of the past like phrenology, but today’s technologies still privilege measurable quantities and visual illustrations over social relationships, processes, and meanings. The problem is not the technologies per se, but their ability to obscure ethical uncertainties and reconstitute sociocultural assumptions that are relied upon to execute neuroscientific research on social behaviors (Dumit, 2004).

These assumptions and uncertainties are the key reason that such knowledges still threaten to reinforce longstanding racial and class-based inequities. The making of scientific knowledge is not just an investigation to uncover objective facts about the natural world, but at once a synthesis of the practices to ‘know’ nature and a reflection of socio-political interests and cultural discourses of power. Arrest records, IQ test, and even teacher evaluations, are commonly incorporated into neuroscientific research on antisocial behaviors as vital “facts” to help determine what groups to include in the research and importantly, to help make sense of research findings. The neutrality afforded to these tools erase the way they already embody and portray specific stereotypic beliefs about race and class. Thus, these knowledges retain the potential to bio-criminalize race and harden socially forged links between race and violence, even as the new biology of violence has sought to employ a race-neutral research stance (Duster, 2006; Rollins, 2014).

Scholarly Significance
As the use of neuroscientific knowledges continues to expand into new territories, including education, we must evaluate how these knowledges can rely on and further reify systemic discourses and practices that engender social hierarchies such as race and class. This paper draws upon first-hand interviews with neuroscientists studying violence and a qualitative analysis of neuroimaging research on violence to examines the race and class implications of the science. Proponents of the new biology of violence praise the science as the most balanced approach for assessing, preventing, and rehabilitating the at-risk, and schools and educational programs have been emphasized as key intervention sites to apply these knowledges (Rocque, Welsh, & Raine, 2012). In their view, neurobiological knowledges on violence operate as vital passage points through which more accurate and complete interventions for antisocial behavior can be accomplished. However, these interventions often bio-medicalize youth as pathologically at-risk for violence, placing them under further surveillance to help manage and treat their symptoms. This paper demonstrates that such interventions can enact a specific biopolitics of race, creating new(er) connections among biological processes, criminal predictability, and racial bodies that undermine the ability of educational institutions to ensure more equitable and meaningful environments for learning.

Author

• Oliver Rollins, University of Pennsylvania