Racism and Science: Still Bubbling Around and Not Going Away

This is another adapted excerpt from my book, Negotiating Science and Religion in America, which I felt I had to post in light of George Floyd's killing and dialogue about racism in our country. 

In this book, I noted a few places where the construction of race, and especially racial superiority, has been tied to science; for that reason it’s also promoted as “scientific racism.” 

The status of race as a scientific category has been significantly questioned—for example, in the influential work of Alan Templeton. In this respect we—and by “we” I mean those who want to bring together religious and scientific insight (and who are often white and male)—have to grapple with race as a social construction.

And with race arrives many other ills. One of the surprises of cultural life in contemporary America is the return of white supremacists and nationalists, and along with them, the anti-immigration rhetoric that highlights certain countries (in this case, Latin American ones) and religions (Islam). I am concerned about the rhetoric against the immigrant that led to Donald Trump’s election as President and how it mirrors the social concerns of the early twentieth century. And, I am horrified at the killing of George Floyd and what that means about the bubbling caldron of racism that is exploding right now in the United States. 

Racism and bigotry make many claims.

“The essence of bigotry, including racism, is the belief that easily identified categories reliably predict behavior, intelligence, and character,” Dave Unander.  

Marouf A. Hasian, Jr., in his 1996 The Rhetoric of Eugenics, had already

noted a “revival of eugenics” twenty-five years ago. I see no reason to miss the same parallel in post-Trump America:

"Just as Americans in the 1990s are confronted with the specter of armies of homeless, dependent AIDS patients, and violent inner-city gangs, in the 1910s and 1920s the nation was concerned with what it termed problems of the feeble-minded, the congenital defectives, and other degenerates." Marouf A. Hasian, Jr.

In his study of race and eugenics in the southern states, Edward Larson examines how southern eugenicists were vexed about “the deterioration of the Caucasian race than about any threat from the African race” and then presents this 1919 quotation from a white Louisiana physician: “What language can express the humiliation we should feel at seeing [our] race, physically, mentally and morally, slowly going to decay?”

As a California child in 1960s and early 1970s grade schools, I remember growing up and learning about three primary human races: “Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid.” How confusing those easy distinctions have become in light of the reality of mixed racial compositions and the fact that the relevant sciences don’t support commonly held discriminating features distinctions based on race.

“Genomics—reading DNA—is showing that all human populations carry most of the same genetic variations, contrary to what we would expect if ‘races’ existed.” Dave Unander

In a related vein, Templeton concluded his study of any biological basis for race with this, 

“Humans are an amazingly diverse species, but this diversity is not due to a finite number of subtypes or races. Rather, the vast majority of human genetic diversity reflects local adaptations and, most of all, our individual uniqueness.” Alan Templeton

At this critical time for our country, my hope is that skilled and informed contributors to this conversation will rise up to address the links between racism and the use of science. May it be so.