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CHAPTER TWO

Scientific Endeavors to Study Race

Race Is Not Rooted in Biology

Early research on race often focused on the shape of human skulls in an attempt to scientifically classify distinct races. In 1775, anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach published the first work distinguishing races of human beings based on physical features. While he focused on the shape of the skull, he also analyzed shades of skin color and facial features, such as the shape of the lips. He classified humans into five races: “Mongoloids, Malays, Ethiopians (Africans), American Indians, and Caucasoids.”1 Today most researchers who study race argue that distinct racial categories such as those

created by Blumenbach do not adequately explain how humans vary from each other. Rather than distinguishing separate groups, human variation is seen as a continuum.2 Blumenbach sought to apply scientific principles to his study of race, but his interest in

grouping humans into separate races was influenced by the prevailing ideologies of his culture and his historical time that perceived humans from different continents as distinct from each other.3 Another bias inherent in Blumenbach’s work was his association of Europeans as the most beautiful of humans. The Public Broadcasting Corporation’s Race: The Power of an Illusion notes: “Although [Blumenbach] opposes slavery, he maps a hierarchical pyramid of five human types, placing ‘Caucasians’ at the top because he believes a skull found in the Caucasus Mountains is the ‘most beautiful form . . . from which . . . the others diverge.’ This model is widely embraced, and Blumenbach inadvertently paves the way for scientific claims about white superiority.”4 More than a century of racially biased research succeeded Blumenbach’s racial

classifications before the first scientific publication directly challenged racist ideology in 1912. Franz Boas, a founder of anthropology in the United States, used measurements of the skull to challenge racism based on biased research. In the early 1900s in the United States, prejudice existed against immigrants from eastern and southern Europe as well as from Ireland. These immigrants were assumed to be inferior to individuals from northwestern Europe. (In chapter 3, we will discuss the complex racial experiences of Irish Catholic immigrants.) Immigration laws in the United States favored individuals from northwestern Europe. Researchers claimed evidence of inferiority of eastern and southern Europeans in the shapes of their skulls. Based on the work of Blumenbach and others, certain shapes of the skull were seen as ideal, while other shapes were devalued.5 Boas and his students studied how the environment influences the shape of human skulls.

While the prevailing view focused on the heredity of the shape of the skull, aspects of the

Halley, Jean, et al. Seeing White : An Introduction to White Privilege and Race, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucr/detail.action?docID=718698. Created from ucr on 2021-04-07 00:40:12.

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environment such as nutrition and exposure to illness also influence the formation and shape of the skull. Using scientific methodology, Boas and colleagues focused on families who had immigrated to the United States. The researchers could predict differences in skull shape between individuals who immigrated to the United States and their siblings who had been born in the United States. This information that cranial shape differed within families was “revolutionary” at a time when differences in skull shape were assumed to be stable and distinct across races.6 The study of the interplay between heredity and the environment can also be discussed in

terms of nature and nurture. Using this terminology, nature focuses on genetic variations, heredity, and how genes predict differences across individuals, such as differences in skull shape, intelligence, or likelihood of disease. Genetic differences between individuals— differences based on nature—will be consistent across those individuals’ lives and may be passed on to future generations. Nurture looks to the environment to predict differences across individuals. Nurture includes all environmental influences from the conception of a person and throughout one’s life. Nurture consists of every influence of physical and social experience, including nutrition, exposure to toxins and pathogens, the safety of one’s environment, and all social interactions. Throughout this chapter, we will explore how nature and nurture have been used to explain differences between racial groups, focusing particularly on intelligence and disease. Prior to the work of Boas, in the 1800s, there were two competing nature-based theories

about race. While the monogenists believed that all human races were parts of the same species,7 the polygenists argued that different races were actually different species. The polygenist perspective suggests that white people are human while other races are not truly human. From the polygenist perspective, any discussion of human equality or human rights applies only to whites. Such beliefs were normative in a political setting, such as that of the United States, during a time of slavery and of savage mistreatment of indigenous populations.8 In 1849, Samuel George Morton, a physician and the leading proponent of the polygenist

perspective, sought to objectively analyze racial differences. Harvard University science professor Stephen Jay Gould’s critical reanalysis in 1977 of Morton’s research reveals that ideology unwittingly, but distinctly, biased the decisions Morton made regarding whom to select for inclusion in his research and how to conduct the research. Although Morton believed he had found definitive evidence of important physical differences between races, Gould’s reanalysis reveals that Morton’s prejudiced approach accounts for the differences Morton thought he found. In fact, using the same data—pieces of evidence—as Morton, Gould found no racial differences.9 Starting from the biased perspective that only whites were fully human, Morton sought to

objectively measure differences between races. He collected skulls of whites, Blacks, Asians, and Native Americans. He attempted to carefully measure the cranial capacity of the skulls, which would yield an accurate measure of the size of the brain that once inhabited the skull. He tried filling each skull with mustard seeds to then measure the cubic inches of space when the seeds were transferred to another container, but he found that the measure lacked reliability.

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When retesting a given skull, the volume of seeds could be notably different from one attempt at measurement to another. He later settled on using lead shot, specifically the size known as BBs. These small spheres were consistently one-eighth of an inch in diameter and yielded higher reliability when retesting a given skull. Based on his clear communication of his research decisions, Morton seemed to believe he was engaging in a carefully conducted scientific endeavor. Gould’s reanalysis of Morton’s work reveals, “. . . a series of unconscious yet systematic

errors in the way Morton collected skulls and analyzed their cranial volumes.”10 Morton published enough detail regarding his data that Gould was able to detect the errors. If Morton had been aware of his errors, it is difficult to believe that he would have provided others with the details that would expose them. Gould revealed multiple ways Morton biased his data to fit his ideology. Morton’s decisions

regarding which skulls to include in his study were inconsistent, especially in that he failed to account for the relationship between body size and brain size. While a rhinoceros has a larger brain than a human, the rhinoceros is not considered more intelligent. Humans with larger bodies have larger cranial capacities without this predicting greater intelligence. Because of average differences in body size, women tend to have smaller brains than men. For races of color, Morton included a greater number of smaller skulls, such as skulls of women and individuals from ethnic groups who tend to have smaller bodies. For example, when measuring skulls of Native Americans, Morton included a larger number of skulls from Inca Peruvians, who tend to have smaller brains, and a smaller number of skulls from Iroquois, who tend to have larger brains. When measuring the cranial capacity of Caucasians, Morton revealed his choice to exclude data from a number of available skulls of Northern Indian Hindus, who tend to have smaller brains than other Caucasian groups. (Hindus have been classified as Caucasian in only some contexts. When researching for this book, author Vijaya was fascinated to learn that according to some, like Morton, she is Caucasian. She has certainly never been treated as white. As described in chapter 8, in the 1930s the Supreme Court denied citizenship to Hindus on the confusing basis that they were Caucasian, but not white.) Gould uncovered errors Morton made in calculating the average cranial capacity for each

group. These errors helped Morton to rank the groups consistently with prevailing racist beliefs. Ethnically biased beliefs about Caucasians during the time of Morton’s work would rank Teutons (Germanic whites) and Anglo-Saxons (English whites)11 above Ashkenazi Jews, who would be ranked above Hindus. Morton believed he found evidence of cranial differences to support this ranking.12 Across races, Morton claimed to have found that Caucasians had larger brains than Asians, whose brains were larger than Native Americans, whose brains were larger than Blacks. Morton’s research was lauded in its day as objective evidence of group differences, but Gould’s work reveals that the groups actually do not differ. Gould challenges readers to consider how unconscious bias may influence many areas of science: “For if scientists can be honestly self-deluded to Morton’s extent, then prior prejudice may be found anywhere, even in the basics of measuring bones and toting sums.”13 We challenge you to read all research critically, exploring the possibility of bias, and to

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consider who might benefit from the ways of thinking reflected in the research. Much like Blumenbach’s work predating Morton and discussed above, Morton’s research reflected common ways of thinking in mainstream Europe and the United States. Cultural materialism provides a strong perspective by which we can critique both of these researchers. As defined in chapter 1, cultural materialism reveals how the way individuals within a culture live and meet their needs influences how they understand the world, including how they conceive of race. The racist beliefs proposed by Blumenbach, Morton, and other European and European American scientists sprang from a global context of imperialism by Europe and the United States. Imperialism refers to foreign policies where one nation or area of the world acts aggressively to take over and control the resources of other areas. In this case, the western areas of the globe in Europe—and eventually England’s former colony, the United States— colonized and controlled, enslaved, or killed the people of those areas. (Please do see the brief discussion of colonization in chapter 3.) Cultural materialism illuminates the racist ways of thinking born from an imperialist economic order.

The Empirical Perspective One of the authors of this textbook, Eshleman, strongly identifies with empiricism. Like all three of the authors of this book, she is curious and engaged with ideas. The empirical method for seeking answers to her questions provides a systematic set of rules and strategies based on principles she deeply respects. To approach a research question empirically is to follow a set of guidelines known as the scientific method. An empirical test of a research question requires one to carefully observe evidence. One must be open-minded to ideas that are contradictory to one’s own perspective while maintaining a healthy skepticism about one’s own expectations.14 Within the empirical method, scholars carefully describe their decisions regarding how to

conduct research. To illustrate the empirical approach, we will use evolutionary biologist R. C. Lewontin’s classic 1972 study on human genetic diversity.15 The first step in an empirical project is to frame one’s research question. A hypothesis—a testable prediction—should be proposed such that the data—evidence—collected in a study will clearly support or refute the hypothesis. While we do not believe it is possible for humans to approach any issue with true objectivity, the empirical approach challenges researchers to share their approach with other scholars. Ideally, different scholars will approach the same issue with distinct perspectives, testing similar hypotheses in different ways. Disagreements between researchers about how to study a research topic can enhance scholarship. Lewontin sought to study genetic variation in humans. Specifically, he wanted to compare

variation between human groups to variation within groups. In other words, to explore the extent of genetic difference between groups perceived as Asian and groups perceived as European compared to the extent of genetic difference within Asians and within Europeans. He acknowledges that scientific work on this issue has been influenced by ideology, noting that changes in perspectives within evolutionary research on human groups “. . . have been in part a reflection on the uncovering of new biological facts, but only in part. They have also reflected general sociopolitical biases derived from human social experience and carried over into

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‘scientific’ realms.”16 While researchers will not be able to identify all the ways they might be biased, awareness of the potential for bias may lead researchers to communicate their methodological decisions clearly so that another researcher, with a different set of biases, might be able to identify flaws in a study. To study genetic diversity across humanity, Lewontin selected samples from different

populations of humans. By carefully describing the choices he made, he allows other researchers to critique his decisions or to replicate his work—repeating his procedures to check whether similar results would be found.17 Lewontin clearly explains his decisions regarding how to categorize race, noting that classifying humans into races is problematic: “No one would confuse a Papuan aboriginal with any South American Indian, yet no one can give an objective criterion for where a dividing line should be drawn in the continuum from South American Indians through Polynesians, Micronesians, Melanesians, and Papuans.”18 The concept of racial classification suggests that humans can be easily separated into distinct groups, but Lewontin argues that observed physical differences within and across groups of humans suggests a continuum of distinctions, rather than clear and separate groups. One challenge to drawing lines around groups of humans and calling them different races is

that some groups are particularly difficult to classify. For example, Lewontin notes that the Sami people19 of northern Europe, a nomadic group, are hard to assign to a race because a focus on language suggests they should be classified as Asian, while a focus on physical appearance is ambiguous because they share features with Asians and Europeans, and a focus on genetic traits suggests consistency with Asians on some traits and with Europeans on other traits.20 Lewontin carefully describes his decision to adhere to “classical racial grouping with a few

switches based on obvious total genetic divergence.”21 This results in seven “races,” but Lewontin acknowledges that he might have drawn the lines between racial categories differently. Do you agree with Lewontin’s classification of Belgians, Dutch, English, French, Germans, Italians, Russians, and Welsh as “Caucasians”? What do you think of his classification of Arabs, Egyptians, Hindi-speaking Indians, Irani, and Urdu-speaking Pakistani as “Caucasians”? His category of “Black Africans” includes Gambians, Ghanaians, Kenyans, and Liberians. It also includes Black Americans and Iraqi. We invite your perspective on each of these “classic” categories of race. Lewontin uses the term “Mongoloids” to include groups such as Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. After acknowledging the challenge of classifying the Sami people, they are classified in the “Mongoloid” group, along with Turks. The remaining “races” in the study were “South Asian Aborigines”; “Amerinds,” including among others Apache, Chippewa, Eskimo, Maya, Pueblo, and Seminole; “Oceanians,” including among others Easter Islanders, Fijians, Hawaiians, Papuans, and Tongans; and “Australian Aborigines” (the only category without any subgroups).22 If you were asked to separate humans into racial groups, how would you do so? Where would you fit Latina/os who are genetically related to both the Spanish and Native American groups? Focusing on seventeen genes (ABO blood proteins, Rh factor, and others), Lewontin clearly

explains how he used statistical techniques to seek an answer to the question, “How much of

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human diversity between populations is accounted for by more or less conventional racial classifications?”23 He tested whether classic racial categories are genetically different from each other and found that only 6.3 percent of genetic variation between humans is accounted for by race. Within a given group, such as the English, 85.4 percent of the diversity among humans occurs. The greatest amount of genetic variability occurs within each of the groups. The remaining 8.3 percent of variation occurred between groups that were classified together into races.24 Lewontin concludes: It is clear that our perception of relatively large differences between human races and subgroups, as compared to the variation within these groups, is indeed a biased perception and that . . . human races and populations are remarkably similar to each other, with the largest part by far of human variation being accounted for by the differences between individuals.25

The opening paragraph of the American Anthropological Association’s “Statement on ‘Race’” emphasizes this finding that there is greater genetic variation within human groups than across human groups. Based on empirical evidence produced by Lewontin and by researchers who conducted replications inspired by Lewontin’s research, the American Anthropological Association has rejected race as a biological category. Lewontin’s work provides a strong example of the empirical process. He carefully frames his

research question and transparently communicates his decisions regarding from whom and how to collect, analyze, and interpret information. This is all communicated in a way that invites criticism and replication of his work. Indeed, Lewontin’s work has been replicated multiple times, yielding similar results across different researchers who have modified the procedure to test for alternative explanations for Lewontin’s results. Across eight replications from researchers working independently from Lewontin and testing different genetic markers, the results repeatedly demonstrate that the greatest genetic differences are between individuals within populations, with smaller differences occurring between groups that are classified within the same race and between racial groups. The finding of greater diversity within races than between races is upheld both when classical racial distinctions are used and when researchers begin with genetic distinctions to try to classify distinct racial groups. After reviewing Lewontin’s work and the replications of it, physical anthropologists Ryan A. Brown and George J. Armelagos conclude, “. . . the amount of human genetic diversity that is attributable to race is only about 5% to 10%.”26 Lewontin’s work has been highly influential in modern scholarship on race. Unfortunately,

biased research such as Morton’s flawed work on cranial capacity was also highly influential in its time. All empiricists should be aware that the empirical method does not clearly reveal what is true or what is false. Good empiricism requires that one keep the example of flawed research in mind. One’s own work could also be revealed to have been foolish or even applied in horrifyingly harmful ways. Ideally, incorrect ideas will be ruled out: “Because scientists subject their propositions to

confirmation or disproof through empirical testing, science has the potential to be self- correcting. It is assumed that the gradual accumulation of evidence from empirical research will lead to the rejection of inaccurate conceptions and theories and to the construction and refinement of better ones.”27 Anthropologist Alice Littlefield and colleagues note that this ideal

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in empiricism is rare. Current culture, historical movements, and personal bias—all of which often function outside of conscious awareness—affect empiricists’ choices of topic, approach to asking questions, and readiness to accept others’ empirical work. For physical anthropology, the termination of the concept of race as a biological category coincided with the civil rights movement in the United States; the political movement prepared researchers to accept ongoing scientific work that revealed that race was not viable as a biological category. Empirical work, no matter how carefully designed, may be flawed because humans choose

what research questions to study and how to study them, including from whom to collect information. Humans are influenced by pervasive ideologies in their culture that may lead to faulty assumptions serving as the foundation for research.28

But Isn’t Race Clearly Rooted in Biology? Why Do I Perceive Differences between Europeans, Asians, and Africans? In 2001, Eshleman—a white woman—traveled in Europe with a good friend who is a Black American woman and the friend’s first cousin, also a Black American woman. Eshleman’s close friend has an appearance that one could argue is easily classified as being of African descent, based on her deep brown skin tone and her choice to wear her hair in natural curls, while her cousin may be difficult to quickly classify in terms of race based on her relatively light skin tone and long, straight hair. On a train traveling through Germany, a young, white German man from a small town

approached Eshleman’s friend and said words to the effect of “We have a Black woman in my town.” He even shared the name of that woman. Eshleman’s friend responded politely but was clearly surprised by this man’s declaration. Did he think that all Black people across the world were socially connected to one another to the point of knowing all the other members of the group by name? Her cousin was also disturbed by this exchange, but for a different reason. She wondered why he had not addressed his statements to her as well as to her cousin, questioning why he did not recognize them as the same race. Shade of skin color, profile of nose, structure of eyes, shape of lips, texture and amount of

hair have been used to classify individuals in terms of race. Interestingly, these are the same traits that are used to differentiate one person from another.29 These two women look distinctly different from each other, yet they are considered to be the same race. Clinical psychologist Marvin Zuckerman argues, “The answer to the question ‘What is race?’

seems simple to the layperson who makes judgments from prototypical images derived from caricatures found in art, literature, and the media.”30 The man on the train focused his attention on one Black woman who was prototypical of his concept of Black but ignored another Black woman. Zuckerman challenges the concept of race as a biological category, noting that some groups classified as Caucasian have darker skin than those classified as Black Africans.31 For example, persons from India may have darker skin than individuals from Iraq. Historian Nell Irvin Painter provides further evidence of the difficulty of defining race by physical features: “We usually assume definitions of race as color to be straightforward, as though ‘black’ Americans were always dark-skinned.” Painter argues, “race as color and actual color of skin”

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are not equivalent.32 People in the United States tend to perceive skin color as indicating distinct racial categories,

but an objective analysis of skin pigmentation reveals a continuum from pale to dark, rather than distinct groups distinguished by color.33 Individuals tend to perceive different skin shades for whites, Asians, or Blacks even when pigmentation is identical. Other indicators of race such as shape of eyes and hair texture influence how skin color is perceived. Skin tone distinctions between races can often be less distinct than the great diversity within a race. Two white people may have remarkably different skin tones from each other, as may two African American people. Evolutionary biologist and African American studies scholar Joseph L. Graves Jr. notes,

“None of the physical features by which we have historically defined human races—skin color, hair type, body stature, blood groups, disease prevalence—unambiguously corresponds to the racial groups that we have constructed.”34 Within biology, “The term ‘race’ implies the existence of some nontrivial underlying hereditary features shared by a group of people and not present in other groups.”35 While such a biological definition of race has often been mistakenly applied to humans, “. . . if race is defined as a population that has achieved the subspecies level of genetic differentiation, no such divergence currently exists in our species.”36 In chapter 1, we explored different classes in feudal Europe being treated almost like

different species—the ruling class as one species while the peasant class would be a distinct species. Given the biological definition of race, the different classes would have been perceived as different races. Why would you or would you not perceive a king in England as a different race than an English peasant who worked on the land owned by the king? While there are certainly hereditary differences that occur in shades of skin tone, shapes of

facial features, hair texture and quantity, body shapes and sizes, and resistance or susceptibility to disease, these hereditary differences are greater within groups classified as races than across races. If we focus on all people who are Asian American, we will find great diversity within the group on lightness to darkness of skin shade, shapes of noses or eyes, body proportions, and health on many different variables. Empirical work by anthropologists and biologists has convinced many researchers to reject

the concept of race as a biological category for humans. Indeed, today most researchers in anthropology, biology, and sociology agree that race is not a biological category. Anthropologists Littlefield and colleagues detailed the following major challenges to the concept of race as biological.37

1. If race existed as a biological category, researchers should be able to clearly group humans into distinct races based on biological criteria alone. Researchers should be able to use a combination of dimensions to distinguish one race from another. Yet no such combination—of shade of skin, hair texture, shape of eyes, body size, genetic blood markers, or disease susceptibility—have clearly been able to distinguish races from each other as distinctly different biological groups.38 2. Researchers may try to separate people into racial groups based on one hereditary dimension (such as any of those listed above). If they then check to see if those groups are

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also distinct on another dimension, the groups created with one biological marker do not coincide with groups created from another biological marker. As Brown and Armelagos explain, “A single trait such as skin color will result in a classification system that is easily determined. Add another trait and classification becomes a more difficult task, and there usually are groups that cannot be classified. As you increase the number of traits, the problems in racial classification become insurmountable.”39 3. There are many human beings that do not fit into classic racial categories. Human groups have shared genetic material by having children together for so many generations over the last 100,000 years that there are many people who cannot be classified according to race.40 4. Rather than distinct categories (e.g., white or Native American), human variation exists on a continuum. Influential physical anthropologist Alan H. Goodman identifies, “Therefore, there is no clear place to designate where one race begins and another ends.”41

We anticipate that challenging the concept of race as a biological category will be disconcerting for some readers while it will comfortably fit the perspective of other readers. Goodman recollects his first exposure to evidence that race is not a biological category, in

1973 in an anthropology course taught by physical anthropologist, George J. Armelagos. I recollect that it made almost instant sense to me that human races are social constructions. . . . I had grown up in a working-class family in a town composed mostly of second-generation immigrants from Italy and Ireland, and as a boy I was aware of being perceived as Jewish and different from my Irish and Italian friends in some fundamental way. Yet when I began attending a more diverse university, something striking happened: I became “White.” I was no longer perceived as very distinct from other students of European descent.42

We invite you to reflect on how your personal experiences with race might influence your reactions to the material in this chapter and throughout this text.

Using Cultural Materialism to Critique Eugenics and the Question of Intelligence

As discussed in chapter 1, religion was once used to uphold the status quo. Science also has been inappropriately used to “explain” why some people are on top and others deserve their place at the bottom. Cultural materialism offers a critical perspective by which we can evaluate eugenics, a

social and scientific movement in the United States and Europe popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The eugenics movement was founded and supported by white elites and by scientists and scientific research.43 (At that time, people considered white were primarily those whose families came from England and northwest Europe.) Much like how the production of “knowledge” and “truth” in feudal times was monopolized by aristocracy and the Church, European and American elites monopolized the production and dissemination of scientific “knowledge” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And the knowledge they produced benefited some—them—and harmed many, many others. Elites used the “science” of eugenics to expose what they believed to be the inherent genetic

differences between different races. In other words, scientists in Europe and the United States used eugenics to show that people inherited the supposed “characteristics” of their race and

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social class. If one was a genius, one came from geniuses. If one was a criminal, one came from criminals. And in this framework, geniuses were inevitably British, criminals and “simpletons” always poor or of color. The eugenicists already “knew”—they believed they knew—how things were in terms of race. They merely used the “science” of eugenics to “prove” their—wrongheaded—thinking correct. Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, invented the term eugenics in his 1883 book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. By eugenics, Galton meant, “to describe the application of scientific knowledge to stem the tide of racial deterioration and bring about the perfection” of the British race.44 Galton, like many British and British American (also called Anglo American) elites, believed that people understood to be of other racial groups— including Jews, the Irish, Italians, and people from Africa, Asia, and the Americas—presented a threat to the best, purest, smartest, strongest, and most civilized races—primarily themselves, the British. Galton argued, “Human breeding could be systematically managed to ensure the improvement of the British race, as well as other civilized peoples.”45 Galton believed objective scientists such as he could numerically measure differences

between races. And with this information, breeding policies could be implemented to support the proliferation of the pure peoples (people like Galton) and to stem the growing populations of impure peoples (people coming from backgrounds different from that of Galton and other elites). In a variety of venues, Galton managed to measure up a storm. He collected data on physical

characteristics such as height and weight. He gathered information on people’s medical histories, and he even attempted to measure mental processes—“internal, subjective experiences . . . sensations, perceptions, dreams, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.”46 Using the immense amount of data he gathered, Galton leapt to interpret it in ways that fit his own racist and classist philosophy. The logic was circular. Poor people were poor because they were less fit than the middle and upper classes rather than because of a lack of economic and other opportunities. And Black people were servile because they came from a race that is genetically prone to slavery and servitude rather than because of a history of colonization, slavery, and brutal oppression. After a trip to South Africa, Galton wrote, “These savages court slavery. . . . They seem to be made for slavery, and naturally fall into its ways.”47 Graves exposes Galton’s thinking on enslaved African Americans, noting, “In his zeal to classify Africans as an inferior type, Galton failed to note or understand that most of the literature on American slave intelligence was written by slaveholders.”48 Galton maintained a complete ignorance as to the actual lives, histories, and experiences of

the supposedly “unfit” that he studied. In other words, he was not interested in the ways environment—nurture—influences people and their development, individually and culturally. He never examined the brutality of colonization or slavery. Much like the nobility in feudal Europe saw the situation of peasants as the will of God, Galton and other eugenicists argued that the poor and non-Anglo lived as they did because of their own genetic makeup, or biological nature. And the eugenicists called their thinking “scientific.” Galton’s eugenics became a profoundly popular, international “scientific” movement, one that

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reverberates through our society even today. In particular, we still struggle with the heritage of the eugenic approach to intelligence. In 1905, a psychologist named Alfred Binet published an article about his work on intelligence levels. From this work, a scale was developed on which individuals could be ranked from “subnormal” to “very superior.”49 Binet did not argue that intelligence was hereditary. Yet the eugenicists did. They jumped on his ideas and used them for their own ends. For the eugenicists, intelligence was clearly an inherited characteristic. Much like intelligence tests today, the early intelligence tests were highly problematic. For

one, they were deeply biased. Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen note that in a time when many people, particularly poor people and marginalized groups like those of color and new immigrants, had no electricity and thus knew very little about it, the test asked multiple-choice questions like “The watt is used in measuring wind power, rainfall, water power, [or] electricity?”50 The eugenicists categorized those who fell in the subnormal category as “feeble-minded.”

And they fine-tuned this category into “idiots,” “imbeciles,” and “morons.” Morons were the high end, the smartest, of the feebleminded. They presented a special threat as “people who were capable of entering into and functioning in mainstream society, often undetected, but whose genetic flaws endangered the long-term vitality of the race.”51 Eugenicists recommended that supposedly feebleminded people be sterilized or isolated so

that they could not reproduce. Based on their (now understood to be completely bogus) scientific studies, between “1907 and 1968, an estimated sixty thousand forced sterilizations would take place in the United States.”52 Further, Ewen and Ewen note, “Eugenic sterilization practices would also be exported to America’s new colonial holdings, most notably Puerto Rico, where one-third of the female population was sterilized between 1920 and 1965.”53 And in Germany, the Nazis revered the work of eugenicists. In 1934, they used it to justify the Third Reich’s Sterilization Law and forced 350,000 unwilling people “under the surgeon’s knife.”54 In the United States and other places today, eugenicist ideas about intelligence grip and

influence us still. For example, in The Bell Curve, Harvard University psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and well-known conservative thinker and political scientist Charles Murray argued in 1994 that intelligence is something we are born with (or without); it can be as measured through intelligence tests like Binet’s; and it fundamentally shapes people’s lives. About this, Halley argues that like the earlier eugenicists, “Herrnstein and Murray reify ‘intelligence’ by assuming that it can be measured via intelligence tests.”55 This thinking “overlooks the fact that intelligence tests are themselves a socially constructed artifact, not handed to us by God or nature, but by psychometricians” such as Herrnstein and Murray.56 In this circular thinking, “intelligence is that which is measured by . . . intelligence tests.”57 Yet in reality, as in the example question above, instead of “intelligence,” intelligence tests might only measure things such as how much access people have to resources like electricity. Since The Bell Curve came out, innumerable studies have shown the book’s many mistakes in

and misuse of statistical data.58 There is, however, a deeper problem, one we examine again and again in our book. As cultural materialists argue, the reason ideas such as those proposed by eugenicists and later by Herrnstein and Murray keep deeply influencing our society is

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because they justify and reinforce an extremely unequal and unfair material reality. Much like the earlier eugenicists, completely ignoring historical and social evidence to the

contrary in addition to misreading and misusing statistical data, Herrnstein and Murray argued that inequality happens in society due to a “fair process that sorts people out according to how intelligent they are.”59 Like the earlier eugenicists, Herrnstein and Murray link their claims to race (and in their case to gender). They argue that African Americans and Latina/os are “by nature not as intelligent as whites; that is why they [do] less well economically, and that is why little can or should be done about racial inequality.”60 Herrnstein and Murray base their claims on the same old idea as the eugenicists, one born out of and supporting an economic reality that greatly advantages some and deeply disadvantages others. According to this thinking, people are rich (and white people are more likely to be rich) because they, the rich, are naturally smarter than others, and people are poor (and they are more likely to be Black and Latina/o) because they, the poor, are naturally dumber. In other words, this idea proposes that the economic reality of inequality in our society is the way it is because it is natural. In sharp contrast to the nature perspective on intelligence, including that of the eugenicists

and Herrnstein and Murray, innumerable studies indicate that nurture (or environment) shapes intelligence. People’s intelligence varies based on the educational and nutritional resources they have access to starting at a very young age. Studies even suggest that something as simple as breast-feeding predicts intelligence and that breast-fed infants score better on intelligence tests than formula-fed infants. Indeed, a Danish study concluded that the “longer infants are breast-fed the higher they are likely to score on intelligence tests as adults.”61 In their important book on inequality, Claude S. Fischer and five other sociologists from the

University of California at Berkeley show that “even if intelligence exists, it is not a single, unitary and fixed trait” as Herrnstein and Murray and the eugenicists assumed.62 Fischer and colleagues illustrate that IQ or intelligence test scores “can, and have, historically changed over time. Fischer et al. point to eastern and southern European immigrants whose test scores were below average when first arriving” in the United States around 1900.63 Many saw this as a sign that the new immigrants were less fit than the Anglo American middle and upper class. “Yet a couple of generations later, the test scores of the new groups had risen dramatically, matching or exceeding those of earlier-arriving white Americans.”64 A couple of generations of this group living in the United States and gaining access to greater resources, nutrition, and education and becoming insiders to the mainstream culture meant a significantly higher level of intelligence, as measured by IQ tests. If intelligence truly were hereditary, these groups’ intelligence would have remained essentially the same over time. The test scores of African Americans and Latina/os have also risen with access to greater

resources, but continued inequality continues to predict lower scores for these groups. African Americans and Latina/os today “tend to score lower than do whites on standardized tests.”65 Unlike the European immigrants whose scores increased from below average to reach the level of mainstream white Americans over two or three generations, Black and Latina/o scores have not risen at the same pace. Inequality explains this discrepancy. While European immigrants have gained equality within a few generations of arriving in the United States, Black and

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Latina/o immigrants have been largely excluded in our society. As Fischer and colleagues argue, “A racial or ethnic group’s position in society determines its measured intelligence rather than vice versa.”66 In other words, a group’s average IQ scores measure the extent to which that group has gained equality in the United States rather than the group’s actual level of intellectual ability. Historically and today, this phenomenon can be seen in innumerable societies. As discussed

above, Jews, Irish, and Italians in the United States became white and gained equality, and their scores rose. And Koreans in Japan, who are of the same “racial” stock as Japanese and who in the United States do about as well academically as Americans of Japanese origin (that is, above average), are distinctively “dumb” in Japan. The explanation cannot be racial, nor even cultural in any simple way. The explanation is that Koreans, whose nation was a colony of Japan for about a half-century, have formed a lower-caste group in Japan.67

In particular, Fischer and colleagues argue that groups in an inferior position because of “conquest or capture (e.g., the Irish in Great Britain, Maori in New Zealand, Africans, Mexicans, and Indians in the United States) . . . suffer the most drastic and lasting effects of subordination.”68 Fischer and colleagues claim that these subordinate groups face socioeconomic deprivation (to be discussed further in chapters 5 and 7), segregation (to be discussed further in chapters 5, 6, and 7), and a stigma of inferiority (to be discussed further in chapter 6). As groups overcome these effects of subordination, their standardized (intelligence) test scores rise.69 The fact that “in the early part of the twentieth century northern blacks did better in school

than did most white immigrant groups”70 exemplifies how the position of a group in society determines the group’s test scores. In the early twentieth century, when African Americans living in the northern United States experienced a similar level of equality compared to new European immigrants, Black students performed better than the new immigrants in school. And today Black test scores are rising as African Americans overcome the effects of subordination (in spite of ongoing and profound racism and discrimination, as will be discussed in later chapters). Indeed, in his research on standardized test scores, Jonathan Crane found that observed underperformance of Black students in comparison to white students in math and reading can be accounted for by equality-based variables such as income of the child’s family and the wealth of the mother’s peers when she was in school. When Crane compared Black and white students whose family lives were very similar, he found that their test scores were similar.

Interpreting Empirical Evidence In addition to the risk of bias seeping into research based on the way data are collected, the interpretation of results can introduce bias. When eugenicist Charles Benedict Davenport found evidence that Black Americans outperformed whites on a test of numerical calculations, he perceived this as evidence of the intellectual inferiority of Blacks, downplaying the skill with which Blacks performed better than whites. One may wonder what conclusion Davenport would have made if the data were in the opposite direction, if whites had performed better than

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Blacks on the same test. If one would interpret any finding as fitting one’s preconceived notions, the interpretation becomes meaningless.71 Information can be interpreted in drastically divergent ways by different researchers. For

example, Elisha Harris, a white physician working in the late 1800s, was deeply concerned about environmental conditions connected to poverty and crime. Harris appointed Richard Louis Dugdale, who shared an interest in sociology, to study a white family from Ulster County, New York. The family, given the pseudonym “the Jukes,” was believed to have an unusual number of persons convicted of crime, of impoverished individuals seeking social services, and of people engaging in behavior that was considered sexually promiscuous by the standards of the time. Geneticist Elof Axel Carlson describes Dugdale’s 1875 publication, in which Dugdale interpreted the information he collected as evidence of “a bad environment” for the members of the Juke family, interpreting the data in terms of nurture.72 He argued that the experiences of this family, including a lack of appropriate social support systems, was responsible for their troubles. Further, he argued that the state of New York should invest in higher-quality housing and enhanced education, suggesting that failure to provide adequate resources was costly in terms of funding court fees and prisons when problems later arose. Interestingly, others dramatically reinterpreted the problems of the Juke family in terms of

nature. In 1916, eugenicist Arthur H. Estabrook claimed that the pattern of criminal conviction, poverty, and expression of sexuality within the Juke family provided evidence of a hereditary flaw inherited through genes.73 From the perspective of eugenics, investing more in social support would be worthless if problems are caused by genes rather than the environment. (Eugenicists would prefer government spending to focus on sterilization of the downtrodden and special opportunities for elites.) Notably, subsequent analyses of the Juke family have revealed a number of upstanding citizens within the family, calling the data themselves—not just the opposing interpretations—into question.74

Correlation Does Not Reveal Causation Focusing on the original data that the members of the extended Juke family were found to be more likely to have social problems, we cannot conclude from these data that the cause is clearly an aspect of nurture or that it is clearly nature. Setting aside for a moment that the data themselves may have been flawed, these data are correlational. A correlation is a relationship between one dimension of interest (one variable) and a second dimension of interest (a second variable) that allows us to make predictions. Turning to an example previously used in this chapter, Galton argued that Black people were

servile because their race was genetically prone to servitude. Here Galton claimed to have observed a correlation between race and level of servitude. Galton might have described the variable of race as having several classifications, including Black, white, Asian, and American Indian. He might have ranked servitude from high levels to low levels. While correlational data allow prediction, one cannot determine cause or effect from

correlational data. Correlation does not reveal causation. In Galton’s time, he would have been able to predict with some consistency how servile someone would act toward him based on his assumptions about the person’s race. If he interacted with an enslaved Black person in

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the United States, Galton would be likely to observe a high level of servitude. If he interacted with a free white person, he would be likely to observe less servitude. In this example, our modern perspective helps us to see the bias in Galton’s claim that Blacks were naturally more servile. Galton clearly failed to account for the variables of slavery (and how it was confounded with race) and of oppression (and how it was confounded with slavery). Social psychologists Bernard E. Whitley and Mary E. Kite identify why correlation is

insufficient to reveal causation.75 While three criteria must be present to claim that one variable has caused a change in another variable, correlation always fails to meet the third required criterion. The first criterion necessary to claim causation is covariation—differences in the first variable must be accompanied by changes in the second variable. Correlation meets the criterion of covariation. In our example, covariation would mean that races would be observed to have different levels of servitude. The second criterion for causation is that the cause must occur prior to the effect. While this

can sometimes be determined for correlational data, it is often difficult to determine because many correlational studies measure both variables at the same time. In our example, Galton observed races as he understood them at the same time as observing level of servitude. Because Galton did not examine evidence of levels of servitude among races prior to colonization or systems of slavery, he cannot conclude which variable might have preceded the other. The third criterion for causation is that one must be able to rule out other possible causes of

the relationship between the two variables of interest. In correlational research, the researcher simply measures the variables of interest without controlling how one variable may influence another. Therefore, other possible causes cannot be eliminated with correlational research. The experimental method is the only technique that allows a researcher to control one variable —an independent variable—to see the effect it may have on a second variable—a dependent variable. We are dumbfounded that Galton failed to consider the brutal oppression that accompanied

colonization and slavery. Focusing on oppression could explain why there appeared to Galton to be differences in servitude related to race. Correlational data can never rule out all the possible alternative causes that could explain the relationship between two variables because the researchers lack the control that is necessary to eliminate other explanations. This is why correlation does not reveal causation.76 All data used by eugenicists will be correlational because researchers will not be able to

ethically or realistically control heredity for human groups. An experimental design that would allow a test of genes as a causal variable could only occur in a horrifying scenario in which humans were bred for specific genes. (Although breeding plans of elites with elites were a goal of the eugenics movement, it is unconscionable to imagine conducting a human experiment based on selective breeding.) Alternatively, researchers can ethically study certain nurture- based hypotheses, studying how controlled changes to specific elements of the environment affect behavior. Returning to the example of the Juke family, Dugdale called for prison reform so that individuals convicted of crime would be rehabilitated and less likely to engage in

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further crime. One can imagine an ethical nurture-based hypothesis in which some prison inmates would be given access to vocational education while others would be given access to literacy-based education. In a true experiment, rather than a correlational study, researchers could examine the impact of the type of educational opportunity on recidivism, the likelihood of inmates returning to criminal activity. Science is often treated like proven fact. Scientists are humans who are influenced by cultural

understandings, personal experiences, and social ideology. They seek to provide objective evidence, but they may unintentionally engage in biased evaluation of data. No matter how carefully one tries to frame a research question objectively, one might act in biased ways.77 We challenge you to think critically about how and by whom research questions are framed, how information is collected, from whom information is collected, and how information is interpreted. Although some scientific work has promoted racism, science also has been valuable in

critiquing racism and promoting greater social justice across races. Through empirical work, modern researchers have been able to explain that race is a social and cultural concept, not a biological category.

Studying Racial Health Disparities: How the Social Construct of Race Influences Biology

In the United States today, a racial disparity exists in rates of multiple health problems, including cardiovascular disease, specific cancers, and diabetes.78 (See box 2.1 at the end of the chapter for a description of sickle cell disease as a historical case of biased racial thinking.) Whites are less likely to experience each of these health problems than are Black Americans. Given that there is greater genetic diversity among whites and among Blacks than there is genetic difference between these groups, nature fails to provide a strong explanation for the health disparity. Alternatively, if one focuses on nurture when seeking an explanation, one may look at environmental variables that tend to differ by racial groups, such as likelihood of experiencing poverty,79 exposure to environmental toxins,80 nutrition based on the quality of produce in grocery stores located within neighborhoods,81 and availability of park spaces perceived as safe places for exercise.82 Socioeconomic class better predicts disease than does race.83 Sociologist Michael S. Kimmel argues that a perspective focusing on nurture will explore

how different environmental experiences create unequal situations. His criticism of the nurture perspective is that it does not focus appropriately on inequality as the cause of the differences between groups.84 The unfair advantages that whites as a group experience in the United States in comparison to Black Americans create different economic opportunities, safer environments, better access to quality nutrition, and more opportunities for healthy physical activity. While the nurture perspective will simply list the disparities, in the following chapter we will further explore the theory of social construction, which focuses on how inequality creates difference. Rather than simply cataloguing disparities, focusing on injustice is more likely to lead to appropriate calls for social action.85

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Anthropologist Clarence C. Gravlee advocates for a focus on social inequalities. While emphasizing that race is not a genetic category, Gravlee challenges readers to consider “. . . how racial inequality becomes embodied—literally—in the biological well-being of racialized groups and individuals.”86 There are biological consequences to the unequal treatment of groups that are socially understood as races in the United States. Individual experiences of discrimination87 and institutionalized racism predict greater health problems.88 For example, institutionalized racism predicts the greater likelihood of landfills and other toxic spaces being located closer to neighborhoods traditionally inhabited by African Americans than by whites.89 Larger historical and political events also predict health disparities. For example, epidemiology scholar Diane S. Lauderdale found that women in California with Arabic names (but not other women) were more likely to experience health problems when giving birth in the six months following September 11, 2001, compared to the six months that preceded the attack.90 We invite you to consider other major events that could predict differential health outcomes based on discrimination. Race is not a biological category, yet the impact of political, historical, cultural, and

environmental events that target specific populations do influence biology. For example, Ashkenazi Jewish women who have a specific mutation on a gene thought to suppress tumors are more likely to develop breast cancer. In a 1999 study, a comparison sample of British women with the same mutation who were not Ashkenazi Jews were no more likely to develop breast cancer than women without the mutation. If we recognize that race is not biological, we will seek an explanation based on how culture, history, or environment may have affected this gene’s relationship with disease in different groups. Graves argues that the Holocaust limited genetic diversity among Ashkenazi Jewish people. This mutation may predict breast cancer similarly in any group exposed to such genetic trauma.91 When comparing Ashkenazi Jews to a group that has not experienced a catastrophe such as

the Holocaust, we may be viewing the effects of horrifying political decisions that eliminated over 60 percent of the people in a genetic pool (in 1933, an estimated 9.5 million Jews were living in Europe;92 5,721,000 of these individuals were murdered in the Holocaust).93 Graves notes, “The problem is that many biomedical researchers and clinicians are still working under the yoke of the biological race concept. Hence, they see all biological differences between and within populations as potentially due to racial genetic composition.”94 If research begins with an incorrect assumption that race is genetic, researchers may fail to seek cultural, historical, political, or environmental explanations that could lead to a better understanding of how disease affects all humans.

Conclusion Contrary to much past and present popular thinking, we now understand that race is not biological. Further we see that “western attempts to [examine, measure, and quantify human biological diversity] have historically been both motivated by racist social agendas and infused throughout with racist ideology.”95 Yet this does not mean there is no such thing as race. Indeed, race exists and profoundly shapes our lives. As Goodman claims, race “is not

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biologically based; rather, it is social with biological consequences.”96 Race is, as we argue in the following chapter, socially constructed. And because of its powerful influence, it is deeply important that we recognize race and understand its impact on us as individuals and as a society.

Box 2.1

Sickle Cell Disease: Biased Assumptions about Race Imagine that you were a researcher in the 1920s in the United States studying sickle cell disease, a hereditary blood disorder in which a double-recessive pairing of a section of one gene causes the shape of red blood cells to obstruct the flow of blood, leading to injuries of the lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys, and eyes.1 The initial cases of sickle cell disease were observed in African Americans. You, like other researchers at the time, perceived race as a clear and important biological category and therefore followed the lead of other researchers in understanding sickle cell disease as linked to this biological concept of race, as a disease that affects people from Africa. Then you were confused when people of Greek descent were also diagnosed with the disease—surely these individuals must have some African heritage if they are found to have a racial disease that affects Africans.2 The initial, and highly influential, claim that sickle cell disease was a racial disease was based on only four observed cases of

the disease. The researchers at the time believed race was biological—after all, they might argue they could clearly perceive racial differences between whites and Blacks and Asians. They perceived evidence of a newly discovered disease with cases in only four Black Americans as sufficient evidence that the disease was racial. (By common standards in medical research today, grounding such a claim on only four cases would be considered ludicrous.)3 In the late 1940s Anthony Allison, a British student in his twenties, was studying the sciences before beginning his medical

training. Allison had grown up in Kenya and sought to become a physician and return to the land of his childhood. In 1949, he traveled with a team to Kenya to research genetic traits related to malaria—a potentially lethal parasitic disease carried by mosquitoes. The researchers discovered that in regions affected by malaria, 20 percent to 30 percent of individuals carried the gene for sickle cell disease. Interestingly, in other areas of Kenya that were not affected by malaria, not even 1 percent of individuals carried the gene.4 Today researchers understand sickle cell disease to be related to malaria resistance. Individuals who inherit the gene that

produces the sickle cell protein from one parent, but not the other, are resistant to malaria without experiencing sickle cell disease.5 When individuals inherit the gene that produces the sickle cell protein from both parents, they are also resistant to malaria but suffer from sickle cell disease. Physical anthropologist Frank B. Livingstone’s research on sickle cell disease and malaria helped to develop a theory that

sickle cell disease was not linked to race but to natural selection within environments where malaria was a threat. Livingstone studied land in equatorial Africa where tropical forests had been cleared for agriculture. The human alterations of the land created areas where water pooled and mosquitoes flourished. Individuals who were resistant to malaria because they were heterozygous for the sickle cell gene had an advantage of being resistant to the potentially deadly parasitic disease while not suffering from sickle cell disease. Given that such individuals were more likely to survive, they were also more likely to have children and to pass on the sickle cell gene.6 Modern research reveals that the sickle cell gene is more common in places where the risk of malaria is high, including areas of southern Europe, the Middle East, and southern Asia.7

Notes 1. American Anthropological Association, “Race: Are We So Different?” www.understandingrace.org/humvar/sickle_02.html

(June 17, 2010). 2. Melbourne Tapper, In the Blood: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press, 1998). 3. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 142–43. 4. Larsen, Our Origins, 85–86. 5. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 143. 6. Larsen, Our Origins, 103–6. 7. American Anthropological Association, “Race: Are We So Different?”

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Discussion Questions 1. List and evaluate multiple explanations for why race is not a biological category. Explore how your personal experiences with race may have influenced your reaction to the evidence that race is not based on genes. 2. How did Franz Boas’s research on the skulls of immigrants and their children challenge racism? 3. Define nature and nurture. How have nature and nurture been used to interpret evidence about intelligence of different racial groups? What biases have occurred in attempts to scientifically study intelligence? 4. What biases were present in Morton’s analysis of cranial capacity? Explore the possible role of ideology in Morton’s work. How did Gould expose Morton’s bias? 5. What did Lewontin’s research reveal about human genetic variation and race? 6. How has science been used to justify social inequality? Describe the eugenics movement. What were the goals of the movement? What social policies did the movement promote? How was the movement connected to racism? 7. Why does correlation not reveal causation? Choose an example of correlational research from this chapter. Explore how nature or nurture could be used to suggest a causal explanation for the evidence in the study. How do competing explanations relate to the inability to conclude causation from correlational research? 8. If race is not genetic, how can race become embodied? Explore Gravlee’s argument and connect it to the evidence on sickle cell disease. 9. The website for the Public Broadcasting Corporation’s (PBS’s) Race: The Power of an Illusion includes a number of activities that challenge the concept of human races as biological. The website can be found at www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm. One exercise invites participants to sort twenty people into racial categories: www.pbs.org/race/002_SortingPeople/002_00-home.htm. After doing the activity, reflect on the extent to which the activity confirmed or disconfirmed the arguments and evidence in this chapter. 10. Read the American Anthropological Association Statement on “Race” www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm. Respond to the way the statement (a) describes research such as that of Lewontin, (b) explains the ambiguity of racial groups, (c) describes the role of inequality in attempts to understand race as biological, and (d) notes the roles of nature and nurture in descriptions of differences among human groups. 11. Interview someone whose racial interactions in childhood or adolescence were different from your own. If you were raised in a town that was fairly racially homogenous, seek out someone whose high school was more diverse than yours. If you had the experience of being perceived by others as being racially distinct, interview someone whose race did not distinguish him or her.

Notes 1. Clark Spencer Larsen, Our Origins: Discovering Physical Anthropology (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008),

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121. See also Joseph L. Graves Jr., The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 2. Alan H. Goodman, “Why Genes Don’t Count (for Racial Differences in Health),” American Journal of Public Health 90,

no. 11 (November 2000): 1699–700. 3. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 40. 4. Public Broadcasting Corporation, “1776: Birth of ‘Caucasian,’” Race: The Power of an Illusion, 2003,

www.pbs.org/race/003_RaceTimeline/003_01-timeline.htm (June 30, 2010). 5. George J. Armelagos and Alan H. Goodman, “Race, Racism, and Anthropology,” in Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political-Economic Perspectives on Human Biology, eds. Alan H. Goodman and Thomas L. Leatherman (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998), 359–77, 362–63. 6. Clarence C. Gravlee, H. Russell Bernard, and William R. Leonard, “Boas’s Changes in Bodily Form: The Immigrant Study,

Cranial Plasticity, and Boas’s Physical Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 105, no. 2 (June 2003): 331. 7. In the 1996 statement of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists on “Biological Aspects of Race,” the

monogenist perspective is clearly stated, see American Association of Physical Anthropologists, “AAPA Statement on Biological Aspects of Race,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 101, no. 4 (December 1996): 569–70. 8. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), 71. 9. Gould, Mismeasure of Man. 10. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 46. 11. William H. Mace and Edwin P. Tanner, The Story of Old Europe and Young America (New York: Rand McNally &

Company, 1915), 142–45. 12. Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 86. 13. Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 88. 14. Paul C. Cozby, Methods in Behavioral Research, 10th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009), 4–6. 15. R. C. Lewontin, “Apportionment of Human Diversity,” Evolutionary Biology 6 (1972): 381–98. 16. Lewontin, “The Apportionment,” 381. 17. Lewontin, “The Apportionment,” 383–85. 18. Lewontin, “The Apportionment,” 385. 19. While Lewontin used the now derogatory term “Lapps,” we have chosen to describe this group as the Sami people. See

the Minnesota State University Mankato electronic museum website for a brief description of the Sami people. www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/oldworld/europe/lapps.html (June 18, 2010). 20. Lewontin, “The Apportionment,” 385. 21. Lewontin, “The Apportionment,” 386. 22. Lewontin, “The Apportionment,” 387. 23. Lewontin, “The Apportionment,” 386. 24. Lewontin, “The Apportionment,” 396. 25. Lewontin, “The Apportionment,” 397. 26. Ryan A. Brown and George J. Armelagos, “Apportionment of Racial Diversity: A Review,” Evolutionary Anthropology

10, no. 1 (February 2001): 34–40. 27. Alice Littlefield, Leonard Lieberman, and Larry T. Reynolds, “Redefining Race: The Potential Demise of a Concept in

Physical Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 23, no. 6 (December 1982): 641–55. 28. For a brilliant critique of social scientific methodology, and in particular, ethnography, please do see Patricia Ticineto

Clough’s The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1998). 29. Lewontin, “The Apportionment,” 382. 30. Marvin Zuckerman, “Some Dubious Premises in Research and Theory on Racial Differences: Scientific, Social, and

Ethical Issues,” American Psychologist 45, no. 12 (December 1990): 1297. 31. Zuckerman, “Some Dubious Premises,” 1298. 32. Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), ix. 33. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 29. 34. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 5. 35. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 5. 36. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 6. 37. Littlefield et al., “Redefining Race,” 646. 38. See also American Anthropological Association, “American Anthropological Association Statement on ‘Race,’” American Anthropological Association 1998, www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm (July 1, 2010). 39. Brown and Armelagos, “Apportionment of Racial Diversity,” 34.

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40. Race, Ethnicity, and Genetics Working Group, “The Use of Racial, Ethnic, and Ancestral Categories in Human Genetics Research,” American Journal of Human Genetics 77, no. 4 (October 2005): 519–32. 41. Goodman, “Why Genes Don’t Count,” 1700. 42. Goodman, “Why Genes Don’t Count,” 1699. 43. Robert V. Guthrie, Even the Rat Was White: A Historical View of Psychology, 2nd ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2004), 43. 44. Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen, Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality (New York: Seven

Stories Press, 2006), 269. 45. Ewen and Ewen, Typecasting, 269. 46. David Myers, Psychology, 9th ed. (New York: Worth Publishers, 2010), 6. 47. Francis Galton quoted in Ewen and Ewen, Typecasting, 270. 48. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 96–97. 49. Ewen and Ewen, Typecasting, 285. 50. Ewen and Ewen, Typecasting, 303. 51. Ewen and Ewen, Typecasting, 285. 52. Ewen and Ewen, Typecasting, 299. 53. Ewen and Ewen, Typecasting, 299. 54. Ewen and Ewen, Typecasting, 299. 55. Jean Halley, “Book Review of Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth” in Theoretical Criminology

(1998), 136. 56. Halley, “Book Review of Inequality by Design,” 136. 57. Halley, “Book Review of Inequality by Design,” 136. 58. Claude S. Fischer, Michael Hout, Martin Sanchez Jankowski, Samuel R. Lucas, Ann Swidler, and Kim Voss, Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 10. 59. For more information on the misuse of statistics and data in Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), please do see, for example, Fischer et al., Inequality by Design. 60. Fischer et al., Inequality by Design, 6. 61. Jean Halley, Boundaries of Touch: Parenting and Adult-Child Intimacy (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007),

6. For analysis of the complex relationships among race, social class, breast-feeding, and intelligence, please do see Jean Halley’s Boundaries of Touch. 62. Halley, “Book Review of Inequality by Design,” 136. 63. Halley, “Book Review of Inequality by Design,” 136. 64. Fischer et al., Inequality by Design, 190. 65. Fischer et al., Inequality by Design, 172. 66. Fischer et al., Inequality by Design, 173. 67. Fischer et al., Inequality by Design, 172. 68. Fischer et al., Inequality by Design, 173. 69. Fischer et al., Inequality by Design, 172–203. 70. Fischer et al., Inequality by Design, 180. 71. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 123. 72. Elof Axel Carlson, The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (Woodbury, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2001),

168. 73. Arthur H. Estabrook, The Jukes in 1915 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916). 74. Scott Christianson, “Bad Seed or Bad Science: The Story of the Notorious Jukes Family,” New York Times, February 8,

2003, www.nytimes.com/2003/02/08/arts/08JUKE.html (June 29, 2010). 75. Bernard E. Whitley and Mary E. Kite, The Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination, 2nd ed. (Belmont, Calif.:

Wadsworth, 2009), 49–50. 76. Empiricists focus on the experimental method as the only research technique with the potential of revealing cause and

effect. We have elected not to delve into research methodology of our three disciplines in this text, but we strongly encourage students to explore the research methodologies used in the fields they study. 77. John Shaughnessy, Eugene Zechmeister, and Jeanne Zechmeister, Research Methods in Psychology, 8th ed. (New York:

McGraw-Hill, 2008). 78. Clarence C. Gravlee, “How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment of Social Inequality,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139, no. 1 (February 2009): 47–57. 79. See chapter 5 for evidence supporting this claim.

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80. Bunyan I. Bryant and Paul Mohai, Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards: A Time for Discourse (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992). 81. Shannon N. Zenk, Amy J. Schulz, Teretha Hollis-Neely, Richard T. Campbell, Nellie Holmes, Gloria Watkins, Robin

Nwankwo, and Angela Odoms-Young, “Fruit and Vegetable Intake in African Americans: Income and Store Characteristics,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 29, no. 1 (July 2005): 1–9. 82. Dawn K. Wilson, Karen A. Kirtland, Barbara E. Ainsworth, and Cheryl L. Addy, “Socioeconomic Status and Perceptions

of Access and Safety for Physical Activity,” Annals of Behavioral Medicine 28, no. 1 (August 2004): 20–28. 83. Armelagos and Goodman, “Race, Racism, and Anthropology,” 370. 84. Michael S. Kimmel, The Gendered Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 85. Kimmel, The Gendered Society. 86. Gravlee, “How Race Becomes Biology,” 47. 87. See also Louis A. Penner, John F. Dovidio, Donald Edmondson, Rhonda K. Dailey, Tsveti Markova, Terrance L. Albrecht,

and Samuel L. Gaertner, “The Experience of Discrimination and Black-White Health Disparities in Medical Care,” Journal of Black Psychology 35, no. 2 (May 2009): 180–203. 88. Gravlee, “How Race Becomes Biology,” 52. 89. Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, 3rd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview

Press, 2000.) 90. Diane S. Lauderdale, “Birth Outcomes for Arabic-Named Women in California Before and After September 11,” Demography 43, no. 1 (February 2006): 185–201. 91. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 186. 92. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Jewish Population of Europe in 1933: Population Data by Country,” Holocaust Encyclopedia 2010, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005161#RelatedArticles (June 22, 2010). 93. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 139. 94. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 174. 95. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes, 8. 96. Goodman, “Why Genes Don’t Count,” 1699.

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