Semester:
Offered:
Alejandro de la Fuente (Department of African and African American Studies)
First-Year Seminar 73C 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
“Race,” most social scientists and well-informed people agree, is a social construction with no basis in biology. It is an invention, a political instrument of power and subordination, deployed to naturalize social hierarchies. Yet “race” and racially based understandings of human difference continue to shape how we identify, classify, and group individuals. Scientific studies in various fields, from medicine to psychometric assessments of intelligence, continue to gather racial information for research purposes. Claiming strict adherence to data and the truth, some of these studies conclude that because of evolutionary and environmental influences, human groups are in fact different and that those differences are grounded in biology.
In order to engage this body of knowledge critically, it is indispensable to examine the central claims of this “science,” how such claims have evolved over time, and their policy implications. To start, should scientists even study “possible links between race, gender, and intelligence,” as a top scientific journal, Nature, asked in 2009?
Our seminar studies the development of “race science” from the 18th century to the present. Using a variety of primary and secondary sources, we examine the research questions pursued by these scientists, their possible merits, and policy implications. We will devote special attention to the emergence of eugenics, the science of “racial improvement,” in Europe and the United States, and its tragic development in Nazi Germany. The final segment of the seminar looks at scientific racism after World War II and to the possible connections between race and recent genomic research.