The aim of the eugenics movement in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century was to prevent the degeneration of the white race. A central tactic of the movement was the involuntary sterilization of people labeled as feebleminded. An analysis of the practice of eugenic sterilization provides insight into how the concepts of gender, race, class, and dislability are fundamentally intertwined. I argue that in the early twentieth century, the concept of feeblemindedness came to operate as (...) an umbrella concept that linked off-white ethnicity, poverty, and gendered conceptions of lack of moral character together and that feeblemindedness thus understood functioned as the signifier of tainted whiteness. (shrink)

To consider blackness and cognitive disability together is paradoxical. On one hand, supposed black intellectual deficit has been used by white elites as a justification for antiblack oppression. On the other, both black children who are struggling in school and black adults labeled with developmental disabilities are less likely than their white counterparts to access the best support services available. These problems cut across a commonly drawn—but, I argue, erroneous—divide between the “judgment” categories of mild cognitive impairment into which black (...) children are disproportionately placed and the “organic” categories of severe cognitive impairment. This division is itself part of the contemporary collective denial of the racialized history and construction of our notion of intellect that ends up harming black Americans. (shrink)

Recent studies demonstrating epigenetic and developmental sensitivity to early environments, as exemplified by fields like the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and environmental epigenetics, are bringing new data and models to bear on debates about race, genetics, and society. Here, we first survey the historical prominence of models of environmental determinism in early formulations of racial thinking to illustrate how notions of direct environmental effects on bodies have been used to naturalize racial hierarchy and inequalities in the past. (...) Next, we conduct a scoping review of postgenomic work in environmental epigenetics and DOHaD that looks at the role of race/ethnicity in human health (2000–2021). Although there is substantial heterogeneity in how race is conceptualized and interpreted across studies, we observe practices that may unwittingly encourage typological thinking, including: using DNA methylation as a novel marker of racial classification; neglect of variation and reversibility within supposedly homogenous racial groups; and a tendency to label and reify whole groups as pathologized or impaired. Even in the very different politico-economic and epistemic context of contemporary postgenomic science, these trends echo deeply held beliefs in Western thinking which claimed that different environments shape different bodies and then used this logic to argue for essential differences between Europeans and non-Europeans. We conclude with a series of suggestions on interpreting and reporting findings in these fields that we feel will help researchers harness this work to benefit disadvantaged groups while avoiding the inadvertent dissemination of new and old forms of stigma or prejudice. (shrink)

The scientific validity of racial categories has been the subject of debate among population geneticists, evolutionary biologists, and physical anthropologists for several decades. After World War II, the rejection of eugenics, which had supported sterilization laws and other destructive programs in the United States, generated a compelling critique of the biological basis of race. The classification of human beings into distinct biological “races” is a relatively recent invention propped up by deeply flawed evidence and historically providing the foundation of racist (...) ideology and inequities of power. Social scientists’ conclusion that race is socially constructed was confirmed by genomic studies of human variation, including the Human Genome Project, showing high levels of genetic similarity within the human species. Some scholars came to believe that the science of human genetic diversity would replace race as the preeminent means of grouping people for scientific purposes. (shrink)

Research suggests that the mind contains a set of adaptations for detecting alliances: an alliance detection system, which monitors for, encodes, and stores alliance information and then modifies the activation of stored alliance categories according to how likely they will predict behavior within a particular social interaction. Previous studies have established the activation of this system when exposed to explicit competition or cooperation between individuals. In the current studies we examine if shared political opinions produce these same effects. In particular, (...) if participants will spontaneously categorize individuals according to the parties they support, even when explicit cooperation and antagonism are absent, and if party support is sufficiently powerful to decrease participants’ categorization by an orthogonal but typically-diagnostic alliance cue . Evidence was found for both: Participants spontaneously and implicitly kept track of who supported which party, and when party cross-cut race—such that the race of targets was not predictive of party support—categorization by race was dramatically reduced. To verify that these results reflected the operation of a cognitive system for modifying the activation of alliance categories, and not just socially-relevant categories in general, an identical set of studies was also conducted with in which party was either crossed with sex or age . As predicted, categorization by party occurred to the same degree, and there was no reduction in either categorization by sex or by age. All effects were replicated across two sets of between-subjects conditions. These studies provide the first direct empirical evidence that party politics engages the mind’s systems for detecting alliances and establish two important social categorization phenomena: that categorization by age is, like sex, not affected by alliance information and that political contexts can reduce the degree to which individuals are represented in terms of their race. (shrink)

Racial and ethnic variables are routinely used in health services research. However, there is a growing debate within nursing and other disciplines about the usefulness of these variables in research. A qualitative study was undertaken (July 2004 – November 2004) to ascertain how researchers conceptualize and operationalize racial and ethnic data. Data were derived from interviews with 33 participants in academic health centers in differing geographic regions. Content analyses extracted manifest and latent meanings to construct categories depicting respondents' understandings of (...) race and ethnicity in research. Race and ethnicity held several meanings but the subtext was often not clear because these terms were not operationalized. Measuring race and ethnicity quantitatively necessitated uniform classifications thus it was often necessary to impose a single racialized identity. Respondents recognized the problems with racial and ethnic variables but the majority still believed these variables were necessary and useful. Several researchers understood that racial and ethnic variables were used in ways that may stigmatize the populations studied. These respondents collected data on variables other than race and ethnicity to ascertain the causes of health differentials. The policy recommendation calls for a shift in thinking about how to use racial and ethnic variables in research. (shrink)

The present paper focuses on essentialism about natural kinds as a case study in order to illustrate this more general point. Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam famously argued that natural kinds have essences, which are discovered by science, and which determine the extensions of our natural kind terms and concepts. This line of thought has been enormously influential in philosophy, and is often taken to have been established beyond doubt. The argument for the conclusion, however, makes critical use of intuitions, (...) and I note that the intuitions are of the sort had by preschool children, and that they are traceable to a deep-seated cognitive outlook, which is often called “psychological essentialism.” Further, if we did not have such a cognitive outlook or implicit belief set—a belief set which is in fact in place by at least age 4—then we would not have the relevant philosophical intuitions. In light of this, I consider the question of whether natural kinds actually have scientifically discovered or discoverable essences, and whether these putative essences could determine the extensions of our terms and concepts as Kripke, Putnam, and many others have supposed. In fact, a number of philosophers of biology and chemistry have argued that biological and chemical kinds do not have such essences, yet these arguments—particularly in the case of chemistry—have not been assimilated by philosophers more generally. The reason for this poor assimilation is, I suggest, that the Kripke/Putnam view is just so intuitive. But this fact, I argue, is due to a deep-seated cognitive bias, rather than to any special insight into the nature of reality. (shrink)

Ernst Haeckel’s popular book Nat¨urliche Sch¨opfungs- geschichte (Natural history of creation, 1868) represents human species in a hierarchy, from lowest (Papuan and Hottentot) to highest (Caucasian, including the Indo-German and Semitic races). His stem-tree (see Figure 1) of human descent and the racial theories that accompany it have been the focus of several recent books—histories arguing that Haeckel had a unique position in the rise of Nazi biology during the first part of the 20th century. In 1971, Daniel Gasman brought (...) the initial bill of particulars; he portrayed Haeckel as having specific responsibility for Nazi racial programs. He argued that Darwin’s champion had a distinctive authority at the end of the 19th century, throwing into the shadows the myriads of others with similar racial attitudes.1 But it was not simply a general racism that Haeckel expressed; he was, according to Gasman (1971: 157–159), a virulent anti-Semite. Since its original publication, Gasman’s thesis has caught on with a large number of historians, so that in the present period it is usually taken as a truism, an obvious fact of the sordid history of biological thought in the first half of the 20th century.2 Perhaps the most prominent scholar—at least among historians of biology—to adopt and advance Gasman’s contention was Stephen Jay Gould. In his first book, Ontogeny and Phy- logeny (1977), Gould took as his subject Haeckel’s principle of recapitulation, the proposal that during ontogeny the developing embryo went through the same morphological stages as the phylum passed through in its evolutionary descent. So according to this conception, the human embryo begins as a one-celled creature, then takes on the form of an ancient invertebrate (e.g., a gastraea), then of a primitive vertebrate, then of an early mammal, then of a primate, and finally of a distinct.. (shrink)

By the 1950s, eugenics had lost its scientific status; it now belonged to the context rather than to the content of science. Interest in the subject was also at low ebb. But that situation would soon change dramatically. Indeed, in an essay-review published in 1993, Philip Pauly commented that a “eugenics industry” had come to rival the “Darwin industry” in importance, although the former seemed less integrated than the latter. Since then, the pace of publication on eugenics, including American eugenics, (...) has only accelerated, while the field has become even more fractured, moving in multiple and even contradictory directions. This essay explores the trajectory of work on the history of American eugenics since interest in the subject revived in the 1960s, noting trends and also fractures. The latter are seen to result partly from the fact that professional historians no longer own the subject, which has attracted the interest of scholars in several other disciplines as well as scientists, political activists, and journalists, and also from the fact that the history of eugenics has almost always been policy-oriented. Historians’ desire to be policy-relevant and at the same time attentive to context, complexity, and contingency has generated tensions at several levels: within individuals, among historians, and between professional historians and others who also engage with the history of eugenics. That these tensions are resolved differently by different authors and even by the same authors at different times helps explain why the fragmentation that Pauly noted is not likely to be overcome anytime soon. (shrink)

Transracialism, defined as both experiencing oneself as, and being, a race other than the race assigned to one by society, does not exist. Translated into hermeneutics, transracialism is an unintelligible phenomenon in the specific sociocultural context of the United States in the early twenty-first century. Within this context, race is a function of ancestry, and is therefore defined in terms of something that is external to the self and unchangeable. Since transracialism does not exist, the question of whether transracialism would (...) be ethically advisable if it did exist is inapposite. Nonetheless, at a minimum we can say that racial transition (defined as attempting to change one’s race through artificial and/or associative changes, and living life as a race other than the race assigned to one by society, etc.) is possible, but is very likely unethical, since it is the same as racial passing. (shrink)

In recent years, postgenomic research, and the fields of epigenetics and microbiome science in particular, have described novel ways in which social processes of racialization can become embodied and result in physiological and health-related racial difference. This new conception of biosocial race has important implications for philosophical debates on the ontology of race. We argue that postgenomic research on race exhibits two key biases in the way that racial schemas are deployed. Firstly, although the ‘new biosocial race’ has been characterized (...) as social race entering into biological processes, it is only particular aspects of social race that are taken to cross the biosocial boundary, resulting in a distorted view of the social component of biosocial race. Secondly, racial categories are assumed to be stable across time and space. This assumption is epistemically limiting, as well as indicating a reliance on a fixed racial ontology. However, the causal pathways for the embodiment of social race, and the different possible modes of embodiment, that postgenomic science is uncovering themselves present a challenge for fixed or static racial ontologies. Given these tensions, we argue that the emerging picture of a shifting landscape of entanglement between the social and the biological requires us to increase the complexity of our ontologies of race, or even embrace a deflationary metaphysics of race. (shrink)

We must critically rethink race and genetics in the context of the new genetic breakthroughs and haplotype mapping. We must avoid the slippery slope of turning socially constructed racial categories into genetic realities. It is a potentially dangerous arena given the history of racialized science in the United States and globally. Indeed, the new advances must be viewed in the context of a long history of racial inequality, continuing into the current period. This is more than a question of how (...) carefully we use categories of analysis such as race. Justice and equity must be core to our considerations. There is a community stake in this work that must be seriously considered and included in decision making. A progressive and critical analysis is in order. (shrink)