ANTHRO 128B Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Cheddar Man, Social Inequality, Troy Duster
Main points from Race: The Power of an Illusion Vol III
Where is the line between biology and society?
What is a feedback loop?
Laws and policies can produce social inequality
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Science was often used as a basis for these laws and policies
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But when these laws and policies are changed, the same practices can continue in other ways
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Naturalization had a racial requirement until 1952
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Immigration restriction act of 1924
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Racial categories were decided by the courts
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Racial categories meant different things at different times
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Scientific authority has played a role in social inequality
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It is difficult to understand the current political and social context without a basic knowledge of history
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HISTORY MATTERS
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Race: The Power of an Illusion Main Points
What is meant to be white or black has varied tremendously
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Varies from city to city and state to state
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Property ownership laws and policies varied at a local level
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Redlining refers to how the racial make-up of a community determined the value of homes among other things
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Discrimination, especially in new housing developments
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Concentrations of people of color in particular areas is not the result of chance
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Racial Categories are not fixed
Intersectionality: the various aspects of what it means to be human (race gender class sexual orientation religion) as interwoven in an incredibly complex way
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How we tell history matters
Appreciate that everyone has a complex and fluid identity
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Avoid the danger of a single story
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Find places and moments of common ground and learn from differences
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Appreciate that not everyone has the same opportunities and some of these challenges are rooted in history
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Accept that we all have biases and we must be vigilant of how they manifest themselves in our lives in our work
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Understand the importance of critically examining authoritative knowledge, especially when there are social and political ramifications
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Possible solutions
10000 year old skeleton found in England
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Had genes for dark skin, curly hair, and blue eyes
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While claim helped unsettle assumptions between link of whiteness and British people and helped combat xenophobia, it can also promote an overly simplistic
view of genetics, which can be used in problematic and troubling ways
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"Cheddar Man"
In scientific discourse, the concept of race has no scientific utility
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The same groups that developed the biological concept over the last century have now concluded that its use for characterizing human populations is so
flawed that it is no longer a scientifically valid concept
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Revised UNESCO Statement on Race 1995
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Recognize and clarify the complexity of interaction between any taxonomies of race and biological outcomes
Argues that scientists have overstated the simplicity of very complex interactive feedback loops between biology and culture and social stratification
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Try to advance our understanding of how race is always going to be a complex interplay of social and biological realities
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Feedback loops
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It is not an either/or proposition
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Humans give meaning to differences
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Race has a substantial effect on how people behave
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By forcing ourselves to think that we must choose between race as biological and race as social construction, we fall into a trap
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If humans define situations as real, they can and often do have real biological and social consequences
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Unavoidable trap
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It is possible to make arbitrary groupings of populations and find statistically significant genetic variations between those groupings
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When researches claim to be able to assign people based on allele frequency at a certain loci, they have chosen loci that shows differences between
groups they are trying to distinguish
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Implications of this for determining who is and who is not officially a member of some racial or ethnic category are profound
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Arbitrary groupings
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Diseases have different incidence rates between races
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The scientific literature on cancer rates for different diseased in racially and ethnically designated populations are well developed
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Genes or environment?
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Troy Duster
2/21/18
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
10:55 AM
February 21 Page 1
Document Summary
Main points from race: the power of an illusion vol iii. Race: the power of an illusion main points. Science was often used as a basis for these laws and policies. But when these laws and policies are changed, the same practices can continue in other ways. It is difficult to understand the current political and social context without a basic knowledge of history. Racial categories meant different things at different times. Scientific authority has played a role in social inequality. What is meant to be white or black has varied tremendously. Varies from city to city and state to state. Concentrations of people of color in particular areas is not the result of chance. Property ownership laws and policies varied at a local level. Redlining refers to how the racial make-up of a community determined the value of homes among other things.
