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<\/a>Evelynn Hammonds<\/a> is also a Professor of History of the Science and of African and African American Studies at the Department of History of Science, Harvard University. Photo: Vivian Mannheimer<\/p><\/div>\n “Just saying that race is a social construction does not help if biologists study it in ways that are not social constructions and people still see it as meaningful biological distinctions,” said\u00a0 Hammonds.<\/p>\n She\u00a0presented the discontinuities in the way race has been framed\u00a0in the history of science.<\/p>\n The first was\u00a0the invention\u00a0of race by European naturalists and anthropologists, marked by Carl Linnaeus\u2019s Systema naturae<\/a>, <\/i>that\u00a0proposed a classification of humankind into four distinct races.<\/p>\n The second discontinuity was\u00a0\u00a0the so called “demise of race” as\u00a0 a biological concept, in line with the Unesco\u00a0statement on race<\/a> published in 1950. In the aftermath of Nazism, the\u00a0 statement clarified the scientific facts about race and condemned\u00a0racism.<\/p>\n “And as a third discontinuity I add the\u00a0statement of president Clinton in 2000 at the announcement of the completion of the first\u00a0survey of the entire human genome,\u00a0when he and scientific leaders Craig Venter and Francis Collins strongly stated that\u00a0contemporary genetics shows that race cannot be a scientific concept and this is\u00a0why racial boundaries cannot be legitimated scientifically,” she said.<\/p>\n Evelynn Hammonds\u00a0presented some of the most important works\u00a0that\u00a0marked the historiography of race, mainly in the United States.<\/p>\n Nancy Stepan’s book is one of the one of the most influential in the historiography of race.\u00a0 Palgrave McMillian, 1982.<\/p><\/div>\n Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race<\/a>\u00a0(1942), by\u00a0Ashley Montagu, was first published\u00a0during\u00a0Nazism, when race was considered the determinant of people’s character and intelligence. The author argued that race was a social construction and not constitutive of significant biological differences between people.<\/p>\n The Mismeasure of Man<\/a>\u00a0(1981),\u00a0by Stephen Jay Gould,\u00a0 is a\u00a0critique of\u00a0biological determinism and the classification of\u00a0 people according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits.<\/p>\n The idea of race in science<\/a>\u00a0(1982), Nancy Stepan,\u00a0 describes the main stages in the history of the idea of race in the natural sciences in Britain since the 18th century, when everything\u00a0 – culture, religion, ethnicity, geography –\u00a0 could be seen under the term of race.<\/p>\n Race: The History of an Idea in the West<\/a>\u00a0(1995)\u00a0 by\u00a0<\/span>Ivan Hannaford argues that the idea of race was\u00a0 largely accepted and became popular and pervasive, even among those who claim to be non-racist.\u00a0However, the author argues that this is not an universal idea.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n In this book, biological determinism is analyzed in discussions about sizes and shapes of skulls and methods used to measure intelligence, such as IQ test.<\/p><\/div>\n The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea<\/a>\u00a0(2014), by Robert Wald Sussman argues that biological races do not exist, and never have in the past,\u00a0a\u00a0view shared by all scientists who study variation in human populations.<\/p>\n In a brief interview to our blog, Evelynn Hammonds talked about\u00a0how race is usually framed in medicine and the difficulties of defining the\u00a0concept.<\/p>\n Which are the dominant approaches to race in\u00a0 science and medicine in the U.S?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Medicine is an interesting area because\u00a0it focuses on racial differences in disease outcomes. It was in the newspaper the other day that a black person\u00a0went\u00a0to the hospital and his family said to the doctor that he\u00a0was\u00a0in so much pain. And the white doctor said that black people experience pain differently than white people and so they don’t need as much pain medication. This idea that black people experience pain differently than white people goes back to slavery in the US context. The continuity of bias is something deeply embedded in ideas that medical students learn about racial differences.<\/p>\n You have mentioned several times during your lecture the idea of race as a social construction. How can we define race?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n We, social scientists, historians, have to keep in mind that race is both, because race is also\u00a0what\u00a0regular people understand\u00a0it. Just saying that race is a social construction does not help if biologists study it in ways that is not a social construction.<\/p>\n And regular people still see it as meaningful biological distinctions. For example, these two girls on the cover of National Geographic. People say \u201cone of\u00a0the girls is black, one is white”. But they are from the same parents.\u00a0So, this does\u00a0not make any sense. If black is not a well defined category\u00a0 and white is not a well defined category both are both, black and white.<\/p>\n More on the historiography of race:<\/p>\n M\u00fcller-Wille, Staffan (2014). “Race and History: Comments from an Epistemological Point of View.<\/a><\/p>\n Yudell, Michael (2014).\u00a0Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century.<\/a><\/p>\n Banton, Michael (2015). What we know about race and ethnicity<\/a><\/p>\n Race: the power of an illusion<\/a> – a PBS three part documentary series.<\/p>\n Race in Manguinhos:<\/p>\n Torrens, Erica.\u00a0Biomedical knowledge in Mexico during the Cold War and its impact in pictorial representations of Homo sapiens and racial hierarchies<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos<\/i>, Mar 2019, vol.26, no.1.<\/p>\n Carvalho, Tito.\u00a0\u201cA most bountiful source of inspiration:\u201d Dobzhansky\u2019s evolution of tropical populations, and the science and politics of genetic variation<\/a><\/span>.\u00a0Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos<\/i>, Mar 2019, vol.26, no.1, p.281-297. ISSN 0104-5970<\/p>\n Stepan, Nancy Leys.\u00a0Medicina tropical e sa\u00fade p\u00fablica na Am\u00e9rica Latina<\/a>.\u00a0Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos, Nov 1997, vol.4, no.3.<\/p>\n See also our two special editions on Eugenics:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.revistahcsm.coc.fiocruz.br\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/Book-Nancy-Stepan.jpg\")
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<\/a>I did mean to say that\u00a0it is not a social construction.\u00a0We historians say that race is whatever scientists say it is. If biologists and geneticists are using it to study biology and genetics, so it\u00a0is a biological object as well. It is a social construction and it is a biological object because they use it in that way.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.revistahcsm.coc.fiocruz.br\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/Screen-Shot-2020-02-24-at-8.14.13-AM.png\")
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