The Historical Development of Racial Science, Scientific Racism

THE CONSTRUCTION OF RACE IN SCIENCE: The Historical Development of Racial Science, Scientific Racism, And Their Social and Political Consequences Module 1 lecture notes June 29-July 2 2023 JUS 317: The Future of Race, Science, and Society Introduction to The Construction of Race in Science Definitions of Racial science and scientific racism Racial science was an attempt to categorize human populations according to biological differences. Using these methods, scholars tried to impose racial categories, that race was an intrinsic and quantifiable thing. These efforts crystallized into what would become known as scientific racism, a willful misapplication of scientific theories in order to justify racial hierarchies. This framework facilitated European colonial expansion and the transatlantic slave trade, giving a superficial patina of legitimacy to deeply held social biases. Pseudoscience was used to justify dominance by reification of race as a biological constant (Benedict and Mead 2019) These classifications were associated with presuppositions about intelligence, goodness and bodily strength. These ideas were further shaped by the era of Enlightenment. Intellectuals wanted to make sense of human diversity in ways that fit rising rationalist ideologies. However, their classifications were often influenced by social biases in the moment rather than an impartial analysis (Flanagin et al., 2021). Hierarchies were established through early scientific methods including measurements of skull size and anatomical comparisons. These practices created the scaffolding for racist ideologies that lasted for generations. Although discredited, their boost on contemporary conversations about race, genetics and human diversity still echoes. It is, therefore, a subject vital to critical analysis, too as it is a matter of debate. Scientific Thought Collaborative Race Concept As a scientific category race arose from various classification attempts of human variation. Early racial taxonomies aspired to scientifically document biologically-based differences between groups by their physical characteristics. Moreover, his work was also influenced by the systems of classification for human races in particular implemented by Carolus Linnaeus. Blumenbach’s five-race model only more deeply embedded the idea of race as a biological reality instead of a social construct. These classifications associated physical with intellectual and moral abilities, and strengthened racial stereotypes (Saini, 2019). The concept of race took a rooted place in scientific discourse, influencing both medical and anthropological as well as social discourse. This line of thinking was not neutral, but rather shaped by the political and economic climate of the day. Race was weaponised to justify social hierarchies and these were often aligned with colonial and nationalist agendas (Wynn-Grant, 2019). Race and intelligence were especially influential in the 19th century. Phrenology and craniometry were used to scientifically justify natives having less cognitive ability than white Europeans. Under the so-called objective inquiry, these pseudoscience methods sustained racial bias. Though we have modern genetics to undo many of these early ideas about race, they remain in our culture. Saini (2019) state that it is essential to understand this historical development of the concept of race to combat the ways in which the concept of race is still misused in science and society today. Colonialism and Slavery in the Name of Science Scientific racism was the watchword that helped pass the ideological stamp of approval for European imperialism, slave based economies. Colonial powers wielded racial science to create hierarchies that placed Europeans at the top. These notions were used to justify the exploitation of populations across Africa through the transatlantic slave trade. As noted by Pierre (2020), anthropological inquiries also help wedges to the racialization of Africans through their narratives that construct an image of the inferior Other. These racial hierarchies had craniometry and phrenology to support them, too. These pseudoscientific techniques professed to offer empirical proof for ideas of racial superiority and inferiority. These notions influenced legal and social policies, which perpetuated discriminatory practices (Flanagin et al., 2021). Polygenism vs. Monogenism Theories Polygenists contended that each race had arisen independently of the others, providing an intellectual underpinning for segregation and exclusion. Monogenists accepted a common origin but still advocated for a hierarchy among the races. These ideas became institutionalized and had permanent effects. Original sundown signs with the words “colored folks not welcome.” Scientific racism guided policies including eugenics, apartheid and segregation laws. Pierre (2020) indicate that this was not just about people's beliefs, these theories also had an impact on immigration policies, limiting the mobility of racialized groups. These ideas, their influence remains evident today. These educational, medical, and mobility inequalities are still maintained by the scientific racism that constructed racial hierarchies. Understanding this historical context is key to unmaking these lasting biases. The History of Scientific Racism and Its Long Shadow Scientific racism is still causing impacts on contemporary genetics and also racial differences. While racial science has been thoroughly discredited, its legacy endures within contemporary research and policy. Medical research in the United States and much of the world often invokes outdated concepts of biological determinism. The genetic studies reinforce racial categories (sometimes unwittingly), without having a critical perspective on them as instances of social construction (Krimsky & Sloan, 2011). Such classifications can reinforce false assumptions about biological differences between racial and ethnic groups regarding health and behavior. Today’s disparities reflect the persistence of 19th-century racial hierarchies. Racism is a structural ideology embedded in economic, social conditions such as education, employment, and health care stemming from racial ideologies derived from scientific racism (Benedict & Mead, 2019). Ethical issues are concerned in the genetic research as well. Race-specific medicine generally treats individual patients as subgroups of larger, genetically homogeneous ethnic or racial categories. Medicine that targets specific racial groups often uses large categories instead of heterogeneity within a race. This methodology can result in misdiagnoses and treatments that are less effective than they could be. Krimsky and Sloan (2011), adds that it also raises ethical concerns and shows more consideration of human diversity in health care settings is needed. The legacy of these ideas can be seen in the policies and institutions that those ideas have influenced and that continue to marginalize communities today. Facing down these historical legacies is critical to working toward a more just and equitable medical system. Part 1: The Foundations of Scientific Racism 1.1 Early Theories of Race and the Origins of Racial Science The idea of race has its roots in pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment-era philosophy, as early theorists attempted to classify human differences in the larger context of natural law and moral order. Immanuel Kant and David Hume, for example, distinguished different groups of humans and tried to make sense of their perceived differences, often linking these differences to layers of civilization and intellectualism (Bernasconi, 2020). Though centrally located on the European stage, and despite the elements that emerged in Enlightenment philosophy which appealed for universal reason, the very same also served to strengthen the foundations of racial divisions by subtly infusing them into emerging scientific discourses. As per Benjamin (2023), that era also saw a growing trend to associate race with moral and intellectual value, an idea that paved the way for scientific racial classifications. This transition mirrored wider attempts in Europe to organize knowledge about the natural world such that variation among human populations was understood in scientific terms rather than purely theological or cultural (Saini, 2019). While European thinkers were determining how to classify differences among human beings, racial theories became more and more intertwined with colonial and imperialist projects, which were justified in pseudo-scientific terms and were dozens of hierarchies of domination. Carl Linnaens’ Systema Naturae was one of the first formal biological attempts at categorizing human races, where humanity is divided via taxonomy into four racial groups stemming off by continent, temperament and moral attributes (Elias & Feagin, 2016). Relying on arbitrary, culturally conditioned regimes of classification, Linnaeus' system would go on to form the basis of subsequent racial classifications that aimed to provide biological rationales for human difference. Expanding upon Linnaeus’ framework, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach constructed a five-race model that relied upon cranial measurements and so-called aesthetic ideals (Bernasconi, 2020). Blumenbach’s claim that Caucasians were the most “beautiful” and “original” race only served to reinforce Eurocentric prejudices in early racial science, and solidified the notion that race mapped onto biological facts about a given population. These advances did not, however, necessarily eliminate racial hierarchies, which were increasingly transformed into scientific forms. Instead, these groups served to rationalize European expansion and enslavement while keeping non-European populations within the realm of the scientific rationale as object (Pierre, 2020). Predominantly neutral in its form, the emergence of systematic racial classification was an important mechanism in producing racial difference as an ahistoric and unchangeable reality. The discovery of human biodiversity led to the emergence of two competing theories, polygenism and monogenism, about human origins. Polygenism also argued that different races were derived from distinct origins, thus providing a biological foundation for arguments of racial inferiority (Barder, 2020). This theory was convenient especially for those who sought to legitimatize slavery and colonial domination since it confirmed the view that race groups were naturally different and unequal. Alternatively, monogenism maintained that all humans descended from one root, a notion often based on biblical stories, and did not necessarily sit at odds with hierarchical racial assumptions (Saini, 2019). Even among monogenists who accepted common ancestry, there was increasing appeal of arguments that environmental (and cultural) factors had contributed to the degradation of certain races, thereby lending scientific legitimacy to racist ideologies. These disputes over human origins shaped not only scholarly conversations but also more widespread policies; racial theories became entrenched in legal and political structures. This led to a pseudo-scientific justification of segregation, eugenics and restrictive immigration laws (Bernasconi, 2020), which had lasting effects throughout13consist of some races being held higher than others and often prevent individuals of lower races from interbreeding with those in higher races. Though these theories originated in seemingly scientific inquiry, they were ultimately influenced by larger sociopolitical forces that aimed to rationalize racial inequality. A genre of craniometry, the study of skull shapes, by Samuel George Morton further lent scientific credibility to racial hierarchies, underlying Morton’s work were craniometries trying to quantify racial intelligence. Using the data, he had collected on skulls from various racial groups, Morton argued that cranial capacity was related to intellectual capacity, with European representatives leading the list (Elias & Feagin, 2016). His results even inspired countermodels such as those by the extreme racist William Shockley, but unsurprisingly the bulk of his results were taken at face value, the methodological flaws and selection biases notwithstanding, and thus became a favorite citation of racial superiority theorizers. Morton’s craniometry was a significant factor in supporting biological determinism, the belief that intellectual and moral faculties were inextricably related to race (Barder, 2020). The Anthropometric Data in Racial Policy These studies helped to propel anthropometric data into wide application, being used to justify racial policies that were emerging as an outgrowth of eugenics and phrenology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Saini, 2019) Though Morton’s methodology was later shown to be flawed by subsequent researchers, his work was a powerful example of how scientific inquiry could be bent to sort of fit with prevailing social and political ideologies. Here, the quantification of difference was translated into embracing racial hierarchies disguised as empirical fact, thereby embedding discriminatory policies and practices in societies across the globe. These initial ventures undeniably impacted the academic landscape but also extended beyond academic debate by offering both legal and social frameworks through which racial discrimination would be institutionally legitimized. The categorization of human groupings as immutable racial categories, in many ways, underwrote a plethora of legislation for citizenship, immigration, and segregation leading to the codification of systematic inequities (Pierre, 2020). Policymakers employed racist theories to justify exclusionary and oppressive policies that were sanctioned by scientific racism undergirding slavery, apartheid and colonialism (Barder, 2020). The strengths of these early theories persisted into the twentieth century where eugenics movements and racial hygiene policies to manipulate reproduction and the population demographics took hold (Benjamin, 2023). Despite biological determinism being discredited by contemporary genetics, the legacy of early racial science continues to impact the ways in which genetics, race, identity, and inequality are discussed (Elias & Feagin, 2016). The history of science's entanglement with racial ideology provides a lens through which we can see how the apparatus for knowledge production can be used as a tool of power that reproduces social hierarchies while cloaked as objective inquiry. 1.2 The Role of Scientific Racism in Justifying Colonialism and Slavery It was imperative that the transatlantic slave trade operate within a framework that was able to account for the systematic dehumanization of African people and their enslavement and commodification. And European powers, profit seekers, turned into racists by an economic motive, used a racial ideology to justify the forced enslavement of millions, embedding racial distinctions in laws and social structure (Acharya, 2022). In the early days, these justifications were often seen through pseudo-scientific claims that suggested Africans were biologically designed for labor, which added an economic dimension to the justification for slavery. They capitalized on the narrative of African bodies as physically strong yet inferior in intellect to build a moral and intellectual hierarchy that presented enslavement as part of natural order, rather than moral crime (Braveman & Parker Dominguez, 2021). The racialization of forced labor played a crucial role in her economic necessity, with policies codifying distinctions in law based on race, especially in colonial territories where legal frameworks institutionalianized race- based subjugation. As slavery and its need for justification become increasingly entrenched, these rationalizations were transformed into more wide-ranging theories of racial hierarchy that laid the groundwork for scientific racism, which aimed to establish the belief in the biological inferiority of Africans by detailed empirical argument (Nicholas & Hollowell, 2016). The great longevity of these ideas shows us the way that scientific racism both arose from and served to justify economic exploitation and served to maintain systems of power and traditional hierarchies that outlasted the end of the slave trade. With racial theorists using biological determinism to justify colonial rule and social exclusion, scientific racism was critical in sustaining perceptions of African inferiority. Theories of polygenism, for example, that treasonously proposed the idea of distinct origins of racial groups, were especially compelling to the conclusions of Africans being inferior (Gould, 1993). And restrictions at the national level on access to education, economic opportunities and legal rights for African populations were policies applied based on such claims, these were not just fanciful ideas. Two of the most well-known scientific practices of the time were craniometry and phrenology, and they were often wielded as proof of racial differences, including studies that claimed that Africans had a smaller cranium capacity and proof of their intellectual inferiority (Krimsky & Sloan, 2011). Many European and American intellectuals embraced these pseudoscientific claims, normalizing them in public discourse and formalizing them into discriminatory policies in both colonial and postcolonial societies. Of course, this racial hierarchy was hardly passed down from on high, but rather both produced and reproduced by the academy. The entrenched interest of the scientific community as a response to the claims made by these racial theories gave credence to their assertions that the pre-constructed hierarchy was an inevitable and objective reason. According to Acharya (2022), these theories had major political implications, influencing policies around segregation, voting rights and citizenship, and illustrated how scientific racism was fundamental to the reproduction of systemic inequality. Perhaps one of the most overt examples of this can be found in the treatment of colonized peoples. Not just an explanation for social divides, racial science was a weapon in the service of forced labor and segregation. Such ideas underpinned colonial labor policy, tightening rigid racial classifications. From the 1930s to the 1960s, European colonial regimes used racial science to justify extractive labor systems. This was particularly so in Africa and the Americas, where indigenous and African descended populations were systematically denied basic rights (Nicholas & Hollowell, 2016). Plantation economies, dependent on coercive labor, relied on racial hierarchies to legitimize grotesque conditions of labor, asserting that African and indigenous laborers had biological characteristics that made them better suited for arduous labor (Braveman & Parker Dominguez, 2021). Scientific arguments were similarly invoked to justify segregationist policies enforced in both colonial and post-emancipation societies, with the biological dangers of racial mixing leading to strict laws classifying individuals based on their race (Krimsky & Sloan, 2011). Scientific racism did not remain purely theoretical it became an applied science, and the trends you can see in the US have been mirrored across the world impacting the very nature and structure of society from which we can never recover. These racial classifications would have repercussions long after the colonial period, shaping policies pertaining to education, employment, and urban planning well into the twentieth century (Acharya, 2022). The scientific racism was used in a systematic way to maintain economic and social control, highlighting its function as an ideological instrument of oppression. Ethnography was a tool of European colonial expansion, used to justify and solidify racial hierarchies by casting colonized peoples as subjects but not equal members of human civilizations. Anthropologists and ethnographers were instrumental in shaping racial taxonomies that categorized indigenous and African societies as primitive or inferior, thus lending intellectual justification for colonial domination (Gould, 1993). Such studies frequently portrayed non-European societies as stagnant and unfit for self-governance, rationalizing the European imposition as a civilizing mission (Nicholas & Hollowell, 2016), Furthermore, European colonial museums were a key site where colonized peoples were treated as mere objects of curiosity, rather than history-making agents in their own right, through the collection and display of indigenous artifacts, human remains and cultural practices (Acharya, 2022). This collaboration between colonial administrators and scientific institutions ensured that racial science remained linked to imperial governance and continued to influence policies regarding land distribution, taxation, and legal status (Braveman & Parker Dominguez, 2021). Leading the way in ethnography's relations with the production of racial knowledge, Joseph Pottier sets the stage for demonstrating that colonial expansion was not only a project of a military or economic but also of an ideology. It is an ideology through which science volunteered itself as a rationalization for domination and control. Beyond academics, religious institutions contributed to the legitimacy of scientific racism, frequently combining theological arguments with pseudo-scientific reasoning to justify racial hierarchies. In colonized territory, missionary work often utilized racial science, arguing that moral and intellectual uplift, reinforcing the paternalistic justification of colonization, was a necessity for non-European populations (Krimsky & Sloan, 2011). In this effort, religious leaders drawing from biblical texts often supported racist theories of so-called racial inferiority, framing their church teachings as consistent with popular scientific discourses of the time that emphasized racial divisions (Nicholas & Hollowell, 2016). The alliance of religious and scientific institutions erected a potent ideological base that offered divine sanction and scientific proof of racial hierarchies, deeming these as both wanted and natural (Braveman & Parker Dominguez, 2021). Notably, this synthesis of religious and scientific racism was particularly influential in justifying segregationist policies in which religious teaching framed racial separation as part of a natural and divinely ordained order (Acharya, 2022). Such a convergence, however, has long-term implications as one can see in the persistence of the racial ideologies that continue to influence modern social and political realities. Evidently, because the ideological underpinnings of religious doctrine and scientific racism fed into one another, the resulting data indicates that there was a strong partnership between multiple institutions to enforce racial inequality, and this reinforces the deeply entrenched nature of these beliefs. Part 2: Craniometry, Eugenics, and the Evolutionary Justifications of Race 2.1 Craniometry and the ‘Measurement’ of Racial Differences Craniometry as a classifying tool became increasingly popular in the 1800s when scientists began measuring skulls as a way to quantify human differences. This was also the time when craniometry, the measurement of cranial size and shape, emerged as the mainstay of the racial science that underpinned beliefs about biological basis of intelligence and moral worth (Perrin & Anderson, 2013). Early practitioners claimed that cranial volume related to cognitive ability and that Europeans were intellectually superior to other groups (Gould, 1993). This framework mirrored existing racial hierarchies and provided an ostensibly objective rationale for both colonialism and slavery (Krimsky & Sloan, 2011). His studies on cranial capacity helped popularize craniometry by collecting and measuring hundreds of skulls to prepare racial taxonomies as well (Turnbull, 2023). His findings, however, were fatally flawed, cherry-picking data to support entrenched racial prejudices. The scientific community largely accepted craniometry as a valid mode of classification, depositing racial hierarchies into the upstart field of physical anthropology. Craniometry’s influence went well beyond the university setting, even if it was methodologically flawed. Its allure derived from its supposed empirical rigor, giving scientific credence to racist ideologies that legitimized social and economic inequity. Paul Broca built upon Morton’s work by developing craniometric techniques and applying them to intelligence assessment. Broca was a famous cranial anthropologist and surgeon who theorized that skull size and brain volume were inherited traits responsible for the racial disparities in intelligence (Perrin & Anderson, 2013). His comparative measurements showed lower cranial capacity for nonwhite groups (relative to white groups) and, by extrapolation, inferior intellect (Gould, 1993). The research by Broca was widely cited in scientific circles he reinforcing the idea that some races were superior than others using seemingly objective means (Anderson & Perrin, 2013). However, his methodology was grossly misguided, as he had chosen not to include contradicting data (Krimsky & Sloan, 2011). And craniometry’s focus on physical measures neglected environmental and cultural influences on intelligence. With its flaws and all, Broca’s work made its way into anthropological discourse and informed public policy. His ideas were useful particularly to colonial administrations, which needed a scientific justification for racial separation. Turnbull (2023) notes that his theories were part of a larger pseudoscientific push to compare intelligence across racial lines, an idea that lasted deep into the twentieth century. Although later critiques would dismantle its core assumptions, craniometry made a lasting impact on racial science. It helped lay the foundations of eugenics and other racist ideologies. Craniometric findings were used to theorize human variation more generally, and physical anthropology played an important role in constructing race-based hierarchies. Anthropologists drew on measurements of skulls to classify racial groups, claiming that physical differences correlated with differences in intellect and morality (Turnbull, 2023). It solidified pre-existing social hierarchies, rendering racial discrimination legitimate behind a façade of scientific objectivity (Gould, 1993). Craniometry soon evolved into a chief component of ethnographic studies, informing practices in forensic anthropology, and medical research, as well as colonial governance (Durbar, 2014). Museums and scientific institutions collected hundreds of skulls, exhibiting them as proof of racial disparity (Krimsky & Sloan, 2011). Dividing populations by cranial features solidified racial essentialism by representing intelligence and behavior as biological facts rather than social constructs. As we have seen in previous chapters, the validity of craniometry was vocally challenged early on, but the bisecting methods had a long shelf life and lingered in the pages of racial science right up through the twentieth century. Perrin and Anderson (2013, such uses of craniometric data became so entrenched in educational curricula and public discourse that they solidified craniometric data's role as shaping societal understandings of race. Its connection to scientific progress hid its intrinsically racially biased and unscientific origins, meaning that racial pseudoscience survived even as it became increasingly discredited. Later approaches to craniometry were critiqued methodologically and also rightly received the respective recognition of its biased notions toward different races in the human species. As mid-twentieth century anthropologists and geneticists delved deeper into cranial structure research, they began to doubt the applicability of cranial measurements as reliable indicators of intelligence (Turnbull, 2023). Geneticist Alan Tempkin helped show that variation in humans was continuous, not discrete, in such a way as to render the idea of biological racial groups impossible (Krimsky & Sloan, 2011) Research demonstrated that environmental factors were prime determinants of cranial development and that craniometry was thus discredited and its deterministic claims falsified (Anderson & Perrin, 2013). Scholars like Stephen Jay Gould systematically uncovered the statistical shenanigans and selective data-sleuthing relied upon by early craniometrists to maintain racial hierarchies (Gould, 1993). The demise of craniometry was part of a larger shift in science, moving away from racial essentialism and toward the study of culture. Modern anthropology acknowledges the existence of physical differences between populations, but believes that race itself is a social construct, rather than biologically specifiable differences. The legacy of craniometry, however, is still evident in today’s debates over race, intelligence and scientific prejudice. Its historical legacy underscores the perils of such a Frankensteinian rehabilitation as a way of perverting imperfect methodologies to rationalize social hierarchies in the name of scientific objectivity. 2.2 Eugenics, Natural Selection and Racial Hierarchies Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection had a significant impact on the racial science of the 19th century, but the misinterpretation of his findings caused the emergence of a hierarchical model of human races. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin suggested that species evolved by means of differential survival and reproduction, which were subject to environmental pressures (Mohsen, 2020). Yet racial theorists misinterpreted his work to claim that human races evolved along different paths and that some groups were biologically superior (Sheldon, 2021). This misunderstanding contributed to the rationale that differences were the result of natural selection, rather than socially constructed inequalities (Slorach, 2020). Classic written conclusions of Darwin’s influence upon human societies thus construed offered pseudoscientific legitimacy to support further institutional racial hierarchies (Fallace, 2016). These ideas became extrapolated to social and political thought, with social Darwinism legitimising colonial conquest and segregationist policies as aspects of human evolution (Stolerman, 2017). This ideological framework located non-European populations as evolutionary “laggards,” and as such incapable of achieving the same level of intellectual or moral refinement as Europeans (Krimsky & Sloan, 2011). Inevitably, this is why racial science became both adopted by and compatible with more general eugenicist beliefs and practices that we saw culminate in massive social motivation to control and even alter human reproduction for the betterment of the race in ways that were supposedly scientific in nature. Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin’s, took evolutionary thinking in the direction of eugenics, making the case that selective breeding could enhance the human race. He thought that intelligence and moral character were inherited, and favoured policies that encouraged reproduction among the “fit” and discouraged it among the “unfit” (Slorach, 2020). Galton was both the architect of eugenic policies seeking for the improvement of the race as well as a major proponent of biological determinism as a guide in social planning (Fallace, 2016). He divided different racial groups based on the alleged higher genetic qualities of their races pushing farther the caste system into science (Stolerman, 2017). Such eugenicist rhetoric became intertwined with nationalist ideologies, resulting in governments pursuing sterilization programs and restrictive immigration policies founded on what would be considered racially desirable (Krimsky & Sloan, 2011). Around the start of the twentieth century, the principle of heredity was also being applied to the improvement of races, as evidenced by its influence on public health campaigns and education (Mohsen, 2020). Despite eugenics' pretense as a progressive science, it was based on flawed genetic assumptions and environmental neglect regarding human development. As per Sheldon (2021), the movement’s growing institutionalization sanctioned racial discrimination, informing policies aimed at engineering societies founded on exclusionary and coercive principles. Eugenics policies were enacted across the globe, with especially horrific results for people targeted in the United States, Nazi Germany, and beyond. US-led early eugenic efforts passed sterilization laws aimed at marginalized communities, including those that were racialized, immigrants and those with disabilities (Stolerman 2017). Nazi Germany’s racial ideologies, including forced sterilizations and euthanization programs aiming to purify the Aryan race, were borrowed from the American eugenics movement (Slorach, 2020). The American models had a direct influence on Germany’s eugenic laws codified under the 1933 Sterilization Law and exemplified the transnational nature of racial science (Krimsky & Sloan, 2011). Similarly, other nations (e.g. Canada, Sweden, and Australia) also implemented sterilization policies to control populations prescriptively viewed as genetically unfit (Mohsen, 2020). These were measures enforcing hierarchical racial ideologies, entrenching eugenicist ideas within public health, legal systems (Sheldon, 2021). Similarly, the global embrace of eugenics highlights the widespread contemporaneous reach of scientific racism whereby governments institutionalized reproductive control as means to sustain racial and social hierarchies in place (Fallace, 2016). Though ethical concerns surfaced, eugenicist rhetoric continued through the twentieth century, informing immigration, education, and labor policy. Eugenics became entrenched such that over one in a hundred Americans underwent forced sterilization during the early twentieth century. This revealed the extent to which scientific authority could be turned against marginalized populations under the guise of genetic improvement. The agenda was especially harmful when it came to reproductive rights and forced sterilization, and it targeted women from marginalized groups in particular. In the United States, thousands of women, particularly Black, Indigenous, and Latina women, were sterilized involuntarily by state-sponsored eugenic policies (Stolerman, 2017). These programs were framed as means of limiting poverty and criminality, while reinforcing racial stereotypes linking nonwhite communities with social degeneracy (Krimsky & Sloan, 2011). Other countries implemented similar policies, aiming at the reproductive control of Indigenous nations to eliminate cultural identities (Slorach, 2020). Under this guise, eugenicists defended these interventions in terms of public health and economic efficiency, framing forced sterilization as a requisite for national progress (Fallace, 2016). These policies not only inflicted physical violence but also led to intergenerational trauma and loss of reproductive autonomy (Mohsen, 2020). Legal attacks on forced sterilization surfaced in the late 20th century, but many victims never received compensation for their pain and suffering. These eugenic policies highlighted the crosssection of race and gender with reproductive rights, which together reflected the ongoing legacy of scientific racism as a means to shape state intervention in the area of bodily autonomy (Sheldon, 2021). The early to mid-20th century witnessed the decline of eugenics following the ethical atrocities of World War II, but eugenics’ ideological legacy endured. The information that came out of Nazi experimentation revealed the grotesque dangers posed by racial science, and eugenics quickly fell into disrepute in mainstream discourse (Slorach, 2020). International codification, such as the Nuremberg Code and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, rejected coercive genetic policies and signaled a departure from eugenicist thought (Krimsky & Sloan, 2011). But the core ideas of eugenics persisted in public health and social policies, shaping the debates around genetic engineering, prenatal testing and population control (Mohsen, 2020). Discussions on intelligence and crime recycled terms such as “genetic fitness,” evoking ancestral prejudices inherited from eugenics (Sheldon, 2021). Therefore, while the eugenics movement is no longer widely regarded as a legitimate scientific endeavor, its legacy remains evident in systemic inequities, particularly in healthcare and criminal justice. Fallace (2016), says the history of eugenics highlights the hazards of pushing genetic determinism as a basis for social policy and the ways in which scientific authority can be abused to rationalize discrimination. The difficulty is to look critically at past abuses, while making sure that genetics research today does not fall prey to the same racialized mores of older bodies of science. Part 3: The Genetic Revolution and the Persistence of Racial Science 3.1 From biological adequacy to the adequacy of modern genetics Over the 20th century, especially after 1945, the overthrow of classical racial science was one of the most important challenges to the scientific study of human difference. Racial hierarchies were predicated in scientific discourse before the war and shaped policies promoting eugenics and biological determinism. The horrors of the Holocaust revealed the extreme consequences of such scientific racial ideologies and led the international scientific community to address the legitimacy of racial classification (Marks, 2017). UNESCO responded to the claims between 1950 and 1967 with a series of statements that did not recognize race as a biological construct but rather linked human differences to environment and socio-cultural structures. According to Mohsen (2020), those declarations helped make possible a broader movement within anthropology and genetics, culminating in an intellectual repudiation of racial essentialism. But racial classifications nevertheless remained a fixture of scientific work, especially so in medicine and human biology, where they remained a central part of studies of disease prevalence and genetic predisposition (Duster, 2015). Even if attempts to erase race from biological conversation had had, good business, its legacy had been well integrated into research practices, public health dogmas, and forensic sciences. The contradictions between nascent genetic evidence and entrenched racial frameworks suggested both the difficulty of fully abandoning the power of old classifications. Even as scientific institutions moved away from racial determinism, the structural remnants of these ideas continued to shape how genetic data was processed and applied. The rise of population genetics in the 1950s and 60s called race a biological category into question, showing that human genetic variation was continuous. While earlier taxonomies of populations placed them in fixed racial brackets, population genetics showed that genetic variabilities occurred on continua rather than discrete boundaries (Duster, 2015). Coined by Theodosius Dobzhansky and others, genetic variation was adapted to the environment, not the other way around, contradicting claims that genetically inherent racial differences existed (Mohsen, 2020). Further findings in molecular biology confirmed this, indicating that genetic variation within populations was hugely more than that between them (Marks, 2017). Yet, race continued to be employed as a categorical variable in biomedical research, and was even viewed as a genetic determinant, despite scientific invalidity. In medical studies, without biological justification, racial groups remained used to sort patients for clinical trials and measure health inequalities, despite the availability of more precise metrics such as ancestry-informative markers (Panofsky & Donovan, 2019). The persistence of race in medicine showed the challenge of fully integrating population genetics into clinical and public health practices. While the field offered a better avenue for exploring human variety, its claims were often drowned out by the institutional inertia and entrenched conceptions of race. In the 1970s, Richard Lewontin conducted research which supported the fact that racial classification is arbitrary, according to his research, human genetic diversity does not match socially constructed racial categories. Geno, of its most influential studies on variation within blood proteins showed that nearly 85% of genetic diversity exists within populations and small fractions between traditionally defined race groups (Mohsen, 2020). This finding exploded the assumption that races are biologically meaningful divisions, further propelling the idea that race is essentially a social construct. Yet the study of human susceptibility to illness and drug development would be complicated by the historical existence of race within medical and genetic research (Eddens, 2019). And while some have argued that race as such has no validity at the level of genetic markers, along with the realization that even population level genetic differences may be medically relevant, resulting in debates about how best to deal with genetic risk factors without reifying race. According to Panofsky and Donovan (2019) however, interspersed by these controversies, Lewontin’s results emerged as a bedrock in contemporary debates on human variation and had an influence on re-casting current critiques of race-based genetics His results remained a seminal reference point in the war against racial essentialism in genetics discussions. Marks (2017) says the abiding legacy of his work is the reminder that the tensions between scientific discovery and established social and institutional arrangements are a permanent feature of modern life. The Human Genome Project (HGP), completed in 2003, redrew the way we understand race and genetics. Duster (2015) notes that scientists mapped the entire human genome and established that humans share more than 99.9 percent of their genetic material with each other, thus rendering race a biologically meaningless category. The HGP did yield some unintended consequences as well, specifically with the rise of direct-to-consumer genetic testing. Ancestry test companies exploited widespread fascination with racial identity, frequently distorting genetic data to feed obsolete conceptions of race (Eddens, 2019). The commercial utilization of genetic information challenged the demarcation between scientific fact and consumer-driven narratives, solidifying the disconnect between genetic data and old racial classifications. They highlight, however, that a related ethical issue is that marginalized communities are overrepresented in genetic databases (Panofsky & Donovan, 2019). When that data is collected and used to apply potential bias in racially biased criminal investigations, such an imbalance raises additional ethical questions. Although the HGP provided a strong response to the idea of racial determinism, its legacy in the ethical arena remains entangled in such ongoing disputes. According to Eddens’ (2019), its findings are still entangled in debates about identity, medicine and forensic science, showing exactly how fraught the connection between genetics and the systems we construct around it can be. Though that made the situation clearer, it also exposed the risk of misreading genetic data. Without adequate ethical supervision, genetic research, has such potential to be misused, perpetuating and sustaining harmful racial stereotypes instead of dismantling and challenging them. The tension between the advancement of science and the social consequences of that advancement suggests that the responsible use of genetic knowledge is as important as the knowledge itself. In the post-genomic era, with progress in genetics translation, ethical dilemmas about genetic science and racial profiling have increased due to emerging potential to utilize the genetic difference between human races for social engineering purposes which can sustain racial discrimination. Genetic databases have been populated more heavily by DNA samples from racial minorities, in the case of forensic science, suggesting discriminatory practices in law enforcement (Panofsky & Donovan, 2019). Biomedical research has also continued to use race as a proxy for genetic differences, despite overwhelming evidence that social determinants of health are much more closely correlated with disease variation (Duster, 2015). The drug industry has made the problem worse by marketing certain drugs to particular racial groups, sometimes using genetic assumptions that can only be understood as dubious to justify these distinctions. The persistence of race-based medicine is due both to historical biases and commercial incentives, showing how hard it is to rid scientific and medical discourse of an entire conceptual frame of reference. And the expanding accessibility of genetic information has already triggered alarms over privacy, while creating a pipeline for law enforcement and private corporations to obtain an amount of genomic data that once was unfathomable. The progress brings the challenge of addressing the ethical and moral issues raised by genetic research. Eddens (2019) says we need ongoing critical engagement with the ways in which racial narratives are embedded into scientific talk, which is highlighted in genetics, race, and ethics at this intersection. 3.2 The Politics of Race in Medicine and Contemporary Racial Science Racial categories are still available in the archive of clinical research and continue to influence and shape public health policies and clinical practices. Though race is a social construct widely understood, medical institutions continue to use racial classification to evaluate disease risk and treatment effectiveness. According to Krimsky and Sloan (2011), the misapplication of race as a biotechnology in medicine continues today, even though recent research suggests that the genetic variation among individuals inside racial group is greater than that between races. This dependency perpetuates historical biases and also obscures the social determinants of health. Researchers often defend making race-based distinctions in medicine by noting differences in disease prevalence, but those explanations often ignore structural inequities that determine health results. Why then does race continue to be used for biomedical studies, because these deep-rooted perceptions have undoubtedly shaped medical research and formulations of public health policies (Pierre, 2019). These classifications risk reifying mistaken conceptions of race as a natural given rather than as a social and political artifact. Brown (2021) emphasizes how racialized medication practices drive spatial and economic segregation, and entrench health disparities within the communities. These patterns suggest that modern medicine needs to see beyond race-based distinctions if it is to address the drivers of health inequities. The argument for race-based medicine remains contentious since genetically based susceptibilities are often used to justify a bright line dividing treatment by race. Some populations, advocates argue, carry the genetic markers for specific diseases, making them prime candidates for targeted intervention. The insidious legacy of racial science has shaped contemporary arguments around things like race-based medical interventions (Gould, 1993). Recent researchers have established a connection between systemic inequities and environmental factors to describe how these drive health disparities. That is, certain genetic traits might be common (or rare) in a certain group, but they do not configure the overall impact of those characteristics on the person’s risk of health problems. In one 2019 paper, Pierre criticizes the over-reliance on genetic explanations, arguing that the underlying obsession with race-based medicine contributes to a lack of attention to more broad socioeconomic determinants. That is, the idea that race can be used as a trustworthy proxy for genetic variation has long been disproven, as it continues to drive drug development and treatment strategies (Krimsky & Sloan, 2011) This is important, given that these practices risk reifying racial essentialism, thus the urgency of a shift towards a more individualized and contextualized medicine. Breaking out of this trap in medicine requires a paradigm shift because it lacks the kind of cutting edge research that sees the integrated dynamic interaction between genes, the environment and structural inequities in the world (Brown 2021). Ancestry testing has now become commercialized, shifting notions of race and identity to focus on biological determinism. Companies promote direct-to-consumer genetic tests as vehicles for understanding ancestral race, but their methodologies are filled with scientific shortcomings. Krimsky and Sloan (2011) state that ancestry tests are based on incomplete genetic databases that have resulted in misleading or simplistic renditions of racial classifications. These tests are marketed by appealing to the consumer hunger for identity verification, but more often than not, the outcome is based on commercial interests rather than objective scientific reality. The advent of genetic ancestry testing, Pierre (2019) argues, has led to a resurgence of essentialism, a belief that individuals can be defined or characterized through their DNA results. Even more troubling, these companies make a profit by selling users the idea of a lineage that ultimately reinforces society's imposed imaginary boundaries on race. These tests have been known to add ambivalence to the experiences of racialized groups, especially those whose identities, such as Middle Easterners, do not fit them neatly into a conventional racial frame (Maghbouleh, 2017). This commodification of ancestry not only warp historical narratives, but it also reinforces a simplistic notion of race as a stable and unambiguous biological fact. Such scenarios demand a careful re-evaluation of presentorial models of how racial identity is created, discussed, and ultimately sold. As we become increasingly aware that race is a social construct, biomedical innovation is reinforcing racial difference. In the past few years, the fields of genetics and personalized medicine have seen a new wave of attempts to group people by their genetic markers. Brown (2021) argues that these categorizations have been defended as essential to the progress of biomedical research, but rather are legitimizations of a broader political project that veils a fealty to racial differencing under an ostensible scientific language of objectivity. To some, variation across populations provides a rationale for treating populations differently in medicine; to others, race has become a potentially dangerous way to concretize boundaries in biology. According to Pierre (2019), this kind of category can mask the sociopolitical nature of the phenomenon of health disparity, hence allowing genetic explanations to overshadow more structural determinants. The persistence of racial taxonomies in biomedical studies is indicative of the difficulties associated with disentangling science from historical prejudice (Gould 1993). According to Maghbouleh (2017), there are significant consequences for marginalized populations based on these practices as structural exclusion becomes the norms under which people experience engaging with medicine and how medicine engages with people. The challenge ahead is to create biomedical models that more fully reflect individual genetic variability and that avoid treating racial categories as proxies for biological differences. Also, cross-disciplinary critiques of contemporary racialized genetic anthropology persist; scientists and ethicists alike warn of risks when equating race and biology. As many scholars have noted, genetics has been misused to rationalize racial hierarchies more akin to turn-of-the-century pseudoscience. Studies of genetic causation for social difference in the contemporary social context can reproduce stale considerations of race (Krimsky and Sloan 2011). These strategies obscure the relevance of the systemic elements that shape health outcomes, echoing the deterministic conception of race. According to Brown (2021), this shows that most of the time these endeavors have an agenda beyond the scientific one. Although genetic data can provide useful information, it needs to be put into the environmental and social context if it is not to contribute to a biology-based form of racial essentialism. Pierre (2019) says ethics should guide genetic research and prevent the potential abuse of racialized categories in scientific literature. The legacy of racial science continues to raise challenges and even ethical dilemmas where race is implicated, as indicated in, for example, the subsequent response of one author, Eric S. Lander, to this ongoing scrutiny of race, which reflects the political dimension, he shared a statement I issued with two other authors of the original study about the work and race-based genetic studies more broadly (Lander, 2023). Research based on genetics is in need of such an interdisciplinary effort that retains historical, sociological and medical views to develop ethical frameworks. A critical re-evaluation of the validity and utilitarianism of racial classifications in medical and genetic studies is needed, given that harmful use of these classifications is still occurring. The use of race as a biological determinant continues to course through public health and biomedical practice, despite extensive critique. Scientific research thus not only mirrors existing historical prejudices but adds to them. According to Pierre (2019), the perpetuation of racial categories quoted in science rests less on separation based on biological differences than on the marking up of historical divisions. A new way of thinking about race will expose the previous use of these concepts in scientific discourse as hindering the transition to a more just medical system. Acknowledging the social construction of race does not diminish the significance of health disparities, Krimsky and Sloan argue (2011), but instead shifts attention from individualistic notions of race that detract from structural origins. Maghbouleh (2017) emphasizes that we must step out of racializing models that emphasize ethnicity to develop medical models that are accurate reflections of individual genetic diversity without falling prey to essentializing notions of ethnicity. At the same time, Brown (2021) reminds us that it is paramount to have future science grounded in ethics so racial myths are not repeated in medicine. In order to promote equal healthcare practices and create public health research that is socially responsible rather than racially deterministic, analyzing racial concepts in science is pivotal. Conclusion 1.1 Summarizing the Historical Trajectory of Racial Science Historically, racial science has influenced social and political institutions to a degree. As I have noted, Fredrickson (2015) mentions that the early racial classification under the guise of science was used as a codification of systemic expectation about who was to be advantaged in society, and under what policies around segregation, immigration and colonialism. As per Solomos (2022), these classifications solidified hierarchies that could be used to rationalize exploitation and exclusion and left a legacy that continues to play out in modern structural inequalities. But over time, changes in scientific understanding began to question the idea of biological determinism. It is easy to recognize then, as Solomos (2022) points out, that race is now largely treated as a socio-political construct rather than a static biological fact across academia. Yet, while such knowledge has advanced in the ensuing decades, remnants of pseudoscience have not been buried completely; these outdated ideas still resurface public discussions, now often recycled to explain away differences in health, education and economic opportunity. Saini, (2019); Saini argues that although the overt racial sciences of yesteryear are no longer respectable, today, new forms of racial essentialism endure that remain to be critiqued. Grasping this historical trajectory is fundamental to undoing the entrenched fictions that continue to inform societal anxieties about race. 1.2. Challenges to Racial Science and the Need for Ethical Scientific Inquiry Race cannot be reduced to biology; even contemporary science hits a limit in that conception. Resnik and Elliott (2016) propose interdisciplinary approaches to better understand race and human biodiversity, framing discussions of genetics, sociology and history rather than one-dimensional narratives. It does so in ways that emphasize the interconnectedness of the fields and the multiplicity of human experience. According to Weinbaum et al. (2019), it is a grave ethical responsibility for scientists to shape public discourse on race. It is claimed that historical misinterpretations and misuses of scientific findings have served to reinforce racial myths, making it more important than ever for scholars to engage critically and responsibly with their research. Academia has a crucial role in countering pseudoscience. They contend that racial biases must be unlearned in scientific research, which cannot afford to play a passive role in the perpetuation of racial biases (Benedict & Mead, 2019). Transparent research and cognizance of societal implications of scientific claims are integral to ethical research. Without those, the dregs of racial science can be repackaged quite easily in forms that only serve to reinforce existing prejudices. Developing sciences of human diversity that are rigorous and ethically grounded is essential to avoiding a destructive reliance on it as a sword of discrimination. 1.3. The Future of Race, Science, and Society The future, with great power comes great responsibility. The parameters of race are changing even as bodies in the western world become more genetically homogenous, across Europe and North America these are often termed genomic approaches to race. Nevertheless, the intersection of race, technology, and biopolitics poses a concern that these developments may be abused. As Solomos (2022) points out, scientific progress can be a force for inclusivity, but it can also be appropriated as another means of reinforcement of the racial order under different pretexts. Insights from critical race studies are valuable in understanding how racialized science is replicated in social structures that have persisted or even intensified, urging vigilance against the resurgence of deterministic thinking (Fredrickson, 2015). So it is not enough just to denounce old concepts, to evolve toward a science that recognizes social justice and human equality; it is also necessary to use science to serve a better humanity. Therefore, Resnik and Elliott (2016) remind us that ethical principles that “support fairness and the eradication of systemic discrimination” should inform scientific inquiry. As per Solomos (2022), as science progresses, the challenge of positioning race within its rightful and greater social, historical and political context endures as a critical theme for the future well-being of all of us in creating a more just and equitable society.