Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century

Science shows that only 0.1% of nucleic acids in the human genome differ on average between individuals, yet despite such evidence, science is still used to fuel racism says Drexel University public health professor Yudell. Indeed, while geneticist J. Craig Venter gave a White House talk in 2000 noting that race has little to do with genetics, and social scientist W.E.B. DuBois penned a similar message a century before, as Yudell writes, "we are having frustratingly similar arguments about race and human difference despite the benefit of 100 years of knowing better." Venter explains in his foreword that it may once have been a selective advantage to fear the "stranger coming to your cave," though a similar condemnation of racism%E2%80%94as an obsolete hunter-gatherer instinct%E2%80%94was attacked as a rationalization when articulated by Pulitzer-Prize winning biologist E.O. Wilson in Sociobiology (1975). Yudell notes that "the intellectual claims of sociobiology%E2%80%94intentionally or not%E2%80%94could and did serve the needs of those who harbored racist ideas by giving them scientific legitimacy." From Darwin's "survivorship of the fittest," misused by eugenicists, to Linnaeus' taxonomic classifications%E2%80%94misused by Linnaeus himself%E2%80%94science has long played a role in perpetuating racism. This intensely deliberative book unearths many subtle and not-so-subtle examples of this complex historic relationship. (Sept.)