Speaking of Race

In this episode we describe some of the early roots of eugenics and Erik describes his three-ingredient model for eugenics.

In this episode we interview Erik Peterson about the book he recently released with fellow historian, Margaret Peacock, about the crazy pandemic year of 2020. Race features prominently throughout!

Some resources:

The website that accompanies the book: https://adhc.lib.ua.edu/pandemicbook/

The book: https://www.amazon.com/Deeper-Sickness-Journal-America-Pandemic/dp/0807040290

In this episode we respond to a listener question about our top 5 examples of scientific racism. Unfortunately, in the five years of this podcast, we’ve only discussed two of these people/topics, so we’ve got a lot of work to do to get up to speed. The transcript includes references and resources for these topics: http://speakingofrace.ua.edu/uploads/1/1/0/5/110557873/transcript.pdf

At least since Stephen Jay Gould's 1981 classic Mismeasure of Man, Darwin has been characterized as a kindly anti-racist while Morton has been characterized as a founding father of scientific racism. We argue that the two men were much more alike in their views on both slavery and race.

In this episode, we talk with evolutionary biologist Joe Graves and biological anthropologist Alan Goodman about their roles as thought leaders on public education around race, racism, and science (https://cup.columbia.edu/book/racism-not-race/9780231200660). They tell us about how they came to collaborate on their new book Racism not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions, which tackles many of these issues. As promised, here are the links to the Wikipedia pages for Joe (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_L._Graves_Jr.&oldid=1051037675) and for Alan (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alan_H._Goodman&oldid=1063696168) so you can see some of their many accomplishments. Also as promised in the episode, here is Joe’s paper telling why Lewontin’s fallacy isn’t a fallacy, a key argument against biological races in humans (http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Graves/). If you want more, you’ll have to listen to the episode and buy the book!

Here's a transcript of the episode: http://speakingofrace.ua.edu/uploads/1/1/0/5/110557873/transcript.pdf

Eugenics: the science and practice of promoting “good breeding” among humans. An early-20th-century movement so steeped in white supremacy that even some white people don’t count, much less people of color. Here we begin a series with more than you ever wanted to know about the sinister history of eugenics, including mass sterilization campaigns in the US and direct connections to the Holocaust.

Transcript here: http://speakingofrace.ua.edu/uploads/1/1/0/5/110557873/transcript.pdf

The idea that race is a biological reality has hung on longest and strongest in the parts of biological anthropology that deal with skeletal remains. In this episode we talk with two forensic anthropologists, Sean Tallman and Allysha Winburn, about how typological notions of race and ancestry have changed over time in this segment of the discipline. They have published a recent paper discussing this change (Tallman, S. D., Parr, N. M., & Winburn, A. P. (2021). Assumed Differences; Unquestioned Typologies: The Oversimplification of Race and Ancestry in Forensic Anthropology. Forensic Anthropology, Early View, 1-24. doi:https://doi.org/10.5744/fa.2020.0046).

Additional resources:

J. Bindon, M. Peterson, & L. J. Weaver (Producer). (2017, 11/14/2017). Race and the Human Genome Project [Retrieved from http://speakingofrace.ua.edu/podcast/race-and-the-human-genome-project

Bindon, J. R. (2020). Race in the wake of the Human Genome Project. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342215956_Race_in_the_wake_of_the_Human_Genome_Project

Crews, D. E., & Bindon, J. R. (1991). Ethnicity as a taxonomic tool in biomedical and biosocial research. Ethnicity & disease, 1(1), 42-49.

Dixon, R. B. (1923). The Racial History of Man. New York: C. Scribner's Sons.

Holden, C. (2008). Personal genomics. The touchy subject of ‘race’. Science (New York, N.Y.), 322(5903), 839.

Hooton, E. A. (1931). Up from the Ape. New York: Macmillan.

Lieberman, L., Kirk, R. C., & Littlefield, A. (2003). Perishing Paradigm: Race—1931–99. American Anthropologist, 105(1), 110-113.

Morning, A. (2011). The nature of race. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wagner, J. K., Yu, J. H., Ifekwunigwe, J. O., Harrell, T. M., Bamshad, M. J., & Royal, C. D. (2017). Anthropologists' views on race, ancestry, and genetics. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 162(2), 318-327.

Racial equality is a new idea, right? Wrong! Meet Anténor Firmin, renegade Haitian intellectual of the late 19th century. He traveled all over the world, duked it out with elite scientific racists, hung out with Frederick Douglass, even ran for president -- but was exiled. Twice. On this episode, we discuss the Haitian anthropologist whose work is finally gaining the recognition it deserves, and why you've never heard of him.

Here's the script with resources: http://speakingofrace.ua.edu/uploads/1/1/0/5/110557873/joseph_ant%C3%A9nor_firmin.pdf

In this episode we finish our discussion of skin color with genetic and evolutionary models proposed throughout the 20th and into the 21st century. Spoiler alert: It's complicated!

Script and resources available here: http://speakingofrace.ua.edu/uploads/1/1/0/5/110557873/skin_color_-_2.pdf

Skin color is probably THE key thing we think of when we think about race these days, but it wasn't always that way. In this episode, we ask: where and when did skin color become the trait most associated with race? There's so much to talk about that we don't quite make it up to the present day--stay tuned for a sequel where we discuss contemporary understandings of skin color, genetics, and race!

Here's a heavily footnoted and referenced script for the episode: http://speakingofrace.ua.edu/uploads/1/1/0/5/110557873/skin_color_part_1.pdf