Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century

by Michael Yudell, J. Craig Venter (Foreword by)

Overview

Race, while drawn from the visual cues of human diversity, is an idea with a measurable past, an identifiable present, and an uncertain future. The concept of race has been at the center of both triumphs and tragedies in American history and has had a profound effect on the human experience. Race Unmasked revisits the origins of commonly held beliefs about the scientific nature of racial differences, examines the roots of the modern idea of race, and explains why race continues to generate controversy as a tool of classification even in our genomic age.

Surveying the work of some of the twentieth century's most notable scientists, Race Unmasked reveals how genetics and related biological disciplines formed and preserved ideas of race and, at times, racism. A gripping history of science and scientists, Race Unmasked elucidates the limitations of a racial worldview and throws the contours of our current and evolving understanding of human diversity into sharp relief.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231168755
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2018
Series:	Race, Inequality, and Health , #6
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Michael Yudell is associate professor and chair of the Department of Community Health and Prevention at the Dornsife School of Public Health, Drexel University. He is author of the blog The Public's Health for the Philadelphia Inquirer and his prior books include Welcome to the Genome: A User's Guide to the Genetic Past, Present, and Future and The Genomic Revolution: Unveiling the Unity of Life.

Table of Contents

Foreword by J. Craig Venter
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Eugenic Foundation
2. Charles Davenport and the Biology of Blackness
3. Eugenics in the Public's Eye
4. The National Research Council and the Scientific Study of Race
5. Coloring Race Difference
6. Biology and the Problem of the Color Line
7. Race and the Evolutionary Synthesis
8. Consolidating the Race Concept in Biology
9. Challenges to the Race Concept
10. Naturalizing Racism: The Controversy Over Sociobiology
11. Race in the Genomic Age
Epilogue: Dobzhansky's Paradox and the Future of Racial Research
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

An interesting, thorough, and informative review of the early history of eugenics.... well written and highly readable.

BioScience

Michael Yudell has given us a fascinating and perceptive study of 'man's most dangerous myth.' This insightful book on race should be read widely by anyone concerned with the multiple uses, misuses, tangled history, and persistent confusions over this vexed and potent concept.

Keith Wailoo

How can a concept that has been so debunked as a biological reality keep rising from the dead? Race Unmasked helps answer this by illustrating the troubling story of the sustained, strained, and stained history of the concept of race in scientific thought and practice.

David Rosner

This engaging book is a must-read for nurses, physicians, scientists, academics, and all who continue to try to understand diversity in our society today.

Nursing History Revew - Barbara Mann Wall

Race Unmasked proves itself of enormous importance not only for those who wish to understand the evolution of race as a concept but also for those studying the place of science in American culture.

American Studies

Race Unmasked is worth reading.... Yudell shows clearly the interplay between science, society, and the changing definitions of race that were central to 20th-century history.

Choice

Race matters. All over the world we sort each other into groups by skin color, hair texture, and other physical characteristics, yet as Michael Yudell reminds us in this masterful, engaging, and important book, we barely have a clue about the biological basis for what we are doing. Race Unmasked is just the right remedy for those seeking to better understand the horrors and wrongs of racism.

Arthur L. Caplan

09/15/2014
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—as an obsolete hunter-gatherer instinct—was 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—intentionally or not—could 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—misused by Linnaeus himself—science 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.)

Publishers Weekly

[Race Unmasked] is an important achievement worthy of a wide readership.

Bulletin of the History of Medicine - Gregory Michael Dorr

We have needed a reassessment and an intelligent book on how racial categorizing grows within twentieth- and twenty-first-century science without using the simple labels of 'racism' or 'racist.' Race Unmasked is a terrific guide to the often invisible, intertwined terrain of science and politics around race. Re-reading the past with an eye toward nuance and clarity, Michael Yudell understands how 'race' comes to be unintentionally hidden yet still can be uncovered and critiqued. This book should find its way into classrooms across the curriculum.

Susan M. Reverby

Yudell fills a critical gap in scholarly discourse on the history of eugenics and race.

The Journal of African American History - W. Malcolm Byrnes

A welcomed contribution to understanding the history of the present.

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences - Terence Keel

A timely, readable and engaging contribution to the growing literature on race and science.

Social History of Medicine - Lundy Braun

Race matters. All over the world we sort each other into groups by skin color, hair texture, and other physical characteristics, yet as Michael Yudell reminds us in this masterful, engaging, and important book, we barely have a clue about the biological basis for what we are doing. Race Unmasked is just the right remedy for those seeking to better understand the horrors and wrongs of racism.

[Race Unmasked] is an important, thought-provoking book and deserves to be widely read by people in all disciplines, but especially by the next generation of geneticists who might need to more fully understand the deep historical roots of their discipline.

The Quarterly Review of Biology - John B. Jenkins

This impressive book proceeds to challenge the standard narrative of race science's postwar decline and fall.... Yudell follows in the footsteps of historians such as Richard Hofstadter and Charles E. Rosenberg—scholars who have uncovered the interdependence of biology and American social thought.

Journal of American History - Warwick Anderson

A fine history of how biologists shaped thinking about race in America in the twentieth century and how social values and attitudes shaped the way biologists thought about race.

Metascience - Michael Root

Yudell, a historian of public health, argues that the complicated interaction of science and race visible in the eugenics movement is still playing out.

Science News - Bryan Bello

2014-07-14
A history of the concept of race in American scientific thought. Yudell (Public Health/Drexel Univ.; co-editor: The Genomic Revolution: Unveiling the Unity of Life, 2002) traces how the concept of race evolved from the eugenicists of the early 20th century to present-day geneticists. He argues that the biologic concept of race originated with eugenic theories of race difference, was integrated into modern biologic thought by evolutionary biologists in the 1930s and '40s, and continues to generate controversy as a classification tool. In examining the history of racial science, Yudell looks at the work of specific scientists and institutions, among them the eugenicist Charles Davenport and the National Research Council in the 1920s and '30s, evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, population geneticist L.C. Dunn, anthropologist Ashley Montagu and UNESCO in the 1940s and '50s. The author's account of the controversy aroused by Carleton Coon's The Origin of Races (1962) makes especially interesting reading, as do his discussions of the pseudoscientific work of Alfred Jensen and William Shockley and the clash between sociobiologist E.O. Wilson and evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin in the 1970s. In the final chapter, "Race in the Genomic Age," Yudell tackles the impact of the genomic revolution on the biological race concept. Scientists who use the race concept in genomic research claim that technological improvements allow them to examine human diversity unhampered by social prejudice. Social and natural scientists argue that the race concept is a flawed, inaccurate way to measure human diversity inseparable from social prejudice. Genome scientists say that the race concept is not accurate but is a useful proxy in clinical settings. J. Craig Venter, who wrote the foreword, opines that instead of relying on an individual's appearance or self-identified ethnicity, looking directly at his genomic sequence is the best way to personalize medicine. The controversy continues. A challenging, well-researched work that clearly shows the interconnectedness of scientific and social thought.

Kirkus Reviews