Studying anthropology and biology in the 1970s, I was in the perfect position to understand why race was not genetic. From that time on, I wanted everyone to know what race was and was not. But here we a half century later and most individuals in the US – and the world – still believe that race is a valid way to divide individuals into biological groups, and worse, that race, rather than racism, explains differences in life circumstances. As a professor and president of the American Anthropological Association I have taught courses and helped with documentaries, museum exhibits, websites, articles, and books to dispel consequential myth about race and genetics.
I wrote...
Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions
The science of variation is clear that
race is not in the genes. However,
glaring inequalities in health, wealth, and much more vary by race. That is not because of genes or biological
differences. It is because we divide
individuals by race and institutional racism.
Using an accessible question-and-answer format,
Joseph Graves and I explain the differences between social and biological
notions of race. Although there are many meaningful human genetic variations,
they do not map onto socially constructed racial categories. We dismantle the
malignant myth of gene-based racial difference in intelligence and other complex traits and show why the inequalities ascribed to race are in fact caused by
racism.Racism, Not Race shows why antiracist principles are both just
and scientific.
The Sum of Us lays out clearly why antiracism is helpful to everyone. We are all victims in a web of racism that divides us and makes for a weaker social fabric. McGee uses both data and stories to explain why racism hurts everyone. She tells stories with data and personal experiences. One story centers on repeated draining of municipal pools in the 1960s because whites did not want to share pools with African Americans. The result, of course, is that nobody now gets to go for a swim on a hot day. Instead of seeing life as a “zero sum game” in which what one group gets what another does not, McGee argues for a solidarity dividend.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • One of today’s most insightful and influential thinkers offers a powerful exploration of inequality and the lesson that generations of Americans have failed to learn: Racism has a cost for everyone—not just for people of color.
WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, The Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ms. magazine, BookRiot, Library Journal
“This is the book I’ve been waiting for.”—Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist
In 1939 it was well-accepted that Europe was home to many different races. Jacobson tells the story of how, after the Holocaust, different ethnic and national groups slowly because members of the “Caucasian” or White race. Jacobson uses a variety of sources, including those from popular culture to tell the story of how these marginal groups, such as the Irish, Poles, Italians, and of course Ashkenazi Jews, became honorary white. This is a highly readable book about the history of racism against some ethnic Europeans. More so, it is an important book for showing how racial categories change through time and how being white is neither stable nor a given. Rather, it is a club that policies entry.
America's racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of "whiteness studies" and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants "race" has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities in becoming American were re-racialized to become…
Fatal Invention is a masterfully researched book on the faulty science of biological race. Roberts shows how race continues to be re-invented as somehow in the skin, bones and genes. Using extensive and wide ranging sources from history and genomics to medicine and business, Roberts shows how the notion of biological race is continually reinvented to support existing hierarchies. Roberts explains clearly the fundamental flaws of race science and what is at stake in believing that race is somehow genetically a real think. A must read to understand how racism, rather than race, gets into our bodies and souls.
A decade after the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, scientists are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category. In this provocative analysis, leading legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts argues that America is once again at the brink of a virulent outbreak of classifying population by race. By searching for differences at the molecular level, a new race-based science is obscuring racism in society and legitimising state brutality against communities at a time when America claims to be post-racial.
The late Stephen Gould is as important as anyone in the last fifty years in showing how the idea of biological race has been used to support racism. Gould clearly dismantles this idea in this book. It is both a tour de force of science and scientific history, so well written that one forgets one is reading a scholarly book. Gould takes apart key moments in the history of race science, not just to show where they were biased, but how those biases and blind spots persist into the present. This is the definitive book on why biological race is a myth and why there is no hierarchy of intelligence by race.
When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits.
And yet the idea of innate limits-of biology as destiny-dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined by Stephen Jay Gould. In this edition Dr. Gould has written a substantial new introduction telling how and why he wrote the book and tracing the subsequent history of the controversy on innateness right through The Bell…
Superior by science journalist Angela Saini is based on source materials. In addition, it is animated by interviews with key scientists involved in the struggle to end race science. Saini weaves together stories that get at the more intimate details of, on the one hand, the persistence and continual reinvention of race and race science, and on the other, the work of individuals including Jonathan Marks and Jay Kaufman to move us all to better understanding why racism, not biological race, is the cause of inequalities in health and wealth. Superior is the most readable of all the books that focus on race and human variation.
Financial Times Book of the Year
Telegraph Top 50 Books of the Year
Guardian Book of the Year
New Statesman Book of the Year
'Roundly debunks racism's core lie - that inequality is to do with genetics, rather than political power' Reni Eddo-Lodge
Where did the idea of race come from, and what does it mean? In an age of identity politics, DNA ancestry testing and the rise of the far-right, a belief in biological differences between populations is experiencing a resurgence. The truth is: race is a social construct. Our problem is we find this hard to believe.
I am adopted. For most of my life, I didn’t identify as adopted. I shoved that away because of the shame I felt about being adopted and not truly fitting into my family. But then two things happened: I had my own biological children, the only two people I know to date to whom I am biologically related, and then shortly after my second daughter was born, my older sister, also an adoptee, died of a drug overdose. These sequential births and death put my life on a new trajectory, and I started writing, out of grief, the history of adoption and motherhood in America.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, I am uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption.
The history of adoption, reframed through the voices of adoptees like me, and mothers who have been forced to relinquish their babies, blows apart old narratives…
Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption
Nearly every person in the United States is affected by adoption. Adoption practices are woven into the fabric of American society and reflect how our nation values human beings, particularly mothers. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women's reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, Rebecca C. Wellington is uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption. Wellington's timely-and deeply researched-account amplifies previously marginalized voices and exposes the social and racial biases embedded in the United States' adoption industry.…
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