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There’s so much bad scholarship and commentary out there, including by BIPOC scholars who claim to be anti-racist, that is underpinned by uninterrogated race/ist science
I live tweeted my read of this open access article by Amade M’charek who is one of the best when it comes to understanding how race science is normalized https://twitter.com/ibjiyongi/status/1303342894800162822
Also Shay-Akil McLean’s scholarship is free:
“From a Du Boisian demographic perspective, race is a product of racism, what I refer to as race/ism. Race is a heredity and inheritance system based on rules of partus sequitur ventrum and hypodescent.” https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/humbiol_preprints/159/
“From a Du Boisian demographic perspective, race is a product of racism, what I refer to as race/ism. Race is a heredity and inheritance system based on rules of partus sequitur ventrum and hypodescent.” https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/humbiol_preprints/159/
Maile Arvin’s Possessing Polynesians is a major contribution to history of race science (and, in my view, Black studies)
https://www.dukeupress.edu/possessing-polynesians
https://www.dukeupress.edu/possessing-polynesians
Katherine McKittrick’s forthcoming Dear Science and Other Stories also challenges biogenic essentialism, through readings of Sylvia Wynter among other things
https://www.dukeupress.edu/dear-science-and-other-stories
https://www.dukeupress.edu/dear-science-and-other-stories
The conversation between Wynter and McKittrick in this book provides a great introduction to Wynter’s incredible contributions to theorizing what human actually is
https://www.dukeupress.edu/sylvia-wynter
https://www.dukeupress.edu/sylvia-wynter
Wynter’s “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument” is a must read
https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2432989/Wynter-2003-Unsettling-the-Coloniality-of-Being.pdf
https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2432989/Wynter-2003-Unsettling-the-Coloniality-of-Being.pdf
Everyone could use an introduction to fungibility. I like Tiffany Lethabo King’s discussion of it in this article, which is worth paying for or finding otherwise! https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/anti.12227
And of course Saidiya Hartman!
“The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors”
https://uwethicsofcare.gws.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Hartman-The-Belly-of-the-World-A-Note-on-Black-Women-s-Labors.pdf
“The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors”
https://uwethicsofcare.gws.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Hartman-The-Belly-of-the-World-A-Note-on-Black-Women-s-Labors.pdf
And Hortense Spillers’s “Notes on an alternative model — neither/nor” has a ranging critique of the use of the mulatto as a narrative site ... “appropriation of the interracial child by the genocidal forces of dominance” https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo3624045.html
Spillers goes on to say: “The ‘mulatto/a,’ just as the ‘nigger,’ tells us little or nothing about the subject buried beneath the epithets, but quite a great deal more concerning the psychic and cultural reflexes that invent and invoke them.”
“But that’s literature, Chanda, not science, not the real world!”
But the point is, as Wynter articulates, we are homo narrans and our interpretation of the empirics of science is shaped by storytelling. We tell stories that construct race/ism. Race science stories.
But the point is, as Wynter articulates, we are homo narrans and our interpretation of the empirics of science is shaped by storytelling. We tell stories that construct race/ism. Race science stories.
This perspective underpins Kim TallBear’s essential scholarship on DNA and Native American identity https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/native-american-dna
And Keolu Fox has taken up the question of what it means to turn indigenous people into a site of science, how that reinforces certain narratives while testimonial quieting others https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1915987
My book has a significantly revised Physics of Melanin essay, where I consider race science vs melanin science.
“Shuri is what happens when indigenous intellectual curiosity is not stifled. America is what happens when it is.”
You can preorder here: https://www.boldtypebooks.com/titles/chanda-prescod-weinstein/the-disordered-cosmos/9781541724709/
“Shuri is what happens when indigenous intellectual curiosity is not stifled. America is what happens when it is.”
You can preorder here: https://www.boldtypebooks.com/titles/chanda-prescod-weinstein/the-disordered-cosmos/9781541724709/
And there’s lots of great scholarship that I didn’t cite here! But the point is, if you’re talking about Blackness or some other racial identity, unpack your beliefs about the role biology plays
Think like 5 million times before you reference “phenotype” as an objective feature or essentially biological phenomenon that characterizes a group of people. 5 million times, please.
Oh my god speaking of race science, here’s some new race science from THIS WEEK that argues Black people are getting COVID more because of our genes https://twitter.com/jama_current/status/1304102350857154567
This article is basically like “your genes are an internal phenotype” literally in violation of everything science knows about DNA and its relationship to race (there isn’t much of one really)
