Racial Science Now
How does new research participate in the differential valuing of human
life? A proliferation of new forms of racial science is
underway in our present moment. In the last few years, a number of
biologists, geneticists, and medical researchers have contested the
view dominant in the second half of the 20th century that race is a
social category with no biological foundation. In particular, genetic
databanking projects and the FDAs approval of BiDil, the first "ethnic"
drug, have produced a wide-ranging debate over the meaning and
significance of racial difference in the life sciences and medicine.
New forms of racial science also appear in popular culture as people
turn to private companies that promise to determine racial mixture or
ancestry on the basis of a mailed-in DNA sample.
As Evelyn Hammonds, a professor of history of science at
Harvard, has observed, the rekindled debate over the scientific
validity of race ultimately has less to do with medicine or genetics
than politics: biomedical research on human variation naturalizes and
is animated by the social order it is made in.
As part of its new design, RaceSci has strengthened its focus
on tracking these developments and their contestation in scientific
publications, new scientific ventures, and the media. By racial science, we do
not mean only those forms of explicit racism found in
science. Rather, we understand racial science to include all forms of
scientific practice that utilize "race" and allied terms (ethnicity,
population, culture etc.) as a central organizing category in the
production of knowledge, including the social sciences