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about this course
Focused principally on the 20th and 21st centuries, this course will study the legacies and implications of the massive migration, forced and otherwise, from the African continent to the Caribbean, Latin America, and North America. Topics will range from the creation of racial categories in the contexts of slavery and colonialism to the making of transnational and transracial families to the recent cultural politics of “blackness” with emphasis on the ways that different kinds of archives produce multiple and often conflicting narratives. Students will produce as well as consume history. In addition to scholarly monographs and articles, course material will include film, sound, and fiction.
I’m very excited to be teaching this course, and looking forward to working with you all semester. Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with the website and read the syllabus. We will use this site extensively for announcements, postings, and virtual conversations. You should feel free to treat it as your own, and post links, images, videos, or anything else of interest to the class.
This week’s readings elicited questions, for me, about science, truth, and where they overlap and diverge. The Leroi and Lewontin texts are at the centre of this discussion, but each of the texts involves themselves to some degree. The inherent “good” of science is that it often brings forth “truths” about its subject, which is Leroi?s approach to the scientific conception of races. In particular, Leroi focusses on the potential good that race as scientific can pose ? promotion of the embrace of racial categories, improvement of race-specific medical care and treatment, and the development of a new reason to protect marginalized people. Leroi mentions, briefly but poignantly, that ?the identification of racial origins is not a search for purity,? and thus the discussion of race as scientific and biological is not harmful. While this is stated as a fact, the reality of the world we live in forces this to truly be a normative statement. This should not be a search for purity, or an attempt to rank, nor should it be harmful, but how plausible is this? This is not to say that if there is a biological aspect of race that we should overlook it, but rather that we need to be far more cautious than Leroi appears to be.
How do you folks feel about Leroi?s arguments in favour of a biological definition of race and what it can do? Personally, if a biological conception of race could improve the state of medical care and treatment, that would be an incredible and desirable change to our medical system. This is, however, a rather large if with the Lewontin and Appiah texts taken into account, which both indicate the limits of the scientific pursuit of race. Most of what biological race tells us is what we can determine with our eyes ? skin colour, hair form, nose/facial features shape, what Du Bois called the ?grosser physical differences.? If these were particularly helpful to medical care, it would be something already deeply entrenched in the medical system.
What about his suggestion of biological race as a new reason to protect and defend marginalized people? I am not entirely certain what it is about this concept that unsettles me. It is not as if we need more reason to avoid prejudice, but an additional reason cannot hurt, right? On the other hand, I feel considerable uneasiness with the idea that we as human beings ought to protect and maintain rare racial stock. If the alternative is letting a group die out, this might be an appealing option, but there is something troubling for me about conceptualizing the preservation of distinct ?races? in this fashion.
But what about you folks? How do you feel about race as biological as opposed to constructed? Is there anything particularly helpful or useful about biological race? What, if anything, can it or does it do to help combat racism or to improve the lives of marginalized people? Or are we just careening down an oft-trodden path of biological differentiation that leads, once again, to the looping conclusion that the degree of biological diversity in human beings is generally consistent across races and places?
The readings for this week discussed about the question of race, from both of the biological, scientific and sociological approaches to decipher the true distinctions between various groups of population from one another. Scholars that preferred the former stance, would argue that the human species are separated by different makeups of genomes, and these differences would distinguish their physical appearances and the diseases that they would be prone to. On the other hand, scholars who stand by the side of the social similarities and differences between us, would argue that the prejudice and cultural values would create the differences between the so called concept of race.
As Armand Marie Leroi had argued that by identifying with race from a scientific perspective, it would enable us to remove the disjunction in which the government and public alike defiantly embrace categories that many, perhaps most, scholars and scientists say do not exist. This meant that people would be less likely to avoid the question of race, and only viewed it as sign of discrimination, but to ignore the health effects and other significant scientific contributions that are related to the concept. In others words, Leroi focuses on the objective reality of racial divisions. As an extension to this argument, Lewontin argued that every population is a different “geographic race” to one another, across time and places, which placed Leroi’s stance into question.
On the other hand, W.E.Du Bois argued from a completely different angle, where he discussed about the building of African American manhood, that consistently struggle to find a breakthrough in order to understand the subtle distinctions that the late nineteenth century scientific discoveries left out. Du Bois made his point using sociohistroical criterions, which led to his belief of that the discovery of the concept of race had led to the numerous problems faced by his race. This included the socially constructed values and prejudices posing against the advancement of African American manhood, and restraining their images to ancient African racial traits.
From these two perspectives, we could really see how the context of the perspective plays a significant role in shaping the conclusions that each scholar arrived at. The concept of race could not be defined along a single set of values or data, but rather in a combination of a variety of different factors. Even in that sense, no one could really declare that they have reached the final conclusion about what race is , since the debates around its existence are still very much present. The central question may not be what defines race, but how does race define our existence, our relationships to one another, and what does it tell us about our past and future.
This week I found myself really struggling to understand the concept of ‘race’. Leroi’s article, “A Family Tree in Every Gene”, stood out to me in particular because of its ideas that contradicted a majority of concepts that I had in the past believed to be truth. Leroi argued that while the term ‘race’ had been previously known to be only a social construct, there was evidence that the expression actually had a biological basis. Adding to this, the author asserted that the concept of ‘race’ is actually needed in our society — and that it is an easy way for us to “speak sensibly” about genetic differences.
This surprised me, and initially I wanted to argue against this definition of race. The ideas behind race cannot be diminished to a term used solely to describe genetics. After all, race is a phenomenon that is experienced — it affects us in our everyday lives, in both the way we see ourselves and in the way we see others.
One thing I found troubling about Leroi’s definition is how it can be used to separate communities as opposed to bring them together. Leroi gave an example describing how an African-American man is more prone to heart disease than the European-American man. Therefore, according to Leroi, conceptualizing the term ‘race’ will be helpful to understand certain illnesses and treatment possibilities. That being said, I couldn’t help but have the feeling that this would give another reason to divide communities. Many people already believe that certain groups are inferior; having genetic and biological proof would only further solidify the negativity between certain communities.
Furthermore, using biology to give people reasons to appreciate ‘obscure and marginalized people’ seems very wrong to me. Yes, we should be protecting those who are marginalized, but we shouldn’t be doing so because their genes are of use to us. Protecting others because of their biology gives me the impression that the individuals themselves are unimportant. Doing so would be effectively demonstrating the point I mentioned earlier — we are separating people based on their genes, giving everyone more reason to see the differences among groups and create a divide. In my opinion, the biological definition of race seems to have a lot of negative repercussions.
Despite all of this, Leroi has a point. Ultimately, when we speak of the term ‘race’, we typically imagine a certain set of physical — and maybe even social —characteristics. These physical characteristics that dominate our perceptions of others are based in biology, although there is no clear division of features between any two races. Perhaps it would make sense to view the concept of race as an idea that has two parts: the biological aspect, and its social consequences (how race is experienced in the everyday life of individuals). And now, I pass on the question to you guys: What do you think is the best definition of ‘race’, in terms of its use in society and in understanding individuals?
These week’s articles provided different definitions and understanding of race. It is roughly divided into two categories: science and social. Scientific race is related to biological and genetic analysis of race. The social realm of race focus more on human value and culture about identification and classification. After reading, I came up question that to what extent that these two categories of race could help us to understanding double consciousness people, such as Africa America people? Du Bois describes this identity as stranger and outcast in recalling his childhood life in US. In Marie Leroi’s view, it is old-fashioned for regarding race as a social concept rather than a scientific one. Racial category related to biological and DNA allow us to make good estimates of the amount of intermixture that has occurred between populations as a result of migrations and conquests. Additionally, racial information can be a useful diagnostic indicator not merely the difference among skin color, nose shape. The recognition of race could improve medical care and affects African-Americans treatment for they poorly respond to some of main drugs. In human value view of race, it is help to reconcile African-American’s conflicting identities of themselves and urge to minimize race distinctions which claim to equality. Du Bois clearly describes their outsider role in US. Although living in US, being both Americans and Blacks, these two identifies bother them for a long time. However, he thinks that these double consciousness provides them a strong destiny of race: urging them bonds together striving for their future- neither assimilation nor separation among hyphenation. He believes that they will merge two identities into one ultimate better one. In order to complete these, education is an important factor in the whole process.
This may not be counted as my response or a blog post, but I found it on the internet and it seemed kind of related to the topic of whole DNA and genetics of races so I’ll post it here. One lady in the video says, “who would be stupid enough to think of such thing as pure race” after she saw her DNA result.
So in a way, using genetics to prove the existence of race may not be so successful after all especially when people nowadays are a mix of many different ethnicity/race/nationality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw7FhU-G1_Q