How We Communicate About Race Matters Department of Communication Colloquium Series UNC Greensboro N

1
How We Communicate About Race Matters!Department
of Communication Colloquium SeriesUNC Greensboro
November 13, 2006

• Dr. Joseph L. Graves, Jr.
• Dean University Studies Professor of Biological
  Sciences,
• North Carolina AT State University.
• Fellow, American Association for the Advancement
  of Science

2
For background information, see

• J.L. Graves, The Emperors New Clothes
  Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium,
  Rutgers University Press, 2001 The Race Myth
  Why We Pretend Race Exists in America, Dutton
  Press, with a new authors preface to the soft
  cover edition, 2005.
• Video resources Race The Power of an Illusion
  (California News Reel), 2003.
• The PBS video, African American Lives, 2006.

3
What do our students think about race?
Table 1. J.L. Graves, Between a rock and a hard
place Teaching the biology of human genetic
variation and the social construction of race,
Race in the College Classroom Pedagogy
Politics, TuSmith Reddy, 2002.
4
Table 2. Fall 2001 Responses to Pre-Test
Questions The maximum number of responses for any
question is 40. Please identify your own race.
How many races can you name?
5
Farleigh Dickinson University Global Challenge
Survey Spring 2005, N 100 students, 50
females 50 males
6
FDU Global Challenge Survey Spring 2005, N
100 students, 50 females 50 males
Data collected by Dawn Koch, Joanne Velvarde,
Chang ShuMing, Akeela Careem
7
(No Transcript)
8
(No Transcript)
9
(No Transcript)
10
NCATSU - Analytical reasoning

• Only 5/60 and 3/60 had taken any formal courses
  in Critical Thinking or Philosophy, but 29/60
  rated themselves as critical thinkers.
• The mean self-rank on mathematics skills was 2.76
  /- 0.67 and for scientific literacy was 2.43 /-
  0.64 on a 4 pt scale (Excellent 4, Good 3, Fair
  2, Poor 1).
• Only 1 student in this survey had less than 3
  years of science/math courses.
• Science courses included ES, Bio, Chem, Physics.
• Math courses included A1, A2, Geo, A3, Pre-Calc,
  Trig.

This result is consistent with other studies
that demonstrate that Americans do not realize
how poorly they are doing in science and
mathematics. In other words, we are in denial!
11
NCATSU Fall 2006

• Analytical Reasoning Pre-Test
• 21. Which of the following is true concerning
  human evolution?
• a. The earliest humans lived at the same time as
  the dinosaurs
• b. Humans evolved over 250,000,000 years ago.
• c. Peking and Neanderthal humans are the
  forerunners of todays modern humans.
• d. Modern humans evolved within the last 250,000
  years and have less genetic variability than one
  tribe of African chimpanzees.

12
NCATSU responses
13
Who deserves the blame for this sad state?

• Graves, J.L. Why we should teach our students
  about race, The Natural Selection newsletter of
  the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, Winter
  2002, and reprinted in Reports of the National
  Center for Science Education, May/June 2002, pp.
  23-26.
• In this article I suggest that our high school
  and university curricula are responsible for the
  vast majority of our students having little to no
  understanding of the concept of race.
• The fault lays with both camps the humanities
  and the sciences, in part because of their
  ongoing lack of dialogue with each other.

14
Sad State II

• In 2004 I participated in a NSF/AAA conference on
  the concept of race. Top scholars were invited
  from the biological and social sciences, as well
  as the humanities. The collapse of meaningful
  discussion at this conference supported my
  claims.
• Geneticists, social scientists, and humanists at
  the conference were talking past each other,
  mainly because they could not grasp how different
  each others definition of race was from each
  other.

15
Common dictionary definitions are severely flawed

• Main Entry 3raceFunction nounEtymology
  Middle French, generation, from Old Italian
  razza1 a breeding stock of animals2 a a
  family, tribe, people, or nation belonging to the
  same stock b a class or kind of people unified
  by shared interests, habits, or characteristics
  a is unclear and b is a
  cultural definition
• 3 a an actually or potentially interbreeding
  group within a species also a taxonomic
  category (as a subspecies) representing such a
  group b BREED c a category of humankind that
  shares certain distinctive physical traitsa c
  are incorrect biologically and b does not apply
  to humans
• 4 obsolete inherited temperament or
  disposition5 distinctive flavor, taste, or
  strength
• Source Merriam Webster On-Line

16
Note on Definitions Biological Race

• morphology (phenotype)
• Geographical location
• Population based (frequency of genes)

Socially Constructed Race Arbitrarily utilizes
aspects of morphology, geography, culture,
language, religion, etc. in the service of
a social dominance hierarchy.
17
Race The Queen of Interdisciplinary concepts.

• Almost everyone (including scholars of race) go
  back and forth between the biological and social
  aspects of race in their daily lives.
• This is partial reason for the absence of a
  consistent language for discussing race.
• For example, who is white and what are
  whiteness studies. This term has little
  meaning in the biological concept of race, but
  profound meaning in the social construction of
  race.

18
The Queen

• For example, a New England Journal of Medicine
  Study (2006) examined the genetic ancestry of
  persons who self-reported themselves as black
  from the city of Cleveland, Ohio.
• This study used Ancestry Informative Markers
  (AIMS) and examined over 1000 individuals.
• However, it found that only 4 of the individuals
  in the sample, that self-reported as black, had
  more than 50 African ancestry. The most common
  percentage observed was between 0 10 African,
  the second most frequent percentage was 70 80.
  

19
The Queen II

• There was also a broad diversity of percentages
  observed in this group from less than 10 through
  to greater than 90.
• Conversely, 93 of those who self-identified as
  white had greater than 50 European ancestry,
  with the most common percentage greater than 90
  European.
• We can explain this disparity in the genetic
  composition of African and European Americans due
  to the legacy of slavery in America, the race
  classification schemes it produced, and the
  Hartmann study.

20
Queen III

• Consider the recent Hartmann study from Am. J.
  Sociology that demonstrates that whites value
  their white identity more than previously
  appreciated, yet conversely they do not
  understand how that contributes to white
  privilege.
• With these data we can better understand the
  cultural practice of hypodescent and its genetic
  consequences.
• Graves, J.L., The Meaning of Race in the African
  American Experience in C. McDaniel and T. Johnson
  (Eds.), The African American Experience in
  Diasporic Perspective, Tapestry Press 2006.

21
Learning Outcomes Things every student should
know about race.

• Race is an interdisciplinary concept and at the
  center of a wide variety of scholarship
  concerning the human condition.
• The vast majority of Americans utilize the
  socially defined concept of race on a daily
  basis.
• The social and biological definitions of race
  differ. When we refer to the biological
  definition of race, neither physical nor genetic
  variation can demonstrate the existence of race
  in modern humans. Cultural definitions of race
  dont fit existing popular schemes either.

22
Things every student should know about race.

• The Biological Race Concept utilizes aspects of
  morphology (physical traits), geographical
  location, or population based measures, (e.g.
  the frequency of genes) to classify subdivisions
  within a given species.
• The Socially Constructed Race Concept arbitrarily
  utilizes aspects of physical features, geography,
  culture, language, or religion in the service of
  maintaining a social dominance hierarchy.

23
Things every student should know about race.

• Due to the fact that membership in socially
  constructed race serves social hierarchy, these
  categories may have biological effects. For
  example, being a socially constructed black
  person in America, can impact both your longevity
  and reproductive opportunities.
• Health disparity is an example of a longevity
  effect, marriage patterns and infant mortality
  are examples of reproductive effects. These
  effects result from environmental not genetic
  differences.

Age-specific mortality of smokers.
24
Things every student should know about race.

• Individuals with ancestries from multiple
  geographic regions of the world, defy socially
  defined racial categories.
• Individuals with ancestries from regions on the
  margin of major continental regions also define
  socially defined racial categories, such as
  Ethiopians, Northern Africans, Middle Easterners,
  or Central Asia.

25
Things every student should know about race.

• Modern humans are remarkably genetically uniform
  compared to similar biological species. This is
  because modern humans are recent productions in
  the history of life.
• Modern humans evolved in a world that featured
  other intelligent hominids. The available
  evidence suggests that our species evolved in
  Africa, and that archaic forms of humans in
  Europe and Asia went extinct.
• African Americans are a population whose genetic
  ancestry includes African, European, and American
  Indian genes to varying degrees. They are also
  characterized by a culture that utilizes elements
  from African, European, and American Indian
  populations.

26
Things every student should know about race.

• Individual identity is complex and all
  individuals have multiple identities.
• Stereotyping results from the elementary logical
  fallacies of composition (individual to group)
  and division (group to individual.)
• Since both biological and social definitions of
  race are commonly used, when writing and speaking
  about race, you should always identify which
  concept you are referring to and consistent
  language should be used. The principal of
  parallelism should be applied.

27
The conversation and the imperative

• In, Between a rock and a hard place, I argued
  that every university should pay careful
  attention to how it addresses the concept of race
  in its curriculum.
• In this regard, the curriculum must be
  intentional, must have clear and well formulated
  learning outcomes and must be made available to
  everyone of your students.
• One of the reasons I became Dean of University
  Studies at NCATSU was to implement this
  curriculum, as part of our over all general
  education core which is organized around
  interdisciplinary scholarship and critical
  thinking.
• University Studies www.ncat.edu/univstud
• I found upon my arrival, that our students are
  actually more confused about racial ideology,
  than the students I taught at Arizona State!

28
Why we have failed to interrogate race properly

• The toolkit was inadequate, in that disciplinary
  methods were applied to explain an
  interdisciplinary phenomenon.
• The social dominance hierarchy had no real
  investment in dismantling one of its most potent
  ideological props.
• For historical reasons, those in opposition to
  the hierarchy, were limited in their
  perspectives. African American Studies, for
  example, is dominated by persons of humanist
  training.

29
Why we failed to interrogate race

• The New Genetics of the African Slave Trade
  discussion group. This group was convened by Drs.
  Henry Louis Gates and Evelyn Hammonds, of the
  W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard this last
  January.
• I just returned from a workshop in Edinburgh,
  Scotland sponsored by the Economic and Social
  Research Council of the UK.
• These were some the highest level discussions of
  race and identity, that have ever been
  enjoined.
• Both meetings joined humanists with molecular,
  population, and evolutionary geneticists!

30
What is to be gained by an interdisciplinary
approach to Race?
31
For example, we can understand how social
dominance has biological effects.
Race/ethnicity, income, and home ownership (NJ,
2003.)
32
We can understand how social hierarchy causes
disease in those who are dominated

• Neuroscience has begun to look at many genetic
  variants between individuals that correlate to
  behavior, such as addiction.
• Cocaine addiction is linked to dopamine
  transporters, genetic variation exists in humans
  at these loci.

33
One type of such harm has been shown
experimentally in other primates

• Social subordinate Macaques were more likely to
  self-administer cocaine (addiction.)
• This was lower in monkeys housed alone or who
  were socially dominant.
• African American college students who reported
  suffering racist harassment were twice as likely
  to use tobacco daily, Bennett et al. 2005, AJPH.

Morgan et. al. Nature Neuroscience, Vol. 5 No.
2, February 2002.
34
We can understand how long-standing injustice
impacts life expectancy

• Studies of malnutrition in rats showed that
  maternal effects on adult health extended over
  several generations.
• We have already seen that differential stress
  exposure plays a role in predisposing some
  African Americans to hypertension.
• Offspring of alcoholic mothers show FA in their
  teeth, FA has been linked to lower IQ in college
  students.

• Numerous studies show that lasting adult
  pathology can result from stress in the maternal
  environment Desai et al. 1995 Hales et al.
  1996 Napoli et al. 1997 Waterland and Garza
  1999 Mustillo, S. et al. 2004 Collins et al.,
  2004.
• Another recent study showed parental exposure to
  racial discrimination had negative impacts on the
  mental health of their pre-school aged children,
  Caughy et al. 2004.

35
Who benefits Critical thinking across the
curriculum.

• The most important skill we can provide our
  students for the 21st century is critical
  thinking Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat.
• Critical thinking is a prerequisite for examining
  social injustice.
• To truly develop this capacity in our students,
  faculty must begin cooperating across
  disciplines, particularly with regard to thorny
  problems such as social dominance.

Graves Laboratory, Summer 2001
36
The discussion must go beyond the academy

• Tony Brown's Journal When We Say Race, Do We
  Mean Culture?
• Dr. Joseph Graves suggests that race does not
  exist.
• PBS - Sun Jan 23 2005 at 230 PM PST - 30 minutes
  
• Participant in PBS Documentary Race The Power
  of an Illusion, Spring 2003, California News Reel
  Producers, http//www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000
  _00-Home.htm

37
End Notes