Prior to beginning work on this discussion, read Chapters 1 and 2 from your textbook and review the following resources:

•  The Story of Race: A History (Links to an external site.)
• RACE – The Power of an Illusion (Links to an external site.)
• To Bring a Divided Country Together, Start With a Little Spit (Links to an external site.)
• Race ≠ DNA: If Race is a Social Construct, What’s Up With DNA Ancestry Testing? (Links to an external site.)

This discussion will help you think about race and ethnicity as socially constructed concepts. Rather than being rooted in any major biological differences, race and ethnicity are systems of thought and human behavior constructed within specific social contexts. Therefore, race and ethnicity are not directly based on nature or biology but instead result from social ideas and practices. In other words, racial and ethnic categories exist because people believe they are real and important. Furthermore, certain groups have historically decided who belongs to a given racial group, as well as the characteristics and values attributed to these groups.

Today as home DNA tests are illuminating people’s genetic diversity, long-held ideas about racial and ethnic groups are being challenged. In your initial post, please address the following:

• Watch the video The Story of Race: A History (Links to an external site.) or review the web page RACE – The Power of an Illusion (Links to an external site.). Explain the difference between race and ethnicity. What do sociologists mean when they say that race and ethnicity are socially constructed?
• During the Spanish colonization of the Americas, how was race socially constructed? How did colonizers benefit from how they constructed race?
• According to the article Race ≠ DNA: If Race is a Social Construct, What’s Up With DNA Ancestry Testing? (Links to an external site.)what makes race a socially defined identity rather than a biologically defined one? Does race matter if it is not a biological concept? Provide an example to support your answer of why race does or does not matter if it is not a biological concept.
• Home genetic (DNA) testing has become a multibillion-dollar industry and millions of people globally have taken these home tests to uncover their genetic stories. According to the resources you reviewed, how do DNA test results shape people’s perceptions of race and ethnicity? Why are some people resistant to their test results?
• According to the article To Bring a Divided Country Together, Start With a Little Spit (Links to an external site.) how might taking a home DNA test help bridge the deep racial and ethnic divisions in our society? Explain why you agree or disagree with this.

Your initial post should be at least 650 words in length. Support your claims with examples from required material and/or other scholarly resources and properly cite any references. Be sure to review the list of recommended resources for additional assistance.

To bring a divided country together, start with a little spit

Susan Svrluga

Students in Anita Foeman’s class at West Chester University prepare samples for DNA testing. (Melissa Rudolph)

One said her dad cheered when she told him she has Zulu roots. A girl with curly red hair said her family always gathers around a Nativity scene on Christmas Eve and sings carols over the baby Jesus, and this year, after learning that she’s 1 percent Jewish, she said: “We’re going to sing the dreidel song!”

When a white student said that 1 percent of his ancestry was African, two black students sitting next to him gave him a fist bump and said: “Yes! Brother.”

‘I honestly thought of myself as simply American’: DNA testing shocks college students

“Some people have never had a happy conversation about race,” Foeman said. But in her class at West Chester University, there’s laughter. Eagerness. And easy connections where there might have been chasms. “Our differences are fascinating,” she said.

At a time when tensions over race and politics are so raw, the stakes, Foeman said, seem particularly high. Her students have been talking all fall about riots, building walls, terrorist attacks, immigration, the election. “You can feel it buzzing around the halls like electricity,” Foeman said.

Asking people to take DNA tests — an idea that has spread to a campuswide effort at this public university — grew out of consulting work Foeman does in race mediation. Instead of a confrontational approach, trying to provoke people into recognizing their own biases, she wanted something that would pull people together, or at least give them a neutral place from which to start to talk. And with racial divides so stark, she wanted to add some nuance and depth.

She wondered: What if people started finding out things they didn’t know about themselves?

So she begins with a short survey asking people their race and what they know about their ancestry. They spit into a vial. Several weeks later, they get an email with an estimate of their ethnic makeup, a color-coded map of their past.

That leads to questions, stories and curiosity. It is a welcome reset from awkwardness, defensiveness, suspicion. Now that the DNA tests are cheaper, Foeman is able to ask all the students in her honors class — almost all of them freshmen just getting to know or redefine themselves — to take the test.

There’s a broad range of people at this state school in Pennsylvania: There are students whose parents are college professors and those who are coal miners. There are students from abroad, from inner cities, and from parts of the state so rural that hunting helps put dinner on the table. There are transgender students, students who reject gender entirely, Bernie Sanders voters, Donald Trump voters, black people who have heard racial slurs, a biracial student who was told by a stranger last month to “go back to Mexico” and one who, growing up in a neighborhood where most people are black, was bullied because he is white. (“Who advocates for him?” Foeman asked. “The election and the protests have pushed that conversation forward.”)

Foeman, who is African American — and genetically more than one-quarter European, as she now knows — would like to test as many people as she can. It’s a way to study everything from medicine to history. Most of all, she’d like to get everyone talking.

She has found people willing, even eager, to take part, with more than 1,500 on campus volunteering.

“I think people want this,” she said. “That surprises me — in a good way.”

“When I opened my results, the first thing that greeted me was 6 percent African,” said a student with light skin in the back of the classroom, smacking herself in the forehead, mouth open wide, to recreate her reaction the night before: “Whaaaaat?”

“I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised,” she added. “I know a lot of African American people have some white DNA, so I shouldn’t be surprised there’s some African in me.”

Another student said when she called her parents to tell them she was 75 percent Irish and 10 percent Scandinavian, “My mom started cheering through the phone,” she said. “I was like, ‘Why are you cheering?’”

“It’s interesting the ones you cheer for and the ones you go, ‘Ehhhhhhh,’” Foeman said. “There are ones you lean into.”

That’s how family histories get told, and identities defined, she says. Some things are exaggerated, some covered up, or forgotten. “There are all kinds of secrets in families.”

A student with bright red hair sent her mother a screen shot of her results, telling her: “‘We’re not Irish at all.’ Her first response was: ‘You must have the wrong data.’”

And then: “‘Don’t tell your grandfather. It might kill him.’”

Foeman has seen people drop out of the project after getting their results, including three people who identified as African American who were upset to find out how much European ancestry they had. Some people refuse to take the test. One woman of Chinese descent told Foeman, “It’s okay for you — you already know you’re mixed up. I don’t want to find out I’m not pure.”

And some people resist some of the findings, like the student who insisted he just tans easily.

Statistically, Foeman and her colleague Bessie Lawton have found people overestimate their European heritage and whiteness, and underestimate ancestry from other regions. Half the people think their families will respond positively to results before they take the test. Afterward, fewer than 1 in 10 think so.

“People don’t realize they think this stuff,” Foeman said. “They would say they have no prejudices. They just get quiet.”

In class, there were a few quiet moments. But mostly people were rushing to talk — to tell about the great-grandfather who was a Portuguese pirate, the grandfather who was a Black Panther, the grandmother who doesn’t like black people, the great-grandmother whose skin is so very much lighter than her siblings and everyone will be very angry if anyone asks why that is. The grandmother who, on her deathbed at 99, insisted that the family’s roots went back to William the Conqueror, though no one thought the family was of British descent at all. (That student’s test results indicated they were, in fact, British. “Even up to the end, you gave Grandma no respect!” Foeman teased.)

Emma Krentler, who has pale skin and brown hair, told the class she knew of Italian and German ancestors and expected some kind of a split between the two. Instead, she found a much more intricate tapestry: 2 percent North African, 13 percent west Asian, 2 percent Jewish. And when she saw “Middle Eastern — I was like, ‘What? What?’ It was complete and utter surprise.”

“Who are these people?!” Foeman laughed with her.

Strummer Steele said the results indicated an Arab Jewish identity and said in these times, neither of those is a safe thing to point out: “There were swastikas painted in Philly yesterday.”

After the election, Foeman said, “People on all sides are smarting. How do we start to approach each other again?”

Several students said they thought genetic testing could help. Amari Gilmore, who is African American, mentioned the historical labeling of people as black if they had even one black ancestor. Cassandra Carabello, who identifies as Hispanic, said her results indicated she was almost one-fifth African. “That would change everything,” she said. “Black lives matter?”

“If everyone had the opportunity to take this test, it would just bring us closer together,” Carabello said. “I’m 7 percent Irish. Now I feel connected to that in some way.” She’s 41 percent Native American. For every race, she now feels, viscerally, “We have something in common.”

Lawton said the results show what researchers already know, that people are 99.9 percent the same in terms of DNA. “The only part that makes us look different is 0.1 percent,” she said.

James Devor, who voted for Trump, said people talk about politics in class in ways they don’t elsewhere on campus. One student told the class about how she started to tell a group of friends she’s Republican and they walked away, furious with her. The class listened. People talked about being scared about deportations, and the class listened. A black student told how she was saddened by results that evoked some of the horrors of slavery, and the class listened.

The DNA test “helps us understand we’re not all from one special place, which is really peculiar to America,” Devor said. “Because we’re all from different areas, with different ideas that come with that ethnic culture. What makes America great is we have all those cultures combined.”

PBS

PBS.org

To bring a divided country together, start with a little spit

Students in Anita Foeman’s class at West Chester University prepare samples for DNA testing. (Melissa Rudolph)

By 

Susan Svrluga 

Reporter

Dec. 24, 2016 at 2:26 p.m. EST

Anita Foeman’s students had just gotten the results from their genetic tests, and they couldn’t wait to talk.

One said her dad cheered when she told him she has Zulu roots. A girl with curly red hair said her family always gathers around a Nativity scene on Christmas Eve and sings carols over the baby Jesus, and this year, after learning that she’s 1 percent Jewish, she said: “We’re going to sing the dreidel song!”

When a white student said that 1 percent of his ancestry was African, two black students sitting next to him gave him a fist bump and said: “Yes! Brother.”

‘I honestly thought of myself as simply American’: DNA testing shocks college students

“Some people have never had a happy conversation about race,” Foeman said. But in her class at West Chester University, there’s laughter. Eagerness. And easy connections where there might have been chasms. “Our differences are fascinating,” she said.

AD

At a time when tensions over race and politics are so raw, the stakes, Foeman said, seem particularly high. Her students have been talking all fall about riots, building walls, terrorist attacks, immigration, the election. “You can feel it buzzing around the halls like electricity,” Foeman said.

Asking people to take DNA tests — an idea that has spread to a campuswide effort at this public university — grew out of consulting work Foeman does in race mediation. Instead of a confrontational approach, trying to provoke people into recognizing their own biases, she wanted something that would pull people together, or at least give them a neutral place from which to start to talk. And with racial divides so stark, she wanted to add some nuance and depth.

She wondered: What if people started finding out things they didn’t know about themselves?

AD

So she begins with a short survey asking people their race and what they know about their ancestry. They spit into a vial. Several weeks later, they get an email with an estimate of their ethnic makeup, a color-coded map of their past.

That leads to questions, stories and curiosity. It is a welcome reset from awkwardness, defensiveness, suspicion. Now that the DNA tests are cheaper, Foeman is able to ask all the students in her honors class — almost all of them freshmen just getting to know or redefine themselves — to take the test.

How DNA testing for your ancestry works

University of British Columbia professor Wendy Roth explains genetic ancestry tests and how these tests influence how people understand race. (YouTube/Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies)

There’s a broad range of people at this state school in Pennsylvania: There are students whose parents are college professors and those who are coal miners. There are students from abroad, from inner cities, and from parts of the state so rural that hunting helps put dinner on the table. There are transgender students, students who reject gender entirely, Bernie Sanders voters, Donald Trump voters, black people who have heard racial slurs, a biracial student who was told by a stranger last month to “go back to Mexico” and one who, growing up in a neighborhood where most people are black, was bullied because he is white. (“Who advocates for him?” Foeman asked. “The election and the protests have pushed that conversation forward.”)

AD

Foeman, who is African American — and genetically more than one-quarter European, as she now knows — would like to test as many people as she can. It’s a way to study everything from medicine to history. Most of all, she’d like to get everyone talking.

She has found people willing, even eager, to take part, with more than 1,500 on campus volunteering.

“I think people want this,” she said. “That surprises me — in a good way.”

Anita Foeman explains to her class at West Chester University just how much saliva is needed for a DNA test. (Melissa Rudolph)

“When I opened my results, the first thing that greeted me was 6 percent African,” said a student with light skin in the back of the classroom, smacking herself in the forehead, mouth open wide, to recreate her reaction the night before: “Whaaaaat?”

AD

“I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised,” she added. “I know a lot of African American people have some white DNA, so I shouldn’t be surprised there’s some African in me.”

Another student said when she called her parents to tell them she was 75 percent Irish and 10 percent Scandinavian, “My mom started cheering through the phone,” she said. “I was like, ‘Why are you cheering?’”

“It’s interesting the ones you cheer for and the ones you go, ‘Ehhhhhhh,’” Foeman said. “There are ones you lean into.”

That’s how family histories get told, and identities defined, she says. Some things are exaggerated, some covered up, or forgotten. “There are all kinds of secrets in families.”

AD

A student with bright red hair sent her mother a screen shot of her results, telling her: “‘We’re not Irish at all.’ Her first response was: ‘You must have the wrong data.’”

And then: “‘Don’t tell your grandfather. It might kill him.’”

Foeman has seen people drop out of the project after getting their results, including three people who identified as African American who were upset to find out how much European ancestry they had. Some people refuse to take the test. One woman of Chinese descent told Foeman, “It’s okay for you — you already know you’re mixed up. I don’t want to find out I’m not pure.”

And some people resist some of the findings, like the student who insisted he just tans easily.

AD

Statistically, Foeman and her colleague Bessie Lawton have found people overestimate their European heritage and whiteness, and underestimate ancestry from other regions. Half the people think their families will respond positively to results before they take the test. Afterward, fewer than 1 in 10 think so.

“People don’t realize they think this stuff,” Foeman said. “They would say they have no prejudices. They just get quiet.”

In class, there were a few quiet moments. But mostly people were rushing to talk — to tell about the great-grandfather who was a Portuguese pirate, the grandfather who was a Black Panther, the grandmother who doesn’t like black people, the great-grandmother whose skin is so very much lighter than her siblings and everyone will be very angry if anyone asks why that is. The grandmother who, on her deathbed at 99, insisted that the family’s roots went back to William the Conqueror, though no one thought the family was of British descent at all. (That student’s test results indicated they were, in fact, British. “Even up to the end, you gave Grandma no respect!” Foeman teased.)

AD

Emma Krentler, who has pale skin and brown hair, told the class she knew of Italian and German ancestors and expected some kind of a split between the two. Instead, she found a much more intricate tapestry: 2 percent North African, 13 percent west Asian, 2 percent Jewish. And when she saw “Middle Eastern — I was like, ‘What? What?’ It was complete and utter surprise.”

“Who are these people?!” Foeman laughed with her.

West Chester University student Emma Krentler. (Melissa Rudolph)

Strummer Steele said the results indicated an Arab Jewish identity and said in these times, neither of those is a safe thing to point out: “There were swastikas painted in Philly yesterday.”

After the election, Foeman said, “People on all sides are smarting. How do we start to approach each other again?”

AD

Several students said they thought genetic testing could help. Amari Gilmore, who is African American, mentioned the historical labeling of people as black if they had even one black ancestor. Cassandra Carabello, who identifies as Hispanic, said her results indicated she was almost one-fifth African. “That would change everything,” she said. “Black lives matter?”

“If everyone had the opportunity to take this test, it would just bring us closer together,” Carabello said. “I’m 7 percent Irish. Now I feel connected to that in some way.” She’s 41 percent Native American. For every race, she now feels, viscerally, “We have something in common.”

Lawton said the results show what researchers already know, that people are 99.9 percent the same in terms of DNA. “The only part that makes us look different is 0.1 percent,” she said.

James Devor, who voted for Trump, said people talk about politics in class in ways they don’t elsewhere on campus. One student told the class about how she started to tell a group of friends she’s Republican and they walked away, furious with her. The class listened. People talked about being scared about deportations, and the class listened. A black student told how she was saddened by results that evoked some of the horrors of slavery, and the class listened.

The DNA test “helps us understand we’re not all from one special place, which is really peculiar to America,” Devor said. “Because we’re all from different areas, with different ideas that come with that ethnic culture. What makes America great is we have all those cultures combined.”

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Race ≠ DNA

If race is a social construct, what’s up with DNA ancestry testing?

Biological race has been defined by combinations of physical features, geographic ancestry, frequencies of genes (alleles) and evolutionary lineages. Biological races exist within some species. This is why we know they do not exist within our species, modern humans.

Socially defined race has been defined by an arbitrarily organized combination of physical traits, geographic ancestry, language, religion and a variety of other cultural features. Social definitions of race differ depending on context and always operate in the service of social-dominance hierarchies. 

The modern consensus of evolutionary biologists is that our species does not have enough genetic variability among its populations to justify either the identification of geographically based races or of evolutionarily distinct lineages. This is because we are a relatively young species (150,000–200,000 years old) that has always maintained significant amounts of gene flow between its major population centers (or regional clusters of inhabitants). Indeed, all modern humans living today are descended from people who once lived in East Africa. (The oldest modern human fossils come from Omo Kibish in Ethiopia.) Humans did not begin to populate the rest of the world until about 60,000 years ago. Some of the first recorded civilizations were located in Ethiopia (prior to 3,000 B.C.E.) and then moved up the Blue Nile to modern-day Egypt. Thus many of the biological traits not found in sub-Saharan Africans are relatively new; fair skin and the blue-eye allele are—at most—6,000 years old. Finally this also means that when most people think of biological ancestry, they are really envisioning recent ancestry relative to our species’ existence (within the last 50,000 years or so).

This is where our understanding often gets fouled up. How is it possible that geographically based genetic and physical variation can tell you something about an individual’s recent biological ancestry, and yet that variation is not useful in identifying an individual’s biological race? Isn’t it true that Norwegians have fair complexions and Nigerians are dark?

It is true that all modern human populations have genetic differences that reflect adaptation to the environments their “recent” ancestors inhabited. There are also genetic changes that resulted from simple chance events. Have you ever heard the term “genetic drift”? This refers to chance events that alter gene frequencies in populations. This happened when human groups migrated out of Africa at different times and in different directions. Members of a given group carried a unique subset of all human genetic variation with them. For all these reasons, there is no single physical trait or gene that can be used to unambiguously assign people to racial groups. Here’s an example: The sickle cell allele is found in high frequency wherever malaria is found, including West Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the Mediterranean Basin and in India. It is not found among Kenyans whose ancestry is from high-altitude regions of that country. Therefore the sickle cell gene can’t be used to define races.

Another relevant example is skin color. Skin color variation is associated with solar intensity, and thus all populations with tropical ancestry have darker skin than those whose recent ancestry is from the temperate and arctic zones. Solomon Islanders, for example, have physical traits very similar to sub-Saharan Africans, yet these Pacific Islanders are much further apart on overall gene frequency (the percentage of genes of a given type) from sub-Saharan Africans than from Europeans. A less visible evolutionary trait is the ability to tolerate milk beyond the age of weaning, which evolved both in Europeans and in some Africans (Masai tribe) due to the domestication of cattle. It stands to follow that if we attempt to infer relatedness between human groups based only on physical traits like dark skin and milk tolerance, we consistently incorrectly assign groups of people together.

Physical factors fail to correctly cluster humans, and thus cannot be used to assign people to racial groups—a fact scientists have known since the 1940s!

Yet today, most Americans still utilize physical features to judge the racial alignment of individuals. This mistake is understandable in the context of American history, since physical features were a reliable indicator of ancestry for much of the nation’s history. Western Europeans (mainly from England) founded this country. They invaded the territory of the American Indians (whose recent biological descent was from Central and Northeast Asia), and then captured, transported and enslaved people from West and Central Africa. This meant that the original inhabitants of our country were drawn from geographically disparate portions of the human genetic spectrum. However, soon after these populations were brought together they began to amalgamate (sometimes willingly, sometimes by force). Soon physical appearance was no longer a reliable determinate of ancestry.

Genetics of race and ancestry

We’ve determined that “biological races” in the human species do not exist. They cannot be determined by either physical or genetic measures; what we think of as “races” are socially assigned sets of characteristics that change depending on context. This does not mean that there is not geographically based genetic variation found in our species. It simply means that this variation is not sufficient to describe biological races within the species. How then is the concept of ancestry different from that of race? Understanding the difference requires understanding these two definitions:

• Biological/genetic ancestry is the proportion of recent ancestry displayed in an individual via genetic material inherited from one’s ancestral geographic origins.
• Social/cultural ancestry refers to the origin of attitudes, beliefs and behaviors displayed by an individual.

To understand biological/genetic ancestry you must recognize that the number of biological ancestors you have doubles each generation into the past and rapidly becomes a very large number. Every living person has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. A standard calculation of a human generation is 30 years. If your family arrived in North America at the time of the Jamestown landing of Africans or the arrival of the Mayflower, that means your ancestors have been on this continent for 13 generations. This also means you contain—from that time to now—the genetic material from as many as 8,192 individuals! And that estimate doesn’t even begin to touch the number of ancestors who came before your genes arrived in North America.

Although it is not possible to determine someone’s socially defined race by examining their DNA, it is possible to estimate the continental origin of different segments of an individual’s DNA. Remember that all of us have deep ancestry in East Africa; the proportion of our variable DNA that falls into that category is about 85 percent. This means that about 15 percent of our “recent” DNA could potentially be differentiated by continent or region within a continent. No single genetic marker is going to be a reliable estimate of ancestry, so statistical methods, such as maximum likelihood, are used to make estimates of a person’s ancestry.

Physical factors fail to correctly cluster humans, and thus cannot be used to assign people to racial groups—a fact scientists have known since the 1940s!

Ironically, ancestry studies have revealed a great deal about the history of American racial subordination. We know from ancestry genetic studies, for example, that the flow of European genes into African Americans occurred mainly during slavery, primarily through European men forcibly impregnating enslaved African women. This is because the genetic code on the Y chromosome is inherited intact from father to son. Numerous ancestry studies have found large numbers of “European Ys” circulating in the African-American and other formerly enslaved communities, but not vice versa.

Finally, there has been much interest in using ancestry testing to try to reconstruct lost identities. This was part of the motivation behind the very successful PBS series African American Lives and Finding Your Roots, conceived of and hosted by Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University. DNA ancestry testing has some ability to achieve that goal, so long as one is cognizant of the limitations of the methods, specifically the population assumptions underlying them.

However, it is also important to realize that our genetic composition is not ultimately the determinate of variations in our complex behavior! The behavioral repertoire of anatomically modern humans was already in place before anyone left Africa. Thus, the variations we see in the manifestation of these behaviors are mainly driven by cultural evolution. Cultural evolution is the transmission of ideas across groups of varying degrees of genetic relatedness. Thus, each person’s social and cultural identity is contributed to by ancestors from all over the world.

So, why should we teach about human genetic variation and the difference between socially constructed race, biological race and ancestry? Everything we know about our genetics has proven that we are far more alike than we are different. If more people understood that, it would be easier to debunk the myth that people of a certain race are “naturally” one way or another. And it would be easier to teach and live tolerance.

How did we get here?

How is it that our collective understanding of race is so flawed and incomplete?

Our ignorance surrounding the meaning of socially defined race, biological race and ancestry is not accidental. Like many misconceptions, it results from a perfect storm of incompetence, indifference, denial and design. This perfect storm affects our K-12 and university education systems and—to some extent—originates from them as well. This is not surprising considering that our education system evolved alongside other social, legal and economic systems designed to privilege European Americans.

One factor that contributes to our confusion is that the preconditions necessary to design and teach a curriculum that would help our students understand the biological basis of physical human variation (and its lack of concordance with biological races) would be based in evolutionary science. In many areas of the country administrators and teachers fear the topic of evolution and are often inadequately prepared to teach it.

Another factor that interferes with our understanding is the manner in which unnamed and unaddressed racial bias disrupts serious and factual discourse concerning the history of racial injustice in the United States. Implicit bias—as opposed to overtly aggressive, hateful racism—is a form of prejudice that characterizes the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of one racial group toward another. It manifests itself in several ways, including bias and prejudices in many European Americans toward African Americans, viewing them as aggressive, impulsive and lazy.

These prejudices have real consequences for socially subordinated racial minorities. For example, African-American children are far more likely to be seen as adults in criminal justice proceedings. As a result, African-American children are 18 times more likely than European-American children to be sentenced as adults, and represent 58 percent of children sentenced to adult facilities. European-Americans police officers are also far more likely to misjudge the age of African-American adolescents. This type of prejudice was largely speculated to be a factor in the shootings of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin.

Implicit bias is supported by faulty science manufactured and reproduced to maintain a racially defined social order. Without a robust national dialogue about the realities of aversive racism, we will not move past it. And a robust dialogue cannot happen as long as we labor under false beliefs about fundamental biological divisions defined by skin tone.

Put this story into action!

History reveals many instances in which institutional racism influenced science and vice versa. Learn how one physician’s theories—which we now know to be deeply flawed—were used to justify chattel slavery.

The Social Construction of Racial and Ethnic Groups

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