Race, Racism, and the New Social Science

Recent advances in scientific research have included a renewed interest in biological concepts of race and explanations of racial inequality. The science that emerged from sequencing the human genome has been marked by investigations of race-based genetic difference and the redefinition of race as a genomic category. The genomic era has generated collaborations between biological and social scientists that seek to link social outcomes to genetic traits. Even some researchers who study the impact of social inequality on biological outcomes have explained racial disadvantage in biological terms. And the biological and social scientists developing a new racial science avoid the political implications of their research by distinguishing their objectivity and socially beneficial aims from scientific racism of the past. This lecture will critically examine the new racial science and propose a more just way for social and biological scientists to study race and racism.