Lab 025: Skin Deep

Welcome back, everybody. It's semester three.

We have been gone so long, but let me tell you, we have missed you so much, and we have thought of you every step of the way.

Right and you guys have been in our DM saying the same thing. So we're just happy to be back. A lot has happened in the first half of twenty twenty. Six months in twenty twenty is the equivalent of ten years in actual time, So congratulations to all of you for making it this far.

Now that we're back, we're ready to dive right into what has been going on. The main thing that's happening in my life and on the timeline is Black lives matter, Yes, and that's all black lives mattering. And you know, I think a lot of people have been protesting in person. Some people are protesting having digital efforts where they're spreading information or they're donating or raising money or providing supplies

And our backyard is science. So we're pulling it up by the route and examining the long intertwining history of science and racism. I'm TT and I'm Zakijah and from Spotify Studios. This is Dope Labs.

You hit the nail on the hill. You know you said this episode we are going to be looking at the intertwining history of science and racism, and I think we really got to tell people how we got here.

So in twenty twenty, some of the deaths of black people that have made national news. It started with a mod Art who's a black man that was gunned down by two white men while he was out for a run. Breonna Taylor who was shot by police who entered her home at night and it turned out to be the wrong home. Christian Cooper who was confronted by a white woman in Central Park who threatened to call the police

And there are countless other victims who don't get media attention and we may never know their names. So tc. How does this all connect to our backyard science? Why are we focusing on racism and science specifically?

I think for the simple fact that a lot of people don't know it still exists, or know the extent that it even existed in the first place. Because I think a lot of people think that signed is so objective and like it's rooted in fact. So how could racism permeate the scientific community if we're all like holding this this beacon of light up, saying here is our facts and there's nothing else that's influencing it. But that's not true.

Yeah, the thing we know is that scientists are people. Science isn't done in a vacuum, and it's always swayed by the politics of the time. You know, even when we think about this is not just a case for racism, this or this is not just the case for what we consider the interaction between race and science. Even as we think about what is the next foray of science? If you think back to stem cell therapy and then the US government put a clamp on that, right, and

What's the key is saying is we're gonna live real, real close.

That's right.

What we know is is a system is often dictated by its roots. So here we're digging up the soil to see how the theories and actions of the past led to us having tainted fruits today.

So let's get into the recitation.

So what do we know and what do we want to know?

I think we want to all start at the same place about understanding race. Like if you stop and think what are the races?

Also ask yourself how many are there? And do those categories that you think our race encompass everyone? Yeah, the answers probably know.

There are three main points we really want to think about to help us really frame how we're what we know about race, and how we'll use that information moving forward to understand the intertwined nature of race and science over time. So some of you may already know these things and some of you may not. Either way, we're not making any assumptions. First, there's no such thing as biological race. Genetics shows us there are no discrete categories of race.

Right, so there's no single gene that only appears in one quote unquote race that doesn't appear in another quote unquote race. Race is not a biological category. What most of us think as race is actually culture and language, and it's been long proven that biologically there are no distinct quote unquote races as we understand the term now.

The second point is we're all members of the same species. We're all Homo sapiens, and our roots can be traced back to Africa. Those visible differences that you see are due to founder effects, where a small group moves from the larger population and they lose some of that genetic diversity.

And the third thing is that wherever there are multiple groups of people and one group is oppressing another group, there is a system in place so it doesn't necessarily have to be race related. It could be religion, class, politics. And what we find is is that history often repeats itself and racism is one of those systems. And even though we know there is no biological basis, it still affects us because it affects our interactions day to day.

So now that we've all set the playing field here, we're all working with the same set of information, let's jump into what we want to know this episode.

One of the things that I want to know is when did the concept of race and race science first originate?

Whose idea was this? And then I'm wondering, if we know all of these things, like race is a social construct and it's been debunked, why are people still looking for these same types of groupings using these artificial categories. Is it just the guilding of time? Have we all been brainwashed?

And I want to know what are some of the foundational scientific theories in science where race like played a part. Who are some of the major players in science whose work was predicated on race science?

Ooh, you're naming names. One of the classic examples of racism and science is eugenics, and eugenics is a system of ideas and practices aiming to genetically quote unquote purify a population. I want to know who were the early proponents of eugenics and what were their motivations.

I love that question. I also want to know where do we see racism in science today? Is I feel like a lot of people are going to say, oh, that must have been during another time when people, you know, weren't as informed and we didn't have the Internet. But I know for a fact it still exists today, and I want to know where it is.

Just like we look back and shame on eugenics in fifty years, what will we look back on today and say, oh, my gosh, I can't believe that was happening.

Yes, because I think that looking back on myself, I wonder why I tweezed my eyebrows so much.

Those pictures of you and undergrad I understood it. I too tweeze my eyebrows as thin as any.

I had six eyebrow hairs on each side, and I thought I was killing it.

Well, I'm glad they made it back then.

Quarantine they all back.

All the hairs are back, okay. And I think the final question is are we doomed to repeat ourselves over and over. Understanding this, what can the scientific community do to change course?

Let's get into the dissection. This episode, we're talking to Angela Saani, a science journalist who tackles the issue of racism and science, exploring how the two have co mingled over the years.

I'm Angela Sani. I'm a science journalist based in the United Kingdom, and I write books really that look under the skin of science, so exploring the reasons why people study what they do, what research tells us, the impact of funding and bias and politics on science, looking at both gender and more recently race.

So to start the dissection, it's important for us to figure out how and where race science and the concept of race started.

Race, of course, as a word has been around for a very long time. The meaning that it has and the way that we use it now is obviously not the way that people have always used it in history.

In Superior Angela notes early uses of the term race, dating back to the fifteen hundreds, were used to refer to groups that were related, so a family or tribe. It wasn't necessarily tied to physical characteristics, which are literally skin deep.

So the way that we use it now to define races like black, white, brown, or you know these kind of big continental groups is relatively recent and it dates from around the time of the European Enlightenment, when naturalists and thinkers were starting to categorize. This is in Europe. European thinkers were starting to categorize the natural world. They were looking at flora and fauna and drawing up these taxonomies, and they did the same with people.

The Age of Enlightenment in Europe was from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries and it was a time in Europe when a lot of intellectual and philosophical advancements were being made. Modern sociology, politics, and science emerged during this time, and specifically in the scientific field, the biological taxonomy was developed. Taxonomy is the science of naming, defining, and classifying groups of biological organisms on the basis of shared characteristics.

If you have some background in biology, you may remember the taxonomic classifications of genus and species. This is a two name system, so think Homo sapiens for humans. That was ushered in by Carl Linnaeus. It's a well known and recognized system. We still use it today. While I was taught that Linnaeus was the father of taxonomy. I did not learn that he was the pioneer of race

And other scientists built on what Linaea was teaching. And you have to remember that we're talking about way way back in the day, so you couldn't just hop on a flight and check out Asia or check out South America to see what the people were like. Information was being exchanged about people purely on hearsay, and for a lot of scientists of that time, it was a lot of guessing about what people were like in other countries.

So we have these categories that were developed many, many years ago. Since then, we understand that race has no scientific basis. So remember at the top of the episode we talked about that, and the question now is why does race still rule everything around us?

Bream.

The weird thing is that we still live with these categories now, we still use them. We have laid these enormous sets of meaning on top of these very what will always arbitrary categories and given them a power that

Considering all of this, we have to ask, why do people still believe race is a thing even though it was debunked decades ago?

Is it because there was something that was said over and over again for a long time and people just accepted it.

Angela explained to us why it's so difficult for people to change their.

Minds, even though in the last seventy years or so, scientists have shown quite categorically and it's very easy to do this because, like I said, these categories were arbitrary to begin with, so it's not you know, it doesn't take a genius to then unpick the biology and figure out that it's nonsense. That even though scientists have done that, they still have so much power even now because of

There are similar systems that uphold these hierarchies, like there's class in the UK, there's caste in India, and religion well everywhere all over the world.

So now we have an understanding of the earliest iterations of race to classify groups of people and how those classifications upheld the politics or agendas of European men during the Enlightenment age. And we know that this is when Western science, you know, as we know it was born. So you got little baby science in the crib and its favorite plush stuffed toy is racism.

Yes, so race is that little baby lullaby to go to sleep at night.

So considering this scene at the birth of Western science, we asked about some of the foundational scientific theories and where a race might have come into play.

If you take into account the fact that modern day Western science, Enlightenment science was predicated on this belief that there were races number one, which we know now biologically is not the case, and number two that there was a hierarchy between these races that meant that some people were in some ways even less human than others, certainly less intelligent. In the nineteenth century, the idea came along with Darwin that some were even maybe less evolved than others.

And if you're thinking, well, surely they saw the error in their ways, not really.

In the nineteenth century when science became professionalized, these ideas didn't go away. All they did was they became more codified and layers of meaning became built around them.

It was the case then and it's still the case today. Using scientific language to describe something or to validate your idea or belief always makes people take you just a touch more seriously.

Right, Not many people will argue with someone who is purporting information that is quote unquote scientific fact.

Race science at the time lent credibility to these awful, incorrect ideas about superiority. And one of the well known and documented executions of these legitimized sinister ideas is eugenics.

Eugenics really, for me, is the kind of manifestation or almost the technology that comes out of race science, if you want to think of it that way, because it's essentially saying we know that these or we think we know that these differences exist. Now, if some people are inferior, genetically inferior to other people, then what can we do about that? How do we improve the human stock or the quality of the race? And Francis Golton, who was a cousin of Childs Darwin.

Like his actual cousin, not his play cousin, like me as a kia, was.

The man who came up with this idea, among many things. He also coined the term nature versus nurture, which I think is one of the worst races in scientific history, because nature and nurture are not two separate things, they're completely intertwined. Anyway. That aside, he also coined the term eugenics and came up with this principle that people superior people, So the smartest and most beautiful should be allowed to breed more, and those who are inferior should be discouraged

And you have to ask who says the standard, who's considered superior, who's the smartest by what measure? What's beautiful? Right?

Is it big eyes? Is it freckles? Is it long legs? I know what you're thinking, I'm describing my friend as a kia.

Those are moles, not freckles. I'll take it.

But it's all really subjective.

And let's be really clear. These ideas were popular. This wasn't just at the fringe the outsiders thinking oh yes, eugenics is the way to go.

It was completely mainstream on the right, on the left. If anything, Socialists were more excited about it than anyone. Virginia Wolf burned Shore. You know our big kind of intellectual progressive heroes, many of them were eugenesis and very firmly believed in this idea and we're behind it.

And eugenics was not like a few years of bad behavior. It was more like seventy to eighty years. We'll put some resources on our website that can give you the deep history. We could spend an entire episode on this.

Eugenics was first used to create the quote unquote perfect family. This means having families without disabilities or deformities. And the idea was that they would just eliminate these individuals that they deemed unfit again subjective. And those efforts weren't only in Britain. They were quickly adopted by scientists in the United States. Not just ideas but action.

When we talk about eugenics, I think the first things that pop in the folk's mind are Hitler, the Nazi Party, and the Holocaust. But Hitler actually took his cue from American eugenics.

Sterilizations in the US were adopted as policy in many states, and they then became an inspiration for Adolf Hitler.

And this didn't stop in the nineteen thirties. After the war, these scientists just rebranded, you know, like favorite influencers.

All Right, we're gonna take a break, and when we come back, we'll look at racism and science Today. Hey, y'all, it's TZI and I wanted to let you know that I had the pleasure of co hosting Season six of the podcast Dissect with Cole Kushna, and it is out right now. Each season of Dissect examines a single album, forensically dissecting one song per episode. Season six takes on

We're back and we've already looked at racism in the past, but what about racism and science today? We asked our guest expert Angela Sani, what will we look back on in fifty years and say, ugh.

And we're not talking about those Janco genes you were wearing during that emo period of your life in two thousand and two.

I see it woven right through medicine. I mean so many medical studies that take race as a biological variable completely inappropriately. I mean it happens routinely that you know, in my view, I wrote this for a piece for the medical journal Lancet the other week. Medicine is almost keeping race science alive.

And Angela tells us it's not just direct action that's a threat either. It's also people turning a blind eye.

You know, it comes down to what are you willing to excuse? When you're not the victim of somebody else's hatred, then it's quite easy, actually to excuse that kind of behavior. When you are the victim, it's impossible. And I think that's the problem. Science looks the way it does because all the people that excuse that kind of behavior stay and all the people who can't leave, And that's why science looks the way it does.

Yeah, that is so true. There are a lot of people in the scientific community that look like well us.

Yes, the scientific community is not a reflection of the general population.

People are so invested in things being innate, and I think that lets us get comfortable with the systems that exist and continue to marginalize different groups. Are we doomed to repeat ourselves over and over? I really hope not.

It does feel that way, and I certainly feel that way sometimes. I mean, the number of my book came out about a year ago, and the number of times have had to explain from first principles why race is a social construct, even to journal editors and science editors and scientists, again and again and again. And what frustrates me is that this was debunked decades ago. You know, I'm not the first person to come along and say this. I'm maybe the ten thousandth person to come along and

So, speaking of moving forward, what can the scientific community do to break this repetitive cycle.

One, I do think representation matters, just because then you don't get silos of viewpoints, and we know historically that silos of viewpoints lead to mistakes in science. That's how race science emerged in the first place. That's how sexism and science emerged in the first place. The other thing is to break down hierarchies. I think this kind of strict and immense power that people at the top have, and most of these people at the top ten to

This is tough, yeah, I think what's difficult for people to grasp and understand is that this is something that isn't actual science, and grasping the fact that, you know, part of our scientific journey as science was being developed, isn't rooted in something that's objective. It was rooted in something that actually wasn't fact, and to push the agendas of a subset of people who wanted to explain their

And you know, the crazy thing is that it's not just biology. You know, I knew some of these things from my thesis work. You know, I was really heavy into DNA repair I mutagensis, so I already knew like James Watson and what he was saying, But I didn't know it was statistics and comparative anatomy. I didn't know it was behavioral genetics all of these other fields too, And so you can start to see how widespread and

Better, right, And the thing is is that science does not exist in a vacuum. It informs policy and it informs our politics. So if something is being pushed through the scientific community, it will eventually show up in various ways in our laws. And that's a huge impact.

Yeah, we've seen it happen before, So I think we really have a duty now to say this is where I draw the line. This is where we get inequitable health policies right. And I think if there's anything I want folks to take away from this is I want you to think, if I know that race has no biological ground to stand on, then racism is for what?

For what?

You know? Like it only racism only exists because race exists, and the scientific community has supported race. And I think there is time to really make it canon that we know this is not real.

Right, And like Angela Saini was saying, it limits the growth that we can have as a society if we can't get past that first hurdle that race is a social construct. It was something that was created by a group of people to create this system, this structure that made them superior and other people fall below them. If we can't get past that first hurdle, how can we get to the other stuff.

It reminded me and I was looking for the quote just now of this Tony Morrison quote that says the function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, so you spend twenty years proven that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up.

We absolutely see everyone's differences in color and culture and background, and we respect it. But we do know for a fact that race does have an impact on all of us even if it doesn't exist.

Well, I think we've just lived with this idea for so long. It does shape how we live, you know, race. Just because something is a social construct, that doesn't mean it doesn't have a profound effect on your mind and on your body from the second that you're born. It completely defines how society works. In the same way that other social constructs like democracy or capitalism or communism or whatever.

That's it for Lab twenty five, but we have so much more for you to dig into on our website, Dope labspodcast dot com, so head over there.

On our website you can find a cheat sheet for today's lab, along with a ton of other links and resources. In the show notes, it was hard not to get carried away with this one, And.

If you want to stay in the know about what's going on with Me and Zachiah and Dope Labs, don't forget to sign up for our newsletter on the site too Special.

Thanks to our guest expert, Angela Sani Her book is called Superior, The Return of Race Science, and you can find a link to it in our show notes.

If this episode blew your mind, then you've got to get into the book. This was just a taste, a tiny morsel of the full entree that she presents in her books, so make sure you pick that up.

Yes, Also, we love hearing from you. What did you think about today's lab? Do you have ideas for future labs? Call us at two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight and let us know.

You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Labs.

Podcast tt is on Twitter at dr Underscore Tsho.

And you can find Zakiya at z Said.

So follow us on Spotify or wherever else you listen to podcasts. Dope Labs is produced by Jenny radalt Mass of WaveRunner Studios. Mixing and sound design are by Hannes Brown.

Our theme music is by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiura, with additional music by Elijah Lex Harvey. Dope Labs is a production of Spotify and Mega Own Media Group, and it's executive produced by us T T show Dia and Zakiah Wattley. Go go go, Who's next? Who's next?

Did you see the one with the heeltop?

Yes?

Girl, that man came out there in that karate suit. He had the stank face on. You know, he was getting ready to tear it up.

God, it was so good. It's so good. Hip hop Harry, Oh my goodness, hip hop Harry had moves