Gustav Mützel's "Principal Types of Mankind (After Huxley)," 1893
This series of discussions by scholars in the humanities and social sciences explores a variety of issues related to science, race, and racism.
Listen to perspectives on the history of racial science around the world; the intersection of race with issues of class, gender, and scientific investigation; and the ways in which the pseudoscience on race continues on in the current era.
After listening, be sure to explore the "Resources" section with further reading and information for researchers.
- Richard Wetzell provides an analysis of "racial science" in Germany during the early years of the Nazi regime, showing us how medical doctors, physical anthropologists, and human geneticists wielded competing theories of race in order to influence public policy and maintain their professional status.
- Andy Evans discusses the history of racial science in Germany before the Nazi era, describing how Germany's nineteenth-century liberal anthropological tradition transmogrified into a hierarchical and racist "science" in the early part of the twentieth century.
- Stephen Kenny scrutinizes the career of surgeon Rudolph Matas and puts his life and work in the context of slavery, segregation, and racialized medicine in the U.S. South in the 19th and 20th centuries.
- Warwick Anderson discusses his investigations into the development of racial science in the Global South and the fabrication of whiteness as a "strategy of authority."
- Christa Kuljian shares her research on the field of paleoanthropology in South Africa and how ideas about racial hierarchies influenced its founding and development.
- Elise Burton analyzes the development of genetics, racial science, and race concepts in the contemporary Middle East.
- Sadiah Qureshi recounts the history of the exhibition of displayed peoples in nineteenth-century Britain, and how these shows contributed to the formation of anthropology.
- Sebastián Gil-Riaño examines how scientific articulations of human diversity have been used to both legitimize and confront notions of race and racism in the modern world.
- Rana Hogarth talks about how white physicians "medicalized" blackness in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and how African-Americans pushed back against this endeavor.
- John Jackson discusses the legacy of nineteenth-century racial science on twentieth-century scientific investigation, the challenge to racial science made by population genetics and anthropology, and the ways in which the pseudoscience of race continues to inform twenty-first century debates.