We Need a New Language for Talking About Race
Subject
Race; African Americans; Biological Records
Description
The other day, while teaching a lecture class, one of us mentioned in passing that the average African American, according to a 2014 paper, is about 24 percent European and less than 1 percent Native American. A student responded that these percentages were impossible to measure, since “race is a social construction.” Given our country’s history of scientific racism — and all of the horrible crimes and abuses that African Americans have been subjected to in the name of science — the fact that race is a social invention and not a biological reality cannot be repeated too much. However, while race is socially constructed, genetic mutations — biological records of ancestry — are not, and the distinction is a crucial one.
Creator
By Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran
Source
Publisher
nytimes.com
File
