I just saw online a news story from the New York Daily News that said 99% of students handcuffed by the NYPD in public schools in 2016 were black or Hispanic. We wouldn't have that report if we didn't have a notion of race and we wouldn't know about such a wild disparity like that, right? So that's right. And it might point the way for you to address that problem, you know, or at least some important part of it. But one thing I've come to is that it seems to me that a lot of those scientists were asking the wrong questions. Because science inevitably is being deployed in some kind of political arrangement.
Scientists weren’t the first to divide humanity along racial – and and racist – lines. But for hundreds of years, racial scientists claimed to provide proof for those racist hierarchies – and some still do.
Resources for this episode:
Fatal Invention, by Dorothy Roberts
The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter