46
Patricia Hill Collins
Science, critical race theory and colour-blindness Patricia Hill Collins
When I first read Troy Duster’s groundbreaking monograph Backdoor to Eugenics soon after its initial 1990 release, I suspected that Duster was onto something. In that volume, Duster laid out a critical analysis of race and science whose threads run through the corpus of his scholarship. His theme was simple – don’t assume that racism can be easily excised from Western science. If racism itself is hard wired into the very fabric of US social structure, then neither passing laws nor deconstructing racial narratives in literature, history, and the social sciences was likely, by themselves, to eradicate it. He held similar suspicions about science, one of the most powerful social institutions that legitimated racial inequality. Post-World War II Western science may have rejected its longstanding embrace of eugenics, but could it so easily excise racial thinking from its centre? Duster’s critique was timely and prescient, yet within academia in the early 1990s, arguments such as his found themselves sidetracked by the growing post-structuralist emphasis on narratives of race and racism. Some scholars even went so far as to assume that doing away with biological understandings of race would somehow eliminate racism. Despite the ongoing damage done by police, schools, the shrinking labour market and media stereotypes to poor Black kids (who were angrily rapping about it in hip hop), anti-racist scholarship looked elsewhere, distracted by a new-found interest in topics such as culture, identity and representations. The contemporary turn back toward social structure could not have come at a better time. Lulled by a two-decade long post-racial interlude, many US scholars seem ‘surprised’ at the current resiliency of racism. Despite his title ‘A Post-genomic surprise’, Duster certainly isn’t. His essay continues his sustained focus on the interconnections of race, science and racism by surveying how the themes that he raised early in his career have played out in science, law and medicine. His ability to stay awake at the wheel of steering his arguments through these broad and expansive areas without losing sight of the need to analyse racism is impressive. Importantly, Duster is no longer a solitary voice and has been joined by critical science scholars working within feminist science studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies and similar fields of study.
Hill Collins (Department of Sociology, University of Maryland) (Corresponding author email: [email protected]) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2015 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12117 © London School of Economics and Political Science 2015
British Journal of Sociology 66(1)
Science, critical race theory and colour-blindness 47
Ironically, critical analyses of science remain underemphasized within the field of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Instead, CRT sees science as one site among many, e.g., education, criminal justice, housing, employment, a perspective that routinely overlooks the continuing significance of science. In this context, placing critical analyses of science in dialogue with Critical Race Theory might benefit both areas of inquiry. Duster’s ‘Post-genomic surprise’ (2015) is situated in a thought-provoking theoretical border space, offering suggestions for articulations between both areas. Bringing critical analyses of science in closer alignment with Critical Race Theory might enrich the interpretive frameworks of both areas. Toward this end, here I sketch out several implications of Duster’s arguments. First, Duster’s ‘A Post-genomic surprise’ encourages critical race scholars to examine the slippery logic whereby race, biology, science and racism are conflated and used as equivalent and often interchangeable constructs. Duster’s essay reminds us that we stand at another historic moment when the recursive relationship between race, biology, science and racism is being reconfigured yet again. These four constructs move in tandem, intertwined in a bundle of changing social meanings and practices. I appreciate the precision of Duster’s argument that traces just race, and that examines how race means specific things in science and is used and constructed in particular ways. Because Duster has engaged various aspects of race and biology throughout the corpus of his work, and in this essay, suggests many potentially productive directions for parsing out race and biology, I want to mention the importance of keeping conceptual clarity. Race is not racism – both terms have specific histories that work with particular power configurations. They mean different and specific things. Duster’s essay should be read as a close reading of race, but not of racism. More importantly, Duster’s careful rendition of biology and race breathes fresh air into stale debates about ‘race’ in ways that provide space for analytical work on racism. Outside the confines of CRT circles, the term ‘race’ does much heavy lifting, often serving as proxy for ‘racism’. This is part of the slippery slope of reducing racism to race, a conceptual conflation that hollows out the meaning of race and racism alike. Do we really need the plethora of books and articles with ‘race’ in their titles? How does this avalanche of ‘race’ work advance theoretical arguments about racism? More importantly, what does it suggest about anti-racism? Second, and relatedly, Duster’s analysis provides another venue for examining one of Critical Race Theory’s major insights, namely, the claim that racism and colour-blindness need not be contradictory. This claim suggests institutions that ignore race or where racial discrimination is illegal manage to replicate racial hierarchies that are just as entrenched as those established under slavery, colonialism and apartheid. This claim has catalyzed a cottage industry of race scholarship that aims to explain the paradox that lies at the British Journal of Sociology 66(1)
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2015
48
Patricia Hill Collins
heart of colour-blindness. Colour-blindness, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., means treating people not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. As the hard-fought response to colour-conscious racism, how is it that colour-blindness not only has failed to unsettle racial inequality, but as suggested by CRT scholars, may itself be culpable in upholding it? CRT has done a good job of tracing the logic of colour-blindness almost everywhere, except in science. Science is not absent from critical race studies. The problem as I see it is one of emphasis. CRT seems more predisposed to critique scientific discourse, and not scientific practices, or in Duster’s words, the architecture of knowledge as scientists make it. Yet critiquing scientific narratives seems to be unnecessary because they no longer advance explicitly racist arguments based in biological assumptions. But CRT’s neglect of colour-blindness in science may reflect another assumption – science itself can be seen as a place that is already colour-blind because it rid itself its racist past. Perhaps this is because ‘good’ science is supposed to be objective and politically neutral. Tackling a science that believes it is objective and politically neutral because it also believes it is colour-blind is extremely difficult. How might colourblindness work in settings where, because it is assumed to be present, race is by definition absent, or at least of lesser importance? Here I found Duster’s rendition of the two strategies used within science to navigate with race while trying to navigate around race not only intriguing, but also providing an entre into how a logic of colour-blindness works in science. In the first strategy, the ‘back into’ strategy, race is assumed to be absent until the researcher ‘finds’ it by happenstance. In Duster’s words: A significant wing of the Biological Sciences has found an unusual and effective way around the problem of confronting the matter of ‘race as a biological category’. The strategy is to NOT deal with race in a full-scale case-control design, but to ‘back into’ a clinical study that was never designed to test whether race plays any role, only to discover ex post facto that the race of the clinical population, however defined, played a role in drug efficacy. (Duster 2015: 12) How convenient – not setting out to ‘find’ race, it turns out that race was there all along in the ways that racial populations responded to drugs. With the ‘back into’ strategy, the researcher can claim the high moral ground that he or she has clean hands regarding racism because the study was ostensibly colourblind. The second strategy, the increasingly standard operating procedure of deploying the idea of ‘admixture’, also sheds light on another dimension of colour-blindness. For this construct, the reality of race lies in the capacity of the computer to determine proportional ancestry at the molecular level – an © London School of Economics and Political Science 2015
British Journal of Sociology 66(1)
Science, critical race theory and colour-blindness 49
individual’s or group’s race is determined less by legal, cultural or social customs than by scientifically sanctioned different ancestral mixtures. Here Duster leaves no stone unturned. Recounting his interview with Shriver, a researcher who was central in developing the construct of admixture, Duster peels back the curtain of the racial thinking: Shriver told me that the phenotype of race was too arbitrary and unable to signal or signify the real genetic make-up of the individual. He understood quite correctly that in different societies, and even in different decades in the same society, the definition of races can be fluid and arbitrary . . . new markers would get at the underlying and thus genuine genetic composition of the individual. (Duster 2015: 8) Rather than walking away from this fluidity, proclaiming that race is so socially constructed as to be useless, Shriver approached the ambiguity as a problem to be solved. Stated differently, race is real, but science had been looking in the wrong place for it. Duster takes a hatchet to the second strategy. Tracing how admixture has been uncritically adopted, he points to the irony that the routine practice of treating four continental ancestral populations as the basis of admixture reflects ‘folk’ thinking about race. Stated differently, admixture works if one assumes that four racially pure populations align with Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans. It’s just not enough to say that colour-blind ideology shapes social practices. Duster’s work and that of others that shows how race is being reformulated provides the possibility of massaging colour-blindness in ways that expand its reach beyond attitudes and cultural products (the social construction of whiteness from cultural symbols, for example). Colour-blindness may dovetail with the fragmented, compartmentalized logic of postmodernity that grants special powers to those who can reassemble with special tools what others cannot access. Third, CRT scholars might consider the implications of Duster’s argument for the thesis of a colour-blind scientific racism. Duster does an admirable job of tracing race, but finding ‘race’ does not necessarily mean that there is ‘racism’ in science or that science itself is ‘racist’. In prior periods, scientific collusion with racism was evident: the term ‘scientific racism’ was valid primarily because science was explicitly intertwined with producing ideas about biology and race that legitimated colour-conscious racism. But can the same be said about contemporary science? Is the ‘back into’ strategy a case of a sloppy science practiced by a few individual bad apples? Have scientists who both hold fast to the belief that scientific objectivity and colour-blindness generate a superior science and who uncritically see admixture as legitimate science been duped by global corporations? British Journal of Sociology 66(1)
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2015
50
Patricia Hill Collins
The reality of colour-blind scientific racism cannot be simply asserted, but rather requires sustained investigation. Critical Race Theory may be especially well-positioned to do this kind of synthetic analysis. Duster’s initial claims about science came at a time when CRT scholars joined in efforts to debunk the biological thinking that had long served as a pillar of scientific racism. Anti-racist scholarship contested the connections between race and biology that had formed the bedrock of scientific racism.This was an important victory, but then a curious thing happened – with the biological basis of the concept of race discredited, critical race theorists erroneously concluded that science no longer needed their sustained attention. With the dragon of scientific racism slain, they could move on to other things. And so they did. The outpouring of critical race scholarship that has ignored race and science has been substantial. The contribution of many social institutions to racial hierarchy was widespread and deeply embedded in the historic fabric of Western society. One found racial thinking within the law, housing policies, the media, family practices, i.e., in multiple sites of social organization that collectively produced racial hierarchy. Given the scope of the task of unpacking colour-blind racism, it came as a relief if one could point to one site of racialization and proclaim, ‘done – we killed it’. CRT now has a substantive body of scholarship that traces how racism itself has moved beyond the obvious, explicit codes of colour-conscious organization associated with slavery, colonialism, imperialism and apartheid to a more implicit coded discourse of racial differences that are less often named than implied. Ironically, CRT’s neglect of biology and science means that it can approach questions of race, science and colour-blindness with fresh eyes. With this task in mind, Duster’s work provides a roadmap for new theoretical arguments about colour-blind scientific racism. By providing a template for an archeology of race, science and racism, Duster’s attention to law, medicine and science complements CRT’s efforts. Duster’s work is situated in a useful intersection of discourse and practice – the examples that he has chosen in this article to ground his analysis of the post-genomic emergence of race speak to ideas in context – we see how these ideas work in practice and we also are exposed to the authors of those ideas. This would be the recognizable space for social scientists who study science as a social institution. Duster alludes to the social location of science within the social, political and economic issues of the times. Duster also points to what exactly is needed, methodologically, for considering whether there is a colour-blind scientific racism. Duster is not content to unpack the scientific logic of ‘backing in’ and admixture that provide an end run around direct confrontation with race. He also asks, what about scientific practices? This is exactly the question that Duster raises near the end of ‘A Post-genomic surprise’, where he argues for empirical investigations of the © London School of Economics and Political Science 2015
British Journal of Sociology 66(1)
Science, critical race theory and colour-blindness 51
architecture of thought of the kind done for the ‘back into’ and admixture strategies. Such investigations would shed light not only on how race enters into science but might also yield more detailed views of how colour-blindness works. Duster points us toward researchers who have spent time doing ethnographic work in scientific laboratories, analyzing the frameworks that shape and are replicated within laboratory work, or critiquing the computer-based programs and algorithms that cede human agency to machines in defining the reality of race. Duster’s arguments about race, science and racism have suggestive epistemological implications. This is an important potential space of articulation between Critical Race Studies and Critical Science Studies. The former casts a finely tuned eye on the logic of colour-blindness, the latter on the logic of scientific practice. Duster’s work among others examines how race is being reformulated – this is the architecture of race that Duster aims to study. The idea here is to massage colour-blindness in ways that expand its reach beyond attitudes and cultural products and to see its operation as a logic for scientific practice. Finally, I’d like to see Critical Race Theory become far more vocal not only in understanding the links between colour-blindness and science, but also in changing science itself. I’m not arguing for storming the scientific barricades, and would not try to stop scholars who embrace those strategies. Like mega banks, science is too big to fail, and efforts to occupy science or regulate it that are launched from outside science seem unlikely to prevail. Because the sciences are difficult to enter, those who are already scientific insiders are necessarily positioned to make the kinds of changes that only insiders can bring about. When it comes to changing the configurations of race, science and racism, a robust agenda of intellectual activism that is advanced by scientific insiders who critique science’s epistemological underpinnings may go far. Here science stands apart from other fields of study where CRT has found a more welcoming home. Like law, science has gatekeeping practices to guard entry, specialized languages that enable practitioners to identify each other, and a high status in a society that uses law, science and religion as sites of legitimation for a series of social practices. But there the similarities end. Law has a storied tradition of praxis built into the field. Yet science has no such guarantees. In fact, the commitments to rationality and objectivity, when coupled with the encroachment of proprietary ownership of scientific products, excise this kind of leverage from the scientific fields. Science is serious business, uninfluenced by bias. Science is not a stepchild in the corner that can be safely ignored in favour of attending to other more important social institutions, practices and discourses. Instead, science is more like the elephant in the room of racial inequality, one that appears to be hidden in plain sight, primarily because we British Journal of Sociology 66(1)
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2015
52
Patricia Hill Collins
have socially constructed it away. In this regard, CRT scholars would do well to disbelieve our own fictions. Prematurely taking science off the hook hides its complicity in sustaining racial inequality. Ignoring science also relinquishes its potentially important contributions to challenging racial injustices. As Duster reminds us, what’s different now is less the reality of the connections among race, science and racism, but rather the different climate in which science, law and medicine now operate. Duster’s essay comes at an important juncture for anti-racist scholarship, a place to pause, take stock, and develop analyses that reflect the challenges of our times. (Date accepted: December 2014)
Bibliography Duster, T. 1990[2003] Backdoor to Eugenics, Routledge [Psychology Press]. Duster, T. 2015 ‘A Post-genomic Surprise: The Molecular Reinscription of Race in
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2015
Science, Law and Medicine’, British Journal of Sociology 66(1): 1–27.
British Journal of Sociology 66(1)
Patricia Hill Collins
Science, critical race theory and colour-blindness Patricia Hill Collins
When I first read Troy Duster’s groundbreaking monograph Backdoor to Eugenics soon after its initial 1990 release, I suspected that Duster was onto something. In that volume, Duster laid out a critical analysis of race and science whose threads run through the corpus of his scholarship. His theme was simple – don’t assume that racism can be easily excised from Western science. If racism itself is hard wired into the very fabric of US social structure, then neither passing laws nor deconstructing racial narratives in literature, history, and the social sciences was likely, by themselves, to eradicate it. He held similar suspicions about science, one of the most powerful social institutions that legitimated racial inequality. Post-World War II Western science may have rejected its longstanding embrace of eugenics, but could it so easily excise racial thinking from its centre? Duster’s critique was timely and prescient, yet within academia in the early 1990s, arguments such as his found themselves sidetracked by the growing post-structuralist emphasis on narratives of race and racism. Some scholars even went so far as to assume that doing away with biological understandings of race would somehow eliminate racism. Despite the ongoing damage done by police, schools, the shrinking labour market and media stereotypes to poor Black kids (who were angrily rapping about it in hip hop), anti-racist scholarship looked elsewhere, distracted by a new-found interest in topics such as culture, identity and representations. The contemporary turn back toward social structure could not have come at a better time. Lulled by a two-decade long post-racial interlude, many US scholars seem ‘surprised’ at the current resiliency of racism. Despite his title ‘A Post-genomic surprise’, Duster certainly isn’t. His essay continues his sustained focus on the interconnections of race, science and racism by surveying how the themes that he raised early in his career have played out in science, law and medicine. His ability to stay awake at the wheel of steering his arguments through these broad and expansive areas without losing sight of the need to analyse racism is impressive. Importantly, Duster is no longer a solitary voice and has been joined by critical science scholars working within feminist science studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies and similar fields of study.
Hill Collins (Department of Sociology, University of Maryland) (Corresponding author email: [email protected]) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2015 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12117 © London School of Economics and Political Science 2015
British Journal of Sociology 66(1)
Science, critical race theory and colour-blindness 47
Ironically, critical analyses of science remain underemphasized within the field of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Instead, CRT sees science as one site among many, e.g., education, criminal justice, housing, employment, a perspective that routinely overlooks the continuing significance of science. In this context, placing critical analyses of science in dialogue with Critical Race Theory might benefit both areas of inquiry. Duster’s ‘Post-genomic surprise’ (2015) is situated in a thought-provoking theoretical border space, offering suggestions for articulations between both areas. Bringing critical analyses of science in closer alignment with Critical Race Theory might enrich the interpretive frameworks of both areas. Toward this end, here I sketch out several implications of Duster’s arguments. First, Duster’s ‘A Post-genomic surprise’ encourages critical race scholars to examine the slippery logic whereby race, biology, science and racism are conflated and used as equivalent and often interchangeable constructs. Duster’s essay reminds us that we stand at another historic moment when the recursive relationship between race, biology, science and racism is being reconfigured yet again. These four constructs move in tandem, intertwined in a bundle of changing social meanings and practices. I appreciate the precision of Duster’s argument that traces just race, and that examines how race means specific things in science and is used and constructed in particular ways. Because Duster has engaged various aspects of race and biology throughout the corpus of his work, and in this essay, suggests many potentially productive directions for parsing out race and biology, I want to mention the importance of keeping conceptual clarity. Race is not racism – both terms have specific histories that work with particular power configurations. They mean different and specific things. Duster’s essay should be read as a close reading of race, but not of racism. More importantly, Duster’s careful rendition of biology and race breathes fresh air into stale debates about ‘race’ in ways that provide space for analytical work on racism. Outside the confines of CRT circles, the term ‘race’ does much heavy lifting, often serving as proxy for ‘racism’. This is part of the slippery slope of reducing racism to race, a conceptual conflation that hollows out the meaning of race and racism alike. Do we really need the plethora of books and articles with ‘race’ in their titles? How does this avalanche of ‘race’ work advance theoretical arguments about racism? More importantly, what does it suggest about anti-racism? Second, and relatedly, Duster’s analysis provides another venue for examining one of Critical Race Theory’s major insights, namely, the claim that racism and colour-blindness need not be contradictory. This claim suggests institutions that ignore race or where racial discrimination is illegal manage to replicate racial hierarchies that are just as entrenched as those established under slavery, colonialism and apartheid. This claim has catalyzed a cottage industry of race scholarship that aims to explain the paradox that lies at the British Journal of Sociology 66(1)
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2015
48
Patricia Hill Collins
heart of colour-blindness. Colour-blindness, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., means treating people not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. As the hard-fought response to colour-conscious racism, how is it that colour-blindness not only has failed to unsettle racial inequality, but as suggested by CRT scholars, may itself be culpable in upholding it? CRT has done a good job of tracing the logic of colour-blindness almost everywhere, except in science. Science is not absent from critical race studies. The problem as I see it is one of emphasis. CRT seems more predisposed to critique scientific discourse, and not scientific practices, or in Duster’s words, the architecture of knowledge as scientists make it. Yet critiquing scientific narratives seems to be unnecessary because they no longer advance explicitly racist arguments based in biological assumptions. But CRT’s neglect of colour-blindness in science may reflect another assumption – science itself can be seen as a place that is already colour-blind because it rid itself its racist past. Perhaps this is because ‘good’ science is supposed to be objective and politically neutral. Tackling a science that believes it is objective and politically neutral because it also believes it is colour-blind is extremely difficult. How might colourblindness work in settings where, because it is assumed to be present, race is by definition absent, or at least of lesser importance? Here I found Duster’s rendition of the two strategies used within science to navigate with race while trying to navigate around race not only intriguing, but also providing an entre into how a logic of colour-blindness works in science. In the first strategy, the ‘back into’ strategy, race is assumed to be absent until the researcher ‘finds’ it by happenstance. In Duster’s words: A significant wing of the Biological Sciences has found an unusual and effective way around the problem of confronting the matter of ‘race as a biological category’. The strategy is to NOT deal with race in a full-scale case-control design, but to ‘back into’ a clinical study that was never designed to test whether race plays any role, only to discover ex post facto that the race of the clinical population, however defined, played a role in drug efficacy. (Duster 2015: 12) How convenient – not setting out to ‘find’ race, it turns out that race was there all along in the ways that racial populations responded to drugs. With the ‘back into’ strategy, the researcher can claim the high moral ground that he or she has clean hands regarding racism because the study was ostensibly colourblind. The second strategy, the increasingly standard operating procedure of deploying the idea of ‘admixture’, also sheds light on another dimension of colour-blindness. For this construct, the reality of race lies in the capacity of the computer to determine proportional ancestry at the molecular level – an © London School of Economics and Political Science 2015
British Journal of Sociology 66(1)
Science, critical race theory and colour-blindness 49
individual’s or group’s race is determined less by legal, cultural or social customs than by scientifically sanctioned different ancestral mixtures. Here Duster leaves no stone unturned. Recounting his interview with Shriver, a researcher who was central in developing the construct of admixture, Duster peels back the curtain of the racial thinking: Shriver told me that the phenotype of race was too arbitrary and unable to signal or signify the real genetic make-up of the individual. He understood quite correctly that in different societies, and even in different decades in the same society, the definition of races can be fluid and arbitrary . . . new markers would get at the underlying and thus genuine genetic composition of the individual. (Duster 2015: 8) Rather than walking away from this fluidity, proclaiming that race is so socially constructed as to be useless, Shriver approached the ambiguity as a problem to be solved. Stated differently, race is real, but science had been looking in the wrong place for it. Duster takes a hatchet to the second strategy. Tracing how admixture has been uncritically adopted, he points to the irony that the routine practice of treating four continental ancestral populations as the basis of admixture reflects ‘folk’ thinking about race. Stated differently, admixture works if one assumes that four racially pure populations align with Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans. It’s just not enough to say that colour-blind ideology shapes social practices. Duster’s work and that of others that shows how race is being reformulated provides the possibility of massaging colour-blindness in ways that expand its reach beyond attitudes and cultural products (the social construction of whiteness from cultural symbols, for example). Colour-blindness may dovetail with the fragmented, compartmentalized logic of postmodernity that grants special powers to those who can reassemble with special tools what others cannot access. Third, CRT scholars might consider the implications of Duster’s argument for the thesis of a colour-blind scientific racism. Duster does an admirable job of tracing race, but finding ‘race’ does not necessarily mean that there is ‘racism’ in science or that science itself is ‘racist’. In prior periods, scientific collusion with racism was evident: the term ‘scientific racism’ was valid primarily because science was explicitly intertwined with producing ideas about biology and race that legitimated colour-conscious racism. But can the same be said about contemporary science? Is the ‘back into’ strategy a case of a sloppy science practiced by a few individual bad apples? Have scientists who both hold fast to the belief that scientific objectivity and colour-blindness generate a superior science and who uncritically see admixture as legitimate science been duped by global corporations? British Journal of Sociology 66(1)
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2015
50
Patricia Hill Collins
The reality of colour-blind scientific racism cannot be simply asserted, but rather requires sustained investigation. Critical Race Theory may be especially well-positioned to do this kind of synthetic analysis. Duster’s initial claims about science came at a time when CRT scholars joined in efforts to debunk the biological thinking that had long served as a pillar of scientific racism. Anti-racist scholarship contested the connections between race and biology that had formed the bedrock of scientific racism.This was an important victory, but then a curious thing happened – with the biological basis of the concept of race discredited, critical race theorists erroneously concluded that science no longer needed their sustained attention. With the dragon of scientific racism slain, they could move on to other things. And so they did. The outpouring of critical race scholarship that has ignored race and science has been substantial. The contribution of many social institutions to racial hierarchy was widespread and deeply embedded in the historic fabric of Western society. One found racial thinking within the law, housing policies, the media, family practices, i.e., in multiple sites of social organization that collectively produced racial hierarchy. Given the scope of the task of unpacking colour-blind racism, it came as a relief if one could point to one site of racialization and proclaim, ‘done – we killed it’. CRT now has a substantive body of scholarship that traces how racism itself has moved beyond the obvious, explicit codes of colour-conscious organization associated with slavery, colonialism, imperialism and apartheid to a more implicit coded discourse of racial differences that are less often named than implied. Ironically, CRT’s neglect of biology and science means that it can approach questions of race, science and colour-blindness with fresh eyes. With this task in mind, Duster’s work provides a roadmap for new theoretical arguments about colour-blind scientific racism. By providing a template for an archeology of race, science and racism, Duster’s attention to law, medicine and science complements CRT’s efforts. Duster’s work is situated in a useful intersection of discourse and practice – the examples that he has chosen in this article to ground his analysis of the post-genomic emergence of race speak to ideas in context – we see how these ideas work in practice and we also are exposed to the authors of those ideas. This would be the recognizable space for social scientists who study science as a social institution. Duster alludes to the social location of science within the social, political and economic issues of the times. Duster also points to what exactly is needed, methodologically, for considering whether there is a colour-blind scientific racism. Duster is not content to unpack the scientific logic of ‘backing in’ and admixture that provide an end run around direct confrontation with race. He also asks, what about scientific practices? This is exactly the question that Duster raises near the end of ‘A Post-genomic surprise’, where he argues for empirical investigations of the © London School of Economics and Political Science 2015
British Journal of Sociology 66(1)
Science, critical race theory and colour-blindness 51
architecture of thought of the kind done for the ‘back into’ and admixture strategies. Such investigations would shed light not only on how race enters into science but might also yield more detailed views of how colour-blindness works. Duster points us toward researchers who have spent time doing ethnographic work in scientific laboratories, analyzing the frameworks that shape and are replicated within laboratory work, or critiquing the computer-based programs and algorithms that cede human agency to machines in defining the reality of race. Duster’s arguments about race, science and racism have suggestive epistemological implications. This is an important potential space of articulation between Critical Race Studies and Critical Science Studies. The former casts a finely tuned eye on the logic of colour-blindness, the latter on the logic of scientific practice. Duster’s work among others examines how race is being reformulated – this is the architecture of race that Duster aims to study. The idea here is to massage colour-blindness in ways that expand its reach beyond attitudes and cultural products and to see its operation as a logic for scientific practice. Finally, I’d like to see Critical Race Theory become far more vocal not only in understanding the links between colour-blindness and science, but also in changing science itself. I’m not arguing for storming the scientific barricades, and would not try to stop scholars who embrace those strategies. Like mega banks, science is too big to fail, and efforts to occupy science or regulate it that are launched from outside science seem unlikely to prevail. Because the sciences are difficult to enter, those who are already scientific insiders are necessarily positioned to make the kinds of changes that only insiders can bring about. When it comes to changing the configurations of race, science and racism, a robust agenda of intellectual activism that is advanced by scientific insiders who critique science’s epistemological underpinnings may go far. Here science stands apart from other fields of study where CRT has found a more welcoming home. Like law, science has gatekeeping practices to guard entry, specialized languages that enable practitioners to identify each other, and a high status in a society that uses law, science and religion as sites of legitimation for a series of social practices. But there the similarities end. Law has a storied tradition of praxis built into the field. Yet science has no such guarantees. In fact, the commitments to rationality and objectivity, when coupled with the encroachment of proprietary ownership of scientific products, excise this kind of leverage from the scientific fields. Science is serious business, uninfluenced by bias. Science is not a stepchild in the corner that can be safely ignored in favour of attending to other more important social institutions, practices and discourses. Instead, science is more like the elephant in the room of racial inequality, one that appears to be hidden in plain sight, primarily because we British Journal of Sociology 66(1)
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2015
52
Patricia Hill Collins
have socially constructed it away. In this regard, CRT scholars would do well to disbelieve our own fictions. Prematurely taking science off the hook hides its complicity in sustaining racial inequality. Ignoring science also relinquishes its potentially important contributions to challenging racial injustices. As Duster reminds us, what’s different now is less the reality of the connections among race, science and racism, but rather the different climate in which science, law and medicine now operate. Duster’s essay comes at an important juncture for anti-racist scholarship, a place to pause, take stock, and develop analyses that reflect the challenges of our times. (Date accepted: December 2014)
Bibliography Duster, T. 1990[2003] Backdoor to Eugenics, Routledge [Psychology Press]. Duster, T. 2015 ‘A Post-genomic Surprise: The Molecular Reinscription of Race in
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2015
Science, Law and Medicine’, British Journal of Sociology 66(1): 1–27.
British Journal of Sociology 66(1)
