Text reads: Brandeis University "Race, Science, and Justice": Professor Dorothy Roberts
[Wangui Muigai]: I'm delighted to see so many of you here at this special event, which is made possible through a generous grant from The HistoryMakers. I and my colleagues in the Department of African and African American Studies are thrilled to welcome Professor Dorothy Roberts to
[Audience Member] Woo!
[Muigai]: Yeah! Professor Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. There she holds several distinguished posts in the Department of Africana Studies and Sociology, and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. At the University of Pennsylvania, she is also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. Professor Roberts received her BA from Yale College and her JD from Harvard Law School. She clerked for the Honorable Constance Baker Motley, the great civil rights litigator and federal judge, and went on to practice law in New York before becoming a law professor and teaching at several of the leading schools in the country.
An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice activist, Professor Roberts has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race and class in American institutions. She is the author of the landmark work, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty, which was first published in 1997. The book documents the sustained and systemic history of regulating black women's bodies and their decisions to bear children. As Brandeis' very own distinguished alumna, Angela Davis, has written about the work, Roberts skillfully insists that the complex issues that define black women's path toward reproductive liberty constitute the precondition for understanding the entire field of women's reproductive rights. Killing the Black Body has been foundational to the reproductive justice movement, and in 2017 was reissued in a special 20th anniversary edition, which many of my students carry around to class.
Professor Roberts has also authored Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, published in 2002, which examines the racial disparities in foster care and calls for transforming the child welfare system in a way that respects the integrity of black families. In 2011, she published Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, offering a provocative analysis of the new biopolitics of race in an age of genomic and personalized medicine. When we add the nine books she's co-edited, the over 100 scholarly articles and essays she has written, what emerges is a scholar who has been a fierce and dedicated leader in envisioning a more equitable society and transforming public approaches to reproductive health, child welfare and bioethics. What is so inspiring is her commitment to having these conversations not only in the academy, but with scientists, activists, teenagers, policy makers and on national media, including her TED Talk titled “The Problem with Race-Based Medicine,” which has been viewed more than a million times. So if you haven't, go to YouTube and check it out.
Through these platforms, Professor Roberts skillfully brings a black feminist jurisprudence to bear on pressing issues in science, race, law and public policy. Her work has been supported by leading institutions, including the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Fulbright Program. She has served on the boards of the Black Women's Health Imperative and the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. In 2015, she received the Solomon Carter Fuller Award from the American Psychiatric Association, an award that honors those who “have made significant impacts for improving the quality of life for black people.” I could go on. To acknowledge all of her awards and accolades would take up the entire length of this talk, but I know you all came to hear her, not me. So with that, it's my pleasure and it's my honor to welcome and introduce Professor Dorothy Roberts.
[Roberts]: Thank you so much for that warm introduction. I'm so proud of you, if I could take a little bit of credit. It's so nice when your former students can then invite you to lectures. It all works out so well in the end, especially when they're so brilliant and writing such important work. Thank you to the Department of African and African American Studies here at Brandeis. It's an honor to be able to help to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the department – congratulations! And thanks also to The HistoryMakers who I just learned helped to fund this lecture. And the director and founder of it, Julieanna Richardson, was a classmate of mine at Harvard Law School. We graduated together, so it's an especially nice treat to hear that she was involved in bringing me to Brandeis. So I am going to talk about some of my more recent research related to my book Fatal Invention, but also some thinking about science and justice and race that I've done since publishing that book.
Okay, so I'll begin with an incident that happened at the American Society for Human Genetics just this last October in New York where the geneticists there were, as the New York Times says, “alarmed by the use of, by white nationalists, of their studies.” And they were acknowledging that many white nationalist websites post new genomic studies that claim to find racial differences between races, and claim to establish that race is a natural category of human beings. And so many of the geneticists thought this should be taken up at the meeting, that they were concerned that their work was being used to support white supremacy. And the next day they issued a statement that their work should not be used in this dangerous way.
I thought it was interesting for a couple reasons:
That in 2018 it was still necessary for institutions of genetics, places like the American Society of Human Genetics, to issue statements like that.
But also the fact it actually is the case that white nationalists are citing studies by human geneticists published in the 21st century.
And while they denounced what they called misuse of their work to support claims of white superiority, they did not denounce the work of their own members whose work was being cited by white supremacists. So even though they issued this statement, there was still this question of what to do about research that claims that race is a natural category, and that it is possible to find genetic proof of racial differences between human beings.
So what I want to discuss today is some of those kinds of questions that come out of these developments in the 21st century that really mirror developments of the past. This statement that the geneticists issued in October of 2018 mirrors statements that other groups of scientists have made over and over and over again, certainly since World War II. So the questions I'd like to look at are:
What is the relationship between racism and racial science? What this association was saying was that yes, some of our members do racial science, but they're not racists, and it's too bad that racists used their racial science. But what is the relationship between the two? Is it just a relationship that occurs when avowed white nationalists use racial science? Or is there something deeper there in the very assumptions that go into racial science?
And then that also begs the question: what is the relationship between biology and racial inequality, because one of the fundamental questions that racial scientists are trying to answer is what's the relation… (well actually, I would say that many scientists are trying to answer, many biological scientists are asking) is: What is the relationship between biology and society?
And one aspect of that is the relationship between biology and social inequality. And I will argue, and I'll try to demonstrate this today, that this has been a question that has dominated biological science for centuries.
And then finally, what is the relationship between race and racism? What does it mean to define race as a natural division of human beings and develop a science around that? And what is its role then to racism?
But looking at the scientists' approach to race and what that tells us about racism is related to a deeper question of the relationship between race and racism. Can it be disconnected, as the scientists were doing on October 19th of 2018, in saying that we want you, public, to disconnect our racial science from what these racists are doing with it?
It mirrors one of the major projects of biologists since World War II, which is to say we can separate racial science from racism. In fact, because there was a condemnation of racial science used by the Nazis to justify exterminating millions of people, it became imperative for scientists that base their research on an assumption of innate racial differences to say, “but we're not like the racial scientists of the past because they were racist and we're not.” Okay, do you get these questions? I'm gonna go into it, but do you understand what I'm saying?
So let's go back to the very invention of race and its relationship to science. We know historically that scientists helped to invent the notion that human beings are naturally divided into separate races. Scientists help to invent the very concept of biological race, the concept that every human being who has ever existed belongs to a race, and that race is universal. It's global and it's immutable. Those are the central features of the biological concept of race.
And another very important feature is that some force of nature did this. All right, scientists discover race according to this way of thinking, but they're discovering something in nature. And we know historically that the Enlightenment scientists in the 1700s took the concept, the pre-modern concept that God created races, and brought it into Enlightenment science, and instead of saying God did it, they said some force of nature did it. But they claim that nature created race. And that they could discover how many races there were, what were the features of these races, both physical features and social features of these races, and they created typologies that identified them and distinguished them.
And we also know that they did this because they wanted to justify the domination of Europeans over other groups of people. And so of course when they invented this idea of race, they put Europeans at the top as the most beautiful people, the most intelligent people, the most creative, the most civilized, the most rational, and the most entitled to power. And they put African people at the bottom as the least intelligent, the least attractive, the least civilized, the most barbarian, the most in need of white people's control. And that was how science helped to invent race. And the fact that scientists said it made it seem as if it was just a discovery of what was in nature, as opposed to people in power justifying their brutal subordination of other groups of people.
Now I also say that science was invented by race because of course this idea had a huge influence on science. It wasn't just that science had an influence on the concept of race, or that scientists helped to shape it; but the concept of race helped to shape science as well. In fact, I don't even think we have come to grasp fully how much the concept of race has shaped science. Seems like people are just discovering every day — and resisting every day — how much the concept of race has shaped science.
And I don't just mean that many scientists think they cannot possibly do science without dividing their human subjects by race — and many scientists feel that way. Or doctors could not possibly treat patients without dividing their patients by race and treating them accordingly. I've had many, many, many, many, many doctors tell me that they could not practice medicine without doing that. They couldn't imagine how you could possibly treat a patient without treating the patient according to race. But even beyond that, even aspects of science that we don't even associate explicitly with race; just the methods of science, the fact that so much of biology is about finding differences; even those basic aspects of Western science — have we even thought through completely how much they're shaped by this very early investment in racial difference that Enlightenment scientists made? There's so much of Enlightenment science that is praised, and celebrated, and copied without attention to the fact that Enlightenment scientists were instrumental in inventing the biological concept of race.
So let me just give you an example of a racial scientist who has been celebrated a lot in the United States without much attention to how his science was influenced by racism and by the desire to explain political inequality as natural. All right, so again the objective of Enlightenment scientists was to explain the domination of white people, European people, of other people, as just the result of nature, and that their racial hierarchies were just discoveries they were making in nature and happened, just happened, because that was the natural order to justify slavery and conquest by Europeans.
Thomas Jefferson in his notes on the state of Virginia explains that the reason why black people cannot be emancipated, or if they are emancipated they cannot participate equally in American democracy, the democracy that he was creating, helping to create, that was founded in equality and tolerance, and liberty— all of these principles that directly were contradicted by owning human beings as property. He dealt with that by using science; by saying that God or nature had created these differences. Now I slipped a little bit because he actually said it was nature, because again, he was an Enlightenment scientist, so he didn't want to reveal that actually he was taking these theological concepts and putting them into modern science. But it was God. God had, just as nature had created the inalienable rights of all people for freedom and the pursuit of happiness, nature had excluded certain people from those rights. And those were African people. And so it wasn't racism that was an obstacle to the incorporation of African-descended people into the new democracy; it was nature that did it. All right, so this is the basic concept that I want to emphasize is that race is a biological category according to this viewpoint, and racial inequalities are simply the product of nature.
One important aspect of this thinking about race and nature was the idea that black women produced the disadvantaged status of their children. Now it's interesting that the quote by Angela Davis that I showed in Killing the Black Body— how the regulation of black women's childbearing is foundational to all of women's reproductive freedom… Actually, I did write about that in Killing the Black Body, but since writing Killing the Black Body, it's become clearer and clearer to me that it was the foundation of all thinking about race, not just having to do with reproduction but all thinking about race, because the colonists had to figure out what was the status of children born to black women but fathered by white men. Or another way of putting it: the children born to the women they enslaved and raped, and then produced— these children who were their biological children, their inheritance, the white men.
But they did not want these children to have the status of white people or to claim the inheritance in terms of status or property or identity of white men. And so they passed a law in 1662, one of the very first laws passed in the United States, to answer this question. This was one of the questions that shows that race wasn't natural at all because they had to debate what was the status. If it was natural, they could have looked to nature to answer the question. They couldn't look to nature; they had to look to politics to answer the question. And they answered it in a way that supported their political investment in the power of whiteness. And so they made these children have the status of the mother so they could enslave these children.
Now in doing that, they made black women's childbearing be not only the subject of regulation so that they could control or try to control the production of the birth of new people to enslave, but also the very idea that race is naturally reproduced, and that the enslaved status of black children is naturally reproduced by their mothers.
I don't have time today to go into all of the reverberations of that idea that black children's disadvantaged status is produced in the wombs of black mothers. But just think about that idea and how it led to, it supported, the sterilization of thousands upon thousands of black women who relied on welfare and were thought undeserving of having more children because of their race and because of their status as welfare recipients. Think about the billboards that went up around the country, anti-abortion billboards, that said the most dangerous place for an African-American child is in the womb. I'm quoting there. Think about the image of the welfare queen, who was supposed to have children just to get a welfare check and then didn't care about the children. Think about the crack baby and the pregnant crack addict. The pregnant crack addict was supposed to be the cause of black children's disadvantage because crack cocaine was what caused black children's poor heath and lack of equal education. I could go on and on and on with all of the ways that this idea that the reason why black children are disadvantaged is because of their mother's reckless reproduction; and I could trace all of that right back to this idea that is one of the foundations of the concept of biological race.
So I'm going to take all of the next 100 years or so and condense it because I want to get to the 21st century for most of what I have to say today. But I did want to point out that these ideas are deeply rooted in slavery and the invention of biological race in order to support slavery.
So let me put this all together then — this biological thinking that stems from Enlightenment science, which is based in prior theology. And we could go through from emancipation and the racial justifications, biological justifications for slavery; move through eugenics and the era where dominant science claimed that social inequalities were caused by different genetic predispositions, and that that justified encouraging some people to have children, and sterilizing other people deemed to be socially devalued because of their supposed genetic defects. And we can move on then to the 1990s where this book, The Bell Curve, was a national bestseller, claiming that race and class inequality are biologically determined.
And I want to take all of that way of thinking and put it under the caption “The ‘Old’ Biosocial Science.” Okay, what I mean by the old biosocial science is the idea that social inequality is caused by biological differences. So we could think of eugenics as claiming that social inequality is caused by genetic differences that predisposed people to good social values or bad social values. We could think about the biological concept of race as being the idea that innate racial differences are what produce the different social statuses of people of different races— and so the idea that the social order is natural; it's produced by biological difference. And that is a major, major tenet of a lot of biological science. And I call it the old biosocial science. But as you see, it's not in the past; it's just a way of thinking that we can trace back many centuries. And so that's why I'm calling it the “old” biosocial science. Biological differences produce social inequality.
Now in 2000, when the map of the human genome was unveiled, or at least a draft of it was unveiled, Bill Clinton famously declared that one of the truths that emerged, great truth, that emerged from this major scientific project was that in genetic terms all human beings regardless of race were 99.9% the same. And he was trying to emphasize the finding of a lot of genetic unity in the human species that was part of the reason, part of the evidence, that there is only one human race. You cannot divide the human race genetically into separable races; or the human species genetically into separable races.
And probably he should have said as well that that .1% of difference, although it involves a lot of genetic diversity, it's obviously not that human beings are genetically identical — I mean that's clear — but it's that all that genetic diversity among human beings can't be divided into discrete races; into those groups I mentioned at the beginning: immutable; discrete; homogeneous in some way within the group and different from people in other groups; global. There's about four or five of them. Everybody fits into one of them or the other.
Or they might be, you know, to be with the modern times you might say, well, there are these pure races. Some people are mixtures of them, but still we only know that people are mixtures of them because there are pure ones too. The mixture is a combination of pure races. That's the add-mixture idea.
And so he said it; Francis Collins said it; Craig Venter said it; all of the major players in the Human Genome Project declared that it finally proved that the human species isn't divided into biological races. And many people thought that this was now going to usher in a new kind of biological science; that this would be the incentive, and the resources, and the knowledge for genomic scientists, and other biological scientists, and other researchers who use biological concepts in their work to figure out another way of understanding and studying human genetic diversity without relying on these antiquated concepts of race.
But as we all know, and I will emphasize here, what happened was that it took very little time for scientists to begin using the knowledge that came out of the Human Genome Project to do just the opposite — to begin to use big DNA databases, and high-tech computer algorithms and programming, and mathematical algorithms, and new concepts that came out of the Human Genome Project, not to understand human genetic diversity in a new way but actually to explain the old concepts of biological race in new genomic terms.
And so I was very surprised when I read in the New York Times articles by Nicholas Wade claiming that the new frontier of genomics was to look for genetic differences between the principle races. And he just said it as if we all know there are three principle races: white people, black people and Asian people. And it's just up to the geneticists to figure out more precisely what the genetic differences are between them; and then to apply this knowledge to figuring out why there are these inequalities between races; and to trace inequalities in health and other aspects of welfare to genetic differences.
And he wrote article after article after article after article about this in the New York Times. And so he then in 2014, wrote a book where he put together a lot of what he'd been writing about in the New York Times for the past 14 years, arguing that there was all, now at this point, lots of scientific research that proved that there were three principle human races; that they were genetically distinct from each other not only in terms of physical features, but also that these distinctions included distinctions in social values. And that because there were these distinctions in social values, the three races had different kinds of social institutions that were produced from these values; and white people being the most creative, the least violent. He doesn't say intelligent though— he knows not to say white people are the most intelligent. It's interesting. He leaves out intelligence among these features, but they're all these positive features involving rationality. And so white people have developed democratic institutions. And then he says Asians are genetically predisposed to conforming, and so they have developed authoritarian institutions. And African people are pretty much never evolved from the ancestral homeland and therefore are prone to violence and chaos. And that's why Africa is a place of tribal conflict; and it's impossible for Africans to have democratic institutions. Former senior journalist at the New York Times!
When people, many people, were outraged by this, and I reminded them: well he's been writing this in the New York Times for the last 14 years — in the New York Times! So he also had a definition, a genetic definition of race, which he supported by those studies I mentioned earlier, that the American Society of Human Genetics was concerned about white supremacists using.
Well Nicholas Wade also used their studies to claim that there was new evidence of these three distinct races, and that there was also an evolutionary theory about how they came to be. And that is that yes, all human beings originated, the human species originated in Africa, evolved in Africa for 200,000 years. But then about 50,000 years ago smaller populations left Africa. And they dispersed on separate continents and evolved to be distinct races with distinct physical features and distinct social values. So that is his theory.
And again, I could spend time just ripping apart what he says here. It's absurd. But including the fact that he says “ever since the first modern humans left,” which would mean that we are all continuing to evolve as separate human races — that doesn't make sense. And no one has said why it was that people couldn't move from one continent to the other (Eurasia is one land mass); or exactly where these divisions are; or when these groups evolved to be separate races.
But this idea is very prominent in today's scientific research on race and genetics. So in my book Fatal Invention, I have to say I was largely inspired by Nicholas Wade because as I read these articles I couldn't believe that they were gaining so much prominence, and that he was citing actual scientific studies that were being published in peer-reviewed journals. And so I began to investigate it. And I found that, yes indeed, there were many scientists who were defining race as a genetic grouping. And I argued that the reason why this science was so popular and being supported by our tax dollars, funding by the NIH and also private foundations, was because it provided an explanation, a genetic explanation — again this natural, innate, biological explanation — for continued racial inequality in a supposedly post-racial society.
And then I also wrote about the ways in which the biotech and pharmaceutical industries were using this idea of genetically distinct races to then provide high-tech pharmaceutical and other kinds of technological solutions to racial inequality. Then because if it's not caused by social determinants, structural racism, institutional bias, and it's caused by innate differences, then the solutions address the innate differences as opposed to calling for social change.
Now I also discovered that Nicholas Wade's genetic definition of race was very popular in scientific journals. Again, he didn't make that up. He got that from scientific articles that were being published. And I'll go back to what the American Society of Human Genetics was grappling with. They disagreed with the speculation about how these genetic differences produced superior or inferior people, the blatantly racist aspects of it. But they couldn't disagree that many of their members were writing articles that were used to support the claim of biological differences between races and the natural creation of human races. And so it is not unusual — in fact this is probably the most common understanding of race in scientific articles that address genetics and race — that races are population clusters based on genetic differences due to evolutionary pressure. Again, a genomic or genetic explanation of what started out as a theological explanation, and then became an explanation in nature, and now is refined as an explanation relating to human evolution.
One study looked at hundreds of articles, scientific articles, published in peer-reviewed journals on race and genomics, and found that at the time of the human genome mapping around 2001 there was actually a dip in articles that treat race as if it were a natural biological division of human beings — that's the black line. And then there was a spike in articles that treat race as if it were a natural genetic division of human beings. And the gray line are articles that treat it as a social construction. And that stayed pretty much the same or decreased, if anything, decreased since the time the human genome was mapped.
So let me show you just a few examples of the kind of research that's being done that treats race as a biological category. One is biomedical research. Study after study after study coming out literally every day that tries to explain some racial gap in health, like why do black children have more severe rates of asthma than other children? A lot of it is about black biological abnormality. Why do black people have higher rates of hypertension than other people? Why is there a higher infant mortality rate in black communities? Why is there a higher maternal death rate among black women? I could go on and on and on because there's so many racial gaps in health in the United States, and these scientists are looking for innate genetic explanations for these gaps in health. And so here's an example of a hypothesis by a group of obstetric researchers trying to explain why black women have higher rates of preterm birth or premature birth, which is an important factor in explaining higher rates of infant mortality among black people. And their hypothesis — please look at this very closely — their hypothesis is that black race, independent of other factors, increases the risk of extreme preterm birth. Okay, so they're hypothesizing that there's something innate in black people that's independent of all the social factors that could affect preterm birth, that increases the risk that black women are going to give birth prematurely. I wish I could just turn this into a class and look at this hypothesis and study it. But you know:
What does black race independent of social... what does that even mean? What does that mean? Who's included in that category? But what is that category? Like, what's the meaning of that category? There's something risky about blackness itself? What? It's so hard to even wrap your mind around it. There's something risky about being black apart from the social environment, the social context. Just the minute you're born black— or I guess even in the womb — that, conceived as black, as a black person, a black fetus, a black embryo, you've got in you already this risk of all sorts of harmful outcomes including death. The blackness means a risk of death, basically. That's how I interpret this.
And then what method would you use to control for every factor that could possibly affect preterm birth? How can you do that? But even if you're gonna do it — okay try hard to do it — you know what I mean? Like you should have at least a hundred variables. They had a few variables. They didn't even look at the stress of racism as something that might increase preterm birth. So how could you even prove this? And yet they claimed that they did. They claimed that when they controlled for a few variables and there was still this racial gap, that that must mean that genes, that black people's genes, predispose us to preterm birth. Oh and by the way, they got a headline, a story in the New York Times, that said “Study Points to Genetics as Explanation for Disparities in Preterm Birth.”
Now let me move to another field of research, which is sociogenomics. The research that looks at how genetic differences produce or influence not just medical outcomes or biological outcomes, but social outcomes. Like the big one now is educational attainment — researchers looking at polygenic scores as explanations for the number of years people, individuals, or groups go to school. And just to give one example, this study in molecular psychology claimed that it's possible to predict educational achievement for individuals directly from their DNA. It claimed that this was a turning point in the social and behavioral sciences. What does that mean? I take that to mean that now we social scientists should be studying our research participants' DNA, and not the social barriers or advantages.
I really think, though, that all these people who are claiming that it's all in… it's in the genes, or enough in the genes that there should make a difference to social policy, now have to take into account the scandal about rich people paying their kids' way into college 'cause do they control for that when they're looking for what? You know we keep coming up with new variables we need to look at if we're going to make genetic claims. Okay.
Oh but then I do want to make that point, though, at the very end where they also say that these scores may soon become a useful tool for early prediction and prevention of educational problems, the claim that not only do genes contribute significantly to educational attainment, but that that research should be used to inform educational policy. And of course they're going to say to prevent educational problems that there's a beneficial use of this. But I would really, I just challenge any researcher to show me any point in US history where predicting that someone was less likely to succeed in school because of their genes led to a more equitable educational policy. I can point you to lots of places where it led to a less equitable educational policy. Usually the argument is: don't waste your money on those people or — now I don't want to sound alarmist but this is the truth. Or don't let those people produce more children because their children will have those genes that predispose them to lack of success in school.
All right, let me turn to now another field that is influenced by the biological concept of race as a genetic category, and that's race-specific medicine. In 2005, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first race-specific drug for labeling for African-American patients. How many of you here, have you all heard about BiDil, this drug? Okay, so but some haven't, so I'll go ahead and say a little bit about it. The main thing to know about this drug that the FDA approved as a therapy for African-American patients with heart failure is that it was developed without any regard to race. The drug is a combination of two generic drugs that have been prescribed for 20 years before the cardiologists who developed this pill figured out how to combine them into one pill. So that's what BiDil is; it's the combination of two generic drugs in one pill.
And the cardiologist had a patent on it; went to the FDA. The FDA would not approve it for marketing because the cardiologists hadn't conducted a clinical trial using his particular formula. And so all of this takes lots of time. By the time he got the rejection from the FDA, his patent was gonna run out soon, and he needed a new patent. So he added to the old patent the claim that it was for an African-American patient because you need a new claim to get a new patent. Okay, so same formula; no attention to genes whatsoever — this was a cardiologist.
The Food and Drug Administration told him if you conduct a clinical trial involving African-Americans and it works, we will approve it for African-Americans. All right, so ask yourself does this mean that the Food and Drug Administration was sending the message we care about African-Americans so we're gonna give you your own drug? Or was it sending the message black people are so abnormal, so different from other human beings, that just because it works on black people is no guarantee it's gonna work on anybody else, and therefore we will only approve it for African-Americans? Then think about it. Which message was it? Which message was it?
And it helps here to also know that there are so many aspects of pharmaceutical and medical practice where black people's bodies are considered abnormal — abnormal! And I'll just give a quick example: glomerular filtration rate, which is an indicator of kidney function, and it measures how a particular substance is filtered by the kidney. And the number comes up in a blood test on the lab results, and that number helps the doctor to know are you at risk for kidney failure. It's based on one protein in the blood. Now when it comes up in the lab report, it says African-American: one number; non African-American: another number. In other words, African-American: this is what the reading is for African-Americans. You're the same patient, same indicator, but if you're African-American it means one thing. And if you're any other human being it means something else. I'm not making this up, literally — literally! And also, the number, the difference of the number means the doctor's gonna be more concerned about you if you're not an African-American.
Why? Why? How could it possibly be that it should make a difference whether you're African-American or not what the meaning is of this indicator? Well, why? Because it's based on the assumption that African-Americans as a race have more muscle mass than all other human beings. And because this protein has to go through muscle, muscle mass is relevant. But literally, doctors today routinely accept the assumption that their patient, no matter how scrawny the patient is, if the patient is black the result should be different than if the patient is any other human being. One of the many, many examples where black people's bodies are automatically treated as abnormal, and so there is what is called in the field a correction, a correction of the reading, for black people.
So that's why this idea that the FDA accepted that "oh, it works for black people, but it may not work for any other human beings" is actually deeply rooted in medical practice, and so it might seem astounding until you start to recognize that this is how doctors are trained to think about black people's bodies as abnormal in many, many, many different ways. It's just regular routine ways of thinking.
Now, where does that come from? It comes directly from slavery, from the idea that black people's bodies were different from other human beings' bodies in the sense that, the main sense that, black people are healthier when enslaved. Black people are healthier. Slavery is good for black people for medical reasons. And so doctors early on, especially in the United States, promoted this concept of biological difference that had an impact on the diagnosis of disease and the treatment. And the main treatment for black people was force them to work harder. They're healthier when they're forced to work when they're, as Samuel Cartwright said, under the white man's control. These ideas continue to circulate and even though you might not see how BiDil of modern medicine, advance in medicine, is connected to slavery, I think it's very much connected to these ideas of black bodily peculiarity that come directly out of slavery.
Okay, so how could the FDA justify a drug just for black people? Well the chair of the advisory committee that held hearings on this and advised the FDA on whether to approve this drug or not and how to label it, said, “we're using self-identified race as a surrogate for genetic markers.” That was his explanation. Now where did that come from? At that point, there had been no research on any genetic connection between heart failure and black people, or between the efficacy of this drug and genes. But it was possible again because of these long-standing ideas to simply state it — simply state race is a surrogate for genetic markers— which embeds in it the idea that race is a biological category and that people of different races are genetically different from each other.
So everything I've talked about so far falls under that category I mentioned before of the “old” biosocial science, the idea that biology produces social inequality.
I wanna now turn to what we might call the “new” biosocial science and that, in a sense, is the opposite; it reverses the order, the relationship. I'm referring to the premise, the scientific premise, that social inequality produces biological differences. And so the differences that we see in people identified as belonging to different races are not because of innate biological distinctions; they are produced by social inequality that has an impact on people's bodies.
Okay, so if you live in a neighborhood where there are a lot of toxins, for example, because of structural racism, segregation, the way in which toxic places are located, that does produce an effect on your body. And that may be an explanation, for example, why black children have higher rates of severe asthma.
So I said before that when I say old biosocial science, I don't mean that it is past. It's just I'm identifying a particular way of thinking about the relationship between biology and society. So the new biosocial science isn't new in the sense that it was just discovered or just created; just developed.
Actually, there have been scientists, especially black scientists and other scientists of color, who have had this new perspective even at a time when the dominant science was the old biosocial science. WEB Du Bois, for example, is a new biosocial scientist because he contested the view that black people had higher rates of certain diseases because of their innate biological difference, their innate predisposition to disease, that blackness itself was a risk factor. He contested that from the late 1800s. In 1899, he challenged the view that black people had higher rates of tuberculosis because of some innate predisposition in their lungs, in all black people's lungs, to this disease. And he said, “no, it's because of the unequal living conditions that black people are experiencing in Philadelphia and other cities around the world, around the nation.” And he also added a political point, which is that the Irish also were claimed to be doomed, to be at risk, innately at risk, for these diseases when they were unpopular. In other words, when they had an inferior political status to English people in the United States, they also had worse health, and the dominant group of scientists attributed it to innate predisposition just like they're doing for black people now.
So there's been contestation of this idea of social inequality being produced by biology, by people like Du Bois. So to capture the one aspect of the new biosocial science that Du Bois was espousing, we might think about racism being embodied, and that these differences in health and wellbeing are not naturally produced from a biological category of race, but they are the consequences of the political category of race having a biological impact because of the influence of social inequality on people's health. It seems very simple and basic, but there's so many people who are doing research today that don't understand that because you see biological differences doesn't mean they're caused by innate difference. They can be caused by social inequality. And so the differences you see in health are actually proof of social inequality; they're not proof of innate biological differences.
And so, a New York Times headline I prefer to some of the ones that Nicholas Wade was responsible for, that captures this idea: “We're Sick of Racism, Literally.” And there is also a whole emerging body of research that, well it's research that's been going on, but escalating, expanding, showing the multiple ways in which racial inequality has harmful consequences on people's health, including as I mentioned before, just experiencing the stress of racism and how that can negatively affect our health.
Now I wanna look at a couple aspects of the new biosocial science critically. One is epigenetics, which looks at the way in which the environment affects the expression of genes. And so the environment, including the social environment, can impact the expression of genes that produces a particular outcome that is not because the individual is innately predisposed to it because of the structure of their genes. It's because of the environment they're in that affects the expression of their genes, and that produces, in some cases, unhealthy outcomes. But some of the researchers looking at epigenetics explain that biological phenomenon as if it's self-perpetuating. In other words, you've got a negative social environment. It affects the expression of genes, and then the environment can go away, but that expression continues. And some are saying you pass it down from one generation to the next, and it starts to look as if it's just like an innate quality. Instead of the genes being inherited, you're inheriting the epigenome, generation after generation after generation, and the consequences for policy can be very similar, as I'll show in a minute.
The other is the neuroscience of poverty. Scientists who are looking at the impact of poverty on children's brains, and arguing that that helps to explain why children living in poverty do not succeed as well as children who aren't living in poverty. Once again, if this is part of the new biosocial science 'cause they're saying the social inequality of poverty has this biological effect, but they're sometimes, some of these scientists are using that to explain social inequality as the consequence of biology.
And so in both of these cases, it flips so that now what started as a social problem becomes a biological problem. So for example, when Newsweek had an article about how poverty affects the brain, and they looked at inner-city schools in Los Angeles, and the police presence in those schools, instead of saying: it's harmful to children's education for police to arrest them in school. It's harmful for children's education. It's a barrier to children learning to have police lined up in the halls and sometimes beating them up, and, we know for things that children living in more privileged neighborhoods don't get beat up and arrested for. No, what they say is the stress, the anxiety level, of going to those schools produces effects on the brain so those children have less gray matter in the brain. And that's why they can't learn.
So then what happens when you start to take the new biosocial science and focus on the biological defects that are caused by these unequal social structures? Well, you produce very similar kinds of policy recommendations: Not end systemic racism, like take the police out of schools; provide more resources to schools; and let's support affirmative action and the privileges that other children have to get into these schools, or at least equal; let everybody have the same privilege. No, those aren't the recommendations by some of these scientists. The recommendations are: neutralize the epigenetic effects; manipulate the development systems; and neutralize and reverse those effects. Go into the bodies of these people who have been harmed biologically by social inequality and fix them, fix them.
Now, here's another example. Epigenetic markings are potentially reversed by pharmacological interventions or behavioral interventions. Whose behavior? Not the police officer's behavior— that's not who we should intervene on; don't give them the pharmaceuticals. No — the children. It's intervene on the children, not the people who are causing the harm. Intervene on the people who are oppressed by these systems. Study what's wrong with the people who are oppressed by these systems. Don't, never study the people who are perpetuating the systems. Never, never! The idea — believe me I've worked with so many of these researchers —they're all studying what's wrong with the people who are oppressed by the systems. So I'm not saying not to study the harms of the systems. But don't do it by… and then ignore who is perpetuating all of this. And then, notice again it will lead to a paradigm shift in the social sciences' approach to this, which again I take it to mean: Stop, you social scientists, trying to figure out how to fix society and let's intervene in the biological problems that these people have as a result of social inequality.
In the Newsweek article, the focus was on the mothers. Again, no focus on ending all those things that are causing anxiety in children; it was on how do we train these mothers to help their children cope with the anxiety so it doesn't affect their brains as much. And then of course the mother is blamed. Go back to that, what I said about black mothers, mother is blamed for her poor parenting skills as opposed to the school system blamed for bringing in police to discipline the children.
Now, all of this is being framed, as I've already kind of alluded to, as a disciplinary battle between biologists and social scientists and people in the humanities. Often, people in the humanities are just considered outliers altogether and should not be listened to at all. What do they have to say about social policy? But it's definitely a disciplinary battle between the social scientists and the geneticists. Wade saying that this is… the whole problem is that social scientists have this official view that race is a social construction, and so are limiting the ability of genetic scientists to prove that race is a biological category and is what is producing all of these unequal outcomes.
Here's an example of a genetic researcher who says, “we don't want to talk to historians; we want to figure out human history directly from genes because we're objective. Historians are subjective, and so they're not really getting at the truth.” And so the idea is people in the humanities, people in the social sciences are too influenced by our ideologies and our subjective views about race, but people in the biological sciences are producing objective truth about the reality of the biological basis of race. And more and more, even within sociology, social scientists are being urged to use this new genetic definition of race in their research. So that it's the biologists who define what race is, and then social scientists simply interpret it, and look at how it plays out in society. But it's really the biologists' definition of race that counts.
Now, Charles Murray, who was a coauthor of The Bell Curve, I think wrote a very astute and important review of Nicholas Wade's book in the Wall Street Journal because he identified this as a political battle, as I do. This is one place where I agree with Charles Murray, although we take opposite views of how this battle should go and framing of the battle. But I think it's important to see that he identifies this disciplinary battle as actually a political battle. So he says that there have been three modern struggles with race in the United States.
The first: the legal battle, which ended with the Civil Rights Act. This is a very common view of conservatives, including most of the members of the U.S. Supreme Court, that the Civil Rights era ended the struggle against racism, and that there's no more racism in the United States, and so any mention of race is a form of reverse racism. Clarence Thomas, literally said in an opinion that there was a moral equivalence to opposing Affirmative Action and opposing Jim Crow. Or a moral equivalence to Jim Crow and supporting Affirmative Action. So, because today recognizing racism is itself racist. That's Murray's view, and so then any difference, any racial inequality that exists still, comes from innate differences. Okay, that's the idea. Then he says, okay, there's still some people who express racial prejudice, a few people, who'll say racist things, but they're swiftly punished, so we don't have to worry about them. So then you think, well what's the battle? What's the battle over race then, in the United States? What's left? And he says, it's the battle waged against the idea that biological differences among human populations are a legitimate subject of scholarly study. This is what he identifies as the current battle around race. And as I said, I agree with him to a large extent. I think this battle around the biological concept of race is a political one that is being framed as a scientific one. It is being waged within science, but it's not an objective, non-ideological battle. It's a battle that involves politics and will have a huge impact on social policy.
Now there are liberal people — most of these scientists are, I think, would identify as liberal — but their attitude is: we should continue to do this racial science, but just keep it out of the hands of racists. And if racists, like white supremacists (going back to the beginning of my talk) use our research, it's not our fault. We should still be able to do this supposedly objective, non-political research claiming that race is a natural division of human beings.”
And so what I'll close with is: what's wrong with that? So they identify white nationalists' use of racial science as racist science, but then distinguish themselves from white nationalists. So they say: “well, we're not white nationalists so we can continue to do this research.” But what they're missing is that it is not the case that there was an old scientific racism that was an ideological use of race for repressive purposes, but now this new research is for legitimate purposes so we can very clearly disengage, disconnect that whole history from racial research today. That's what they say, but that's wrong, because 1) they are explaining racial inequality without taking into account institutionalized racism. Both the studies I've mentioned that I categorized as old biosocial science, and the ones I mentioned that are new biosocial science, they share this flaw. They are trying to explain racial disparities without taking into account institutionalized racism.
And so they ultimately, regardless of whether they start with biological difference or start with social inequality, they ultimately focus on the biological defects of oppressed people to explain why they're in their disadvantaged status. And they have a misunderstanding of the relationship between race and racism because what they're asserting is that there is a natural division of human beings into races. And in the hands of racist people that's a problem, but in the hands of non-racist scientists it's okay.
What they don't understand is that the very concept of race as a natural division of human beings, whether it was from God, whether it was from unknown force of nature, or whether it's from evolution, that that idea is a product of racism. You only need that idea to justify racism. That was the reason why race was invented in the first place, and it continues to be why the biological concept of race holds power over so many people to this day. The original idea that at some point in human history some natural force divided all human beings into races, and that explains why the world is the way it is now — that fairytale, that ugly fairytale. That's the idea that has traveled across centuries and still, still dominates a lot of science today.
So, I'll close with another way of thinking about how science should be conducted. And that is: embrace it —the ideology, the values. Science is gonna embrace values. It's not, it's never been objective, so what's wrong with saying we should embrace the value of affirming our common humanity by working to end the structural inequalities that are preserved by the political system of race? And that should be the focus of scientists and everyone else who is striving for a better, more humane more egalitarian and just society.
So I will end there, and I hope I've left time for questions and answers and comments. I would love to have discussion with you as long as you can stay. I know I have to catch a flight at some point, but I'd love to have some discussion about this if you have questions or comments. So, thanks so much.
[Muigai]: We have time to take a couple of questions. Are there any people who... yes, back there.
[Audience Member stands up]
[Roberts]: Hi, how are you? Good to see you. Good to see you. I'm back to working on issues of slavery. Yeah, I'm working on the Penn and Slavery Project. Penn has just acknowledged its connections to slavery in June. So working on a project involving the connection between Penn's Medical School and slavery, so yeah, yeah.
[Audience Member]: That's wonderful.So Professor Roberts and I had the opportunity to work together in the Gender and Sexualities Program. You can see a wonderful lecture by her on the website of its own section. Brandeis' own section.
Thank you very much for this. So I have a question about a related phenomenon that you'll probably see as even more related than I can imagine, which is the question of the Henrietta Lacks settlement, and I understand that this is still being widely used. And told that it's used in Brandeis' labs.
[Roberts]: Probably.
[Audience member]:I don't know what kind or how the discussion is currently going with the scientists who were interviewed. Is that, would you ever discuss that with them? Is that a topic? Is there student activism going on? I just don't know.
[Roberts]: Yeah, there's still discussion about it. So at Johns Hopkins where her cells were taken without consent, there's been an effort, working with the Lacks family, to address it. There's an annual lecture that takes place. I gave that lecture maybe three or four years ago, and so there's been an effort to address it but there's still controversy over questions of ownership today, proprietary control over the cells, and still debate about the ethics of taking the cells in the first place.
So I gave a talk once at Penn about this, and a white doctor in the audience stood up and said, “Well, I used to work at Johns Hopkins. And this was a way for poor people who used our clinic to pay back, because they couldn't, they couldn't afford the care, and we gave 'em free medical care, and this was a way to pay it back.” And then I, I'm not making this up, he literally said, "and they got better care in the colored wards than the white patients did in the other wards." And I said, "Sir, how can that possibly be?" He said, "because they got advantage of the experiments..." I'm not making this up. I am not making this up, "...that we conducted in the colored wards, and, there's an advantage to being able to use the advanced but not approved medical procedures."
So there is still debate about the ethics of taking her cells. And then the other debate is about what are the proper reparations, the atonement for this. This is a question that comes up a lot in slavery projects as well. What is the atonement for it?
I think one of the most striking things about that case was that as medical researchers and patients were taking advantage of research that came out of her, using her cells, her own children couldn't get adequate health insurance. And so I'll say one more thing about it, which is that it shows the contradiction of this idea that black people's bodies are abnormal. Okay, so on the one hand, scientists are looking into how abnormal black people's bodies are, correcting in all sorts of ways for the ways that black people's bodies function differently than other human being's bodies, as I mentioned, still going on routinely in medicine today. And yet, her cells were used to cure and help people around, literally, around the world regardless of race. If you think about it, so much experimentation on black people is done to benefit white people. And yet on the other hand, we're supposed to have these abnormal bodies where we're denied care — denied care because of the assumption that we're supposed to be unhealthy. So that it just shows how this is based on myths and racist stereotypes and dangerous ideologies that fuel these ideas and supposedly advanced scientific procedures of thinking. So those are just some of the ways that I think you're absolutely right. What happened to Henrietta Lacks is related to everything that I was talking about this evening. Thanks.
[Anita Hill stands up]
[Roberts]: Hi Anita, Dr. Hill. How are you? So good to see you! Thank you for — I think we've got to give a round of applause...
[Anita Hill]: So, I have two questions.
Within the scientific community, is there movement or resistance, in that sense?
And can you speak a little bit about the roles that these journals are playing, and that chart that you said, whether it's shooting up, and the people who are funding. It's a very, I mean that's a lot of...
[Roberts]: That's a lot but you've pointed out two ways in which this kind of research gets supported, and reiterated over and over and over again. One is the guidelines that journals have that accept research that in so many ways is shoddy. When it comes to race as a variable, there is so little attention paid to even how is the scientist even defining this category? How are they choosing which research participants to put into one category or another? What are the fundamental assumptions behind their use of race to begin with?
And so there are some journals that are starting to try to correct this by issuing guidelines for peer reviews to determine whether or not this meets the editorial approval of the journal. So some are trying to do that, but that is an area that could make a big difference if there was more scrutiny placed on these articles that many of them have many flaws. It's just basic flaws about, just even defining the key variables that they're using.
The other is funding. Funding plays a big part of this. There are many people who think today that adding a genomic component to your study, even if it's not really relevant to the study, helps you get funded. Genetic research is very popular. Having a genetic explanation for an outcome is very popular. People in America are, in the media, in ancestry testing, all sorts of commercial products — it just has this influence that I don't think any other aspect of science has. And so that's a part of it.
The National Institutes of Health, which funds millions and millions of dollars to scientific research and is absolutely essential to scientific research in the United States, it should be funded of course. But it requires researchers of certain studies to divide their subjects by race. Now that was intended to diversify clinical trials.
And there are good reasons for that. But many researchers then believe that they must study... look for differences, and explain their outcomes based on innate differences between people of different races. So there's a lot of of work that needs to be done in, I think, reissuing the NIH guidelines having to do with race. The guidelines — their racial categories are the same racial categories used in the Census. The idea is that all federal statistics should use one common racial classification. Now as we know, every single Census since the 1700s has changed the racial classification. So, and we know these are social — that's proof. That's a social category, right, but many scientists are using this blatantly social category, explicitly social category, as if it were a biological category, and believe that they have to do that to get NIH funding. So all of those are written...
Now there is, there is resistance within science as well. So I don't want to indicate that all of genomic science is doing this kind of research. There are many scientists who are saying that race is not a genetic category, and their research is important to showing that, who are criticizing this but it hasn't stopped these assumptions from going into the research or really making... I just don't think it's made much of a difference to the prominence of these kinds of studies over studies that are looking at the social factors that are creating these inequalities. And then doing something about it, too, is the other aspect of it. Yeah.
[Hill]: Thank you
[Roberts]: Thanks for your question.
[Muigai]: Okay, we'll bundle these two.
[Roberts]: Oh, and let me just say one more thing, which is that students are so important to this because many of the researchers today, and people in biomedical research, and people in the healthcare professions havebeen ingrained with this idea, especially in medical school, that you have to treat patients by race; that there are all these differences in outcomes that are innately produced because of racial difference. This is a big part of medical school, and recent studies have shown that medical students have these absurd stereotypes.
There's a study that recently came out of University of Virginia. A substantial number of residents — they're practicing medicine on patients — believed myths like black people have thicker skin than white people. Black people have less sensitive nerve endings than white people. And then the researchers found an association, a significant association, between students and residents who held those beliefs and their undertreatment of patients for pain. That study was published a couple of years ago, and so…
But why would a resident think that? Well, they may have come into medical school having been taught that growing up, and then they come to medical school and in every class the professor says "black people's bodies are different from other human being's bodies in all these ways." They may not repeat the stereotype but you come in with these biological stereotypes. You're taught in class you should treat black people differently 'cause their bodies are different. And if you believe black people have thicker skin, then you're gonna give them less pain treatment. There's nothing in the education, typically, in medical school that would dispel that way of thinking. It encourages that way of thinking.
But I'm sorry. I feel so bad cutting off my answers, but I just want to say, on the other hand, there are some students coming into medical school, coming into the STEM professions, who know this is wrong, and they want to change it. And that is what the hope is. I have not too much hope for those who are already doing, practicing, that their thinking is going to change. But the students coming in demanding different kinds of courses, demanding that these myths be taken out of their education, and thinking of ways to change the practice, change the research, change the research design — that's what the hope is. That's why I love to talk to students, because we're counting on you all to make these changes that have… that will reverse 300 years of racial thinking. Yeah. Okay, sorry.
[Muigai]: We'll bundle up the last three, and that'll be the end of the formal program, but Professor Roberts will stick around to answer additional questions.
[Roberts]: If my voice holds out. I'm not sure it will.
[Muigai]: I think I saw three hands, so we'll start there
[Audience Member] Hi, I'm not sure if you remember me.
[Roberts]: Uh oh.
[Audience Member] You spoke on, you were a keynote speaker at the Decolonizing Birth conference.
[Roberts]: Oh yeah!
[Audience Member] So, I heard you speak on maternal mortality, between all reproductive justice and birth justice...
[Roberts]: Yes, yes, I couldn't give that talk today, too. There wasn't enough time, but it's an important aspect of this.
[Audience Member]: Yes, and so that kind of goes along to what you were saying about where this exactly becomes disruptive because I came into Brandeis wanting to be an OB-GYN with the intention of offering care specifically to black and brown communities, and addressing the disparities of care. But with my focus on Health, Science, Society and Policy, my major, I learned more about how institutionalized these forms of oppression are, and where me becoming an OB-GYN might perpetuate the problem as opposed to solve the problem, and was where my transition into wanting to be a midwife truly came. But I'm wondering for those who don't have that, they're like, a cardiologist, or for someone who doesn't have that holistic alternative of offering care, where does that disruption occur?
[Roberts]: Okay, I'm supposed to hold off and listen to the other questions.
[Facilitator] You, sir, in the...
[Audience Member]: So from the sociological perspective, what does it say about us as humans that we have such a strong tendency to couch our preconceived beliefs and biases in quote-unquote scientific legitimacy? And how can you deconstruct this with regards to race? And is your proposal about jettisoning value-neutral science and inheriting a pro-value science a solution to that, not just in the scientific realm, but on a broader, sociological, societal realm?
[Dorothy]: Yeah, OK. Try my best. If I can remember the questions, we'll be doing well. Go on. Think of key words: decolonize, value, science based on values, yeah, okay.
[Audience Member]: Actually, I'm glad he posed that question. It's kind of similar to mine in the sense that, well do you think that black bodies will actually ever truly be free?
[Roberts]: Oh, lordy, lordy. Yeah, okay, okay. All right, the point of disruption. These are great questions. I mean we could just... I am gonna try to answer, but actually those questions are such good questions for all of us to leave thinking about, so thank you for the questions. No, really, 'cause no, I'm not trying to get out of it. Those are questions that, first of all, I could not possibly fully answer those questions, right? And they are also all questions that we have to keep working on. Let's remember, what I'm talking about today are ways of thinking that have been embedded in Western science for 300 years, at least. And they've been repeated over and over. Some of them — you can literally read what someone like Samuel Cartwright wrote in the 1850s, and then read something almost exactly the same in 2019. And you can seehow there are just so many ways... What he wrote about slavery being good for black people's health, you just take out the word "slavery" ('cause no one's gonna say that today) and so much of what many contemporary scientists say — it's exactly the same! And even his technologies are still being used today. His idea of correcting for the lower lung capacity of black people — still used today!
Okay, so all of these questions are really such terrific questions for thinking about where do we go from here? How do we address that? But of course I couldn't possibly give you the answer because how am I gonna give you a simple answer to changing 300 years and more of thinking that's been embedded and reinforced, over and over and over again? That's why we all need to go away... I'm inspired by the questions. I'm thinking rapidly about these questions. But I wanna think about them more.
So the point of disruption. So Number one: I want to affirm what you decided to do — to say one thing I could do is try to go into traditional obstetrics and gynecology and change it.
Another thing I could do is be something that is an alternative to that and help to not only provide better care but also perhaps use that to change the very way of thinking about what good healthcare is in the first place; what legitimate care is. Yes, so just as we worked to change medical education and practice, we also need to be working to support midwives and to have them be seen as authoritative, right, and even think about the whole concept of authority being the right term to use. So that's one way of disrupting.
But then on the other hand, some people might say, "but I wanna be an obstetrician; I wanna go in and change the way obstetrics is practiced." But you have to figure out strategies for doing that because once you're in there, it's difficult 'cause you've gotta pass exams. You have to regurgitate all of those myths and racial ways of thinking in order to pass exams. So you get together with other medical students, other students at other parts of the university, professors who can be allies with you. They may not be in the medical school; they may be outside the medical school; maybe there's some within. And you work together to make those changes. I think that can be done.
I think it is a legitimate question to ask: should we all, everybody interested in obstetrics, become midwives instead? That's an interesting question. I mean, a related question I have is when my students say, "I wanna be a prosecutor. I'm gonna go and be a prosecutor and change the criminal justice system." And I have a hard time. More likely I'm gonna try to convince them to be a public defender. But it's a similar kind of question about whether, where you can do this work. Because look, some people would say, "you're up in the academy and that you can't really be radical in the academy.
So wherever we are, there's going to be challenges and we have to strategize how to keep our integrity and what we can do that will be effective. And I found that we can be effective in lots of different kinds of positions, but you have to have the common values of work together; you can't be by yourself. You're not gonna be able to get anything done on your own; you have to work with other people who have a common mission.
So for the question about why do human beings have this tendency — well number one: I'm gonna challenge whether it's a human tendency. I do not think so. Some people will say, "well, it's just human to divide people into race." No, it's not just human. There are political reasons why particular forms of science became dominant. And I think we need to understand the roots of Western science, and how it was so related to slavery and conquest and domination by certain Europeans over other people, and how those ideas continue to affect the practice of science, the very thinking about human beings today. So I just don't think there's anything naturally human. I think I don't even like the word natural ‘cause I think there is anything natural.
So but I'm not criticizing you. I think you asked an important question. I just wanna point out that I think that… but that liberates us then to say we don't have to think a particular way. Science doesn't have to be a particular, have a particular anything — anything! It doesn't have to have particular methods. It doesn't have to have particular values.
And then when it comes to this idea about objective truth — it's just not truth. It's not real. It's not a reflection of reality to say that science has ever been objective. I mean, I could go on and on and on with the ways in which Western science has been influenced by politics— every aspect of it. So in my opinion, if we're going to acknowledge the reality that science is not immune from social influences and never has… It can't be! Scientists are human beings who are influenced by their social surroundings and their political interests. Yeah, even if there were robots doing it, the robots would be influenced by the scientist that programmed the robots, so there's just no way.
So then to me, I would say, okay, so if we acknowledge that scientists are influenced by their politics, what politics do we want them to be influenced by? And so it's just a false straw person or dichotomy or disciplinary battle to say well the scientists are purveyors and searchers of objective truth, and everybody else is influenced by their ideology. So whatever the scientists say we have to abide by; we have to take as reality. No, that's just, that's not true! And I just don't have any problem saying that scientists should be influenced by a desire for social justice. Why not?
Historically, Western scientists have been influenced by a desire to promote white supremacy. I mean, I've showed that a little bit in my talk. I could give you so many examples, other examples. Deeply influenced, deeply and so influenced that they say absolutely nonsensical things like, black people, as a race, have more muscle mass than other human beings so we should treat black people differently, that it's better for their health. I can't tell you the number of people who, when I criticize that, try to defend it — highly educated people who claim to be interested in advancing science. So anyway, I have no problem saying that. And anybody who criticizes me about it, I will just say, show me. Show me where in history of Western science, science in Europe and the United States, dominated by these principles, that it has been objective and non-ideological? So therefore, as I said, let's figure out what it would mean to have a science that is truly in the service of social justice.
And then, oh — will black people ever be free?
I think that that's a question I have been thinking a lot about. Actually, my pipe dream is that when I retire I wanna spend the rest of my life writing about that very issue. I haven't figured out where in my recognition and deep sense of the reality that every single aspect of US history, and dominant culture, and dominant institutions have been targeted; they're aimed at destroying black people's lives and constraining, confining, limiting black people's opportunities, denying freedom in such a fundamental way. Even defining, as I said about Thomas Jefferson, even defining freedom to exclude black people. I mean that's pretty deep. That's pretty deep that your very definition of freedom excludes black people.
[Audience Member] Specifically?
[Roberts]: Specifically. Specifically. Samuel Cartwright, this doctor I've mentioned in the 1850s, who said black people have lower lung capacity and therefore have to be forced to work; they're healthier under the white man's control. And he has this line in a journal, a Louisiana medical journal, where he says that black people are free when under the white man's control, and chained to barbarism and ignorance when in freedom. I believe that's a literal quote. So in his mind black people's freedom, what it means for a black person to be free, is under the control of white people. And when black people are truly free — they have their own control of their own bodies and lives — they're chained to bad outcomes. That idea is so prominent in explanations for black people's inequality: that black people are naturally predisposed to be subservient and therefore…
I could just go on and on about all the ways in medical science where black people's freedom has been characterized as unhealthy, and black people are healthier... and I'm not just talking about during slavery. To this day these ideas circulate in biomedical research, and medical practice, and other areas of science.
And so when the very concept of freedom... this is part of why I wrote Killing the Black Body, because at the time there were these ideas that women's reproductive freedom was advancing (since the birth control movement; during eugenics), that there was this steady advance of more and more freedom for women. And I thought, “who are you talking about? That's not true for black women.” The very concept of freedom for black women's, you know black women, their reproductive... that's like, people don't even think... the people in power and doing policy, they don't even think that's an issue. Like black women's control of their own reproduction — that's bad for America. Like we wouldn't even think of a policy that would be based in that. And that was true since the time of slavery. So again, I think I've expressed the negative, pessimistic part of it.
But on the other hand, I can't be totally pessimistic or I wouldn't bother to do any of the work that I do. I see so many instances (instance isn't even the right word because it's so capacious) where black people have sought their freedom, have defined freedom — defined freedom! Like who should define freedom more than black people? 'Cause we are the. ones... well again, I don't wanna have a contest over who's more oppressed or who sought freedom more. But certainly black people have sought freedom, defined freedom, defied all the ways that our freedom has been restricted, and denied, and defined out of America. Consistently. Consistently. From the minute that black people were enslaved and brought to the New World, black people have resisted every single concept: including the concept of biological race, including the idea that some people are destined to be slaves, you know, innate. This is that idea. Black people have resisted it and have found forms of freedom despite all of the… you know, the most powerful nation in the world trying to stop it. It's incredible!
I haven't been able to go to the African-American history museum in DC yet but I did go to the one in Birmingham. And in Birmingham you go in and there they set up a downtown Birmingham, a section of downtown Birmingham run by black people. And then you go and you see evidence of the lynching of black people, the denial of the rights of black people, the violence against black people, the segregated... you know, every aspect of their lives — white people in Alabama trying to deny it to blacks. Even through brutal violence. And I mean, how in the world did they create that area where there were doctors and piano teachers and teachers and dentists and homemakers and all the things that — how did they do that?
You think about that, you think, yes, black people will be free. Black people have been free in that sense. Do you know what I'm saying? And so, I just... I have to be… it's somewhere between pessimism and optimism.
It's like you understand the depth of the forces denying our freedom; but you also understand the depth of the forces claiming our freedom, creating our freedom. And you have to hold both. I think you have to hold both. I think black people are so good at holding two seemingly contradictory ideas at once. I've been saying this over and over again, so many things I write. Like black people can understand: We want birth control. We want to control our bodies. We want access to abortion. We want access to contraceptives. But we don't want you to force it on us! Like, can you understand that? Like black people can't understand the two things? No, we can! Black women and others can understand that reproductive justice means you can't force me to use birth control because you think I don't deserve to have children. But yes, you gotta give me access to it too.
I just recently wrote that about a claim that black people have waived their right to freedom from police violence because we want our communities patrolled by police. No, we want to be protected but we don't want the police to beat us up, and kill us, and falsely accuse us of crimes. We want to figure out a system where we can be safe, but that doesn't mean we have waived our interest in the police coming in and patrolling our communities and brutalizing us.
There's people who can't understand that. We can understand that there's the reality of racism, deep racism, and white supremacy in America. But we can also understand the power and the promise of liberation. And I just think we have to, we have to lead our lives that way. We have to lead our lives that way because otherwise, we're giving in to the suffering that people are experiencing, and we're not acknowledging all of the struggles that people have made in the past, that have meant something. They haven't been useless. They haven't been useless; they've meant something. They've achieved something. And how to describe that?
Like I said, I wanna work on your question. I really do. In the meantime, I feel like there are all these urgent issues that I don't know the answer but I'm gonna keep working to end what I can see is a harmful, abominable policy that is based on lies and devaluation of human beings. I'm gonna continue to work on that even if I don't have an answer to your question in the meantime.
Thank you. Thank you so much for your questions, I have to say, and your energy. I feel like I'm gonna go out there.