Cultures and Knowledge Workshop Reading List: "Quantifying Race: How Numbers Divide Us"

On February 22, the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge will present the second in their Cultures and Knowledge Workshop series for the Winter Term. This workshop, titled "Quantifying Race: How Numbers Divide Us," will be presented by Dr. Iris Clever.

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Many of us have interacted with biometric technologies through facial scanners and fingerprints, either on our phone or at the airport. This talk will discuss how these technologies build on older racial research practices. Around 1900, anthropologists and biometricians introduced measurements and statistical methods in racial research to infuse it with precision. With skull-measuring instruments and formulas, they transformed skulls into data templates and quantified racial research. British and American researchers also used these metrical approaches to challenge racial dogmas, including Nazi racism. At the same time, the talk will show how they continued to reproduce old racial biases in their new methods and theories. Iris Clever's research thus reveals how biometric practices were considered objective and reproduced prejudices and assumptions. Presented by Dr. Iris Clever, SIFK Postdoctoral Researcher at the Rank of Instructor.

About the presenter: Iris Clever is a historian of science, medicine, and technology whose research explores why and how science measures what it measures. Much of her work is concerned with the quantification of bodies, the human experience of measurement practices, and the role bodies and technologies play in defining the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity in science. Her current book project, The Lives and Afterlives of Skulls, reveals how and why biometrics emerged in the 19th and 20th century as an innovative tool to shed new light on human variation while it continued to perpetuate old racial prejudices in algorithms, instruments, and human data. Iris teaches widely in history of science and medicine, cultural history, STS, race, and gender. She holds a Ph.D. in History from UCLA and a B.A. and M.A. in history from Utrecht University.

Below is a list of further reading on the topic of the workshop, compiled by Dr. Clever:

Social Mendelism: Genetics and the Politics of Race in Germany 1900-1948 (Cambridge UP 2020)
Amir Teicher  

Amir Teicher challenges the preoccupation with Darwin's eugenic legacy by uncovering the extent to which Gregor Mendel's theory of heredity became crucial in the formation - and radicalization - of eugenic ideas. Through a compelling analysis of the entrenchment of genetic thinking in the social and political policies in Germany between 1900 and 1948, Teicher exposes how Mendelian heredity became saturated with cultural meaning, fed racial anxieties, reshaped the ideal of the purification of the German national body and ultimately defined eugenic programs. Drawing on scientific manuscripts and memoirs, bureaucratic correspondence, court records, school notebooks and Hitler's table talk as well as popular plays and films, Social Mendelism presents a new paradigm for understanding links between genetics and racism, and between biological and social thought.

Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics (University of Chicago Press 2020)
Jenny Bangham 

Blood is messy, dangerous, and charged with meaning. By following it as it circulates through people and institutions, Jenny Bangham explores the intimate connections between the early infrastructures of blood transfusion and the development of human genetics. Focusing on mid-twentieth-century Britain, Blood Relations connects histories of eugenics to the local politics of giving blood, showing how the exchange of blood carved out networks that made human populations into objects of medical surveillance and scientific research. Bangham reveals how biology was transformed by two world wars, how scientists have worked to define racial categories, and how the practices and rhetoric of public health made genetics into a human science. Today, genetics is a powerful authority on human health and identity, and Blood Relations helps us understand how this authority was achieved.

Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity (Stanford UP 2021)
Elise K Burton

The Middle East plays a major role in the history of genetic science. Early in the twentieth century, technological breakthroughs in human genetics coincided with the birth of modern Middle Eastern nation-states, who proclaimed that the region's ancient history—as a cradle of civilizations and crossroads of humankind—was preserved in the bones and blood of their citizens. Using letters and publications from the 1920s to the present, Elise K. Burton follows the field expeditions and hospital surveys that scrutinized the bodies of tribal nomads and religious minorities. These studies, geneticists claim, not only detect the living descendants of biblical civilizations but also reveal the deeper past of human evolution.

Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity Press 2019)
Ruha Benhamin 

Ruha Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life.