“Dying Tecumseh,” a marble sculpture in the Smithsonian Institution, presents the Shawnee chief in a majestic light. (Photo courtesy of Frederick Pettrich, Smithsonian American Art Museum, CC)
In a recent flurry of executive orders from President Donald Trump, one warns of a “distorted narrative” about race “based on ideology rather than fact.” It cites as an example an ongoing exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum called “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture.” The show features sculptures spanning more than two centuries that demonstrate how art has shaped and reproduced racial representations and ideologies.
The order criticizes the exhibition because it “supports the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, and asserts that 'race is a human invention.'”
The executive order seems to contradict such statements: “While a person’s genetics influences their phenotypic characteristics and racial self-identification may be influenced by physical appearance, race itself is a social construct.” However, these words do not come from the Smithsonian; they come from the American Society of Human Genetics.
Scientists reject the concept that race has a biological basis. The claim that race is a “biological reality” does not correspond to current scientific knowledge.
I am a historian who studies race scientifically. The executive order contrasts a “social construct” with a “biological reality.” The history of both concepts demonstrates how modern science has come to believe that race was created by humans, not nature.
Race exists, but what is it?
At the turn of the 20th century, scientists believed that humans could be divided into different races based on physical characteristics. According to this concept, a researcher could identify physical differences in groups of people, and if these differences were passed on to their descendants, it meant that he had correctly identified a racial “type.”
The results of this “typological” approach were inconsistent. A frustrated Charles Darwin in 1871 listed 13 scientists who had identified between two and 63 races, creating confusion that persisted for the next six decades. Virtually every racial classification had its own classifier, since no two scientists seemed to agree on what physical characteristics should be measured or how to do so.
One of the difficult problems with racial classifications was that differences in human physical characteristics were minimal, so scientists had difficulty using them to distinguish groups. African American studies pioneer W. E. B. Du Bois noted in 1906, “It is impossible to draw a sharp line between the black and other races… in all physical characteristics the negro race cannot be distinguished by itself.”
Still, scientists kept trying. In an 1899 anthropological study, William Ripley classified people by head shape, hair type, skin color, and body type. In 1926, Harvard anthropologist Ernest Hooton, one of the world’s leading racial typologists, listed 24 anatomical features, such as “the presence or absence of the postglenoid tubercle and pharyngeal fossa or tubercle” and “the degree of curvature of the radius and ulna,” while acknowledging that “this list is certainly not exhaustive.”
All this confusion was the opposite of how science should work: as instruments improved and measurements became more precise, the object of study—race—became increasingly confusing.
Sourse: www.livescience.com
