Trump and his administration are actively dismantling our economy and democratic institutions. One of the most recent parts of this assault is an executive order issued last week, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The title itself is Orwellian doublespeak since the order describes the rejection of truth and science, while it in fact aims to whitewash American history.
An entire section of the order is devoted to, “Saving our Smithsonian” Institution, the national complex of museums, education outreach programs, research facilities, and a large Zoo. The order singles out an exhibit at the American Art Museum because it, “promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct … ‘a human invention.'”
As noted in the New York Times, the exhibit displays many quotations from the Statement on Race & Racism published by the American Association of Biological Anthropologists a few years ago. The statement explains, “Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters,” which I think gets at the fundamental misconception most Americans have about race. Whether uninformed or outright racist and malicious, many people conceive of race as an invisible, unchanging essence that determines an individual’s capacities and behaviors. In the olden days race was thought of as ancestral and ‘in the blood,’ but in the genomic age people began attributing racial essence to DNA. All of these biological data—from blood to whole genomes—for at least the past fifty fucking years have shown that, again, “Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters.”
Now, some folks who call themselves “race realists” (you can’t spell “race realist” without “racist”) might point to scientific research about human genetic variation with graphs showing humans partitioned into statistically-inferred clusters corresponding roughly with geography. The problem that tends to arise from here is the over-interpretation this within-species variation. As Lewontin showed back in 1972, and subsequent studies have consistently confirmed with more and more data, the amount of genetic variation that distinguishes different populations is but a small proportion (less than 15%) of the overall variation within our species. What’s more, because this variation is scattered throughout all of our DNA, most of it should be “neutral” with regard to evolution, with little or no effect on how likely an individual is to survive or reproduce. Simply put, humans across the planet are more genetically similar than different, and the limited genetic differences between populations probably doesn’t really influence how they behave or what they are capable of. Even though geneticists have argued this for years, many Americans are still quick to over-interpret the biological significance of these minuscule genetic differences, often tragically so.
To the contrary, race as many people think of it today is a recent historical concept – a “Fatal Invention” as Dr. Dorothy Roberts explains in her 2012 book. This is the consensus among experts in both the natural and social sciences. Yet Trump’s executive order specifically rejects this well established knowledge that race is in fact “a human invention,” as the order quotes from the Smithsonian art exhibit. This is one of the many purposes of rejecting the science and claiming that race is a biological reality — it serves to naturalize social differences and social inequality. If you maintain that people’s qualities are genetically determined and that groups differ fundamentally in their inherited genetics, then you have justification for avoiding social interventions to racial (and other kinds of social) inequality. As Dr. Michael Blakey explained back in 1999, “Race is essentially a means of defining ethnic and social status groups as biological entities. … In a racist or White Supremacist society, such as the United States, this … will often become the basis for decisions about the allocation of social resources and the solutions to social problems.”
Trump and Musk are both known to harbor unscientific and racist views about genetics, and both have been associated with far right and often white supremacist groups. The recent executive order claims that by communicating the actual science of human variation and the history of racism in this country, the Smithsonian is “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” But with this administration, every accusation is a confession. They are actively dismantling our institutions and efforts that aim to address and repair the damage from centuries of racism, in order to advance their own white supremacist agenda (see for example here, here, and here).
Lawnchair Anthropology 