Update 2018: The New York Times published an Op-Ed by David Reich which threatened to further contribute to the race revival. As Jonathan Marks writes, “Reich, like many geneticists writing about race, does not really know what he is talking about.” Agustin Fuentes, together with 68 scientists and researchers published a response: How Not To Talk About Race And Genetics.
As I note below, there was never a rebuttal to Armand Marie Leroi’s “A Family Tree in Every Gene” (2005) in the New York Times, so we can safely say that the Times has been at the forefront of attempts to revive scientific racism. See also The unwelcome revival of ‘race science’ in The Guardian (March 2018).
At the same time, we should be wary of the notion that racist science is experiencing a “revival” as opposed to simply a continuation. Two important correctives: Scientific Racism Isn’t ‘Back’–It Never Went Away by Edward Burmilla in The Nation and Textbook Racism: How scholars sustained white supremacy by Donald Yacovone in The Chronicle. As Yacovone writes “to appreciate why white supremacy remains such an integral part of American society, we need to appreciate how much it suffused our teaching from the outset.”
For comprehensive current coverage of race and racism in anthropology, see the Race and Racism in Anthropology page, which covers biological origins, colonial categories, structural racism, colorism, and white supremacy as analytical term.
Anthropology Attacked on Race & Science
From the time of Franz Boas and the immigrant head shape studies, anthropology provided new ways to think about race. Boas should have won. Race was debunked. But since 2000 there has been a race revival, with an attack on anthropology.
In some ways Boasian anthropology did win. Very few people today claim biological appearance leads directly to a particular language or culture. But in other ways, Boas lost. Almost immediately, race became culturalized. People simply accepted that talking about culture was the polite way to talk about race (see When culture starts looking like race).
The Race Revival Timeline
One sign of this loss came in 2007 when James Watson, one of the discoverers of DNA, tried to publicly revive ideas about race and intelligence, claiming he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours–whereas all the testing says not really.”
This trend became notable when Armand Marie Leroi wrote a 2005 opinion piece for the New York Times, “A Family Tree in Every Gene.” Leroi became the dashing young geneticist who said traditional race ideas were just fine. Leroi’s op-ed has never been refuted at the level of the New York Times.
Coupled with the tremendously irresponsible reporting of Nicholas Wade, always quick to accept anything with a genetic-claim, it seemed the official position of the New York Times was to accept traditional race thinking. Wade’s reporting culminated in his 2014 book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.
Then in 2018, David Reich’s New York Times op-ed prompted the response from Agustin Fuentes and 68 scientists: How Not To Talk About Race And Genetics.
Why Anthropology’s Message Failed
After fifty years of teaching about race, the message has not registered. In part this is because of internal problems:
First problem: The phrasing of social construction makes it sound like anthropologists claim people are all biologically the same. Anthropologists are definitely not saying that humans were all the same. Human biological variation is real and important; anthropologists were the first to scientifically describe this variation. Human variation is simply not usefully grouped according to traditional races.
Second problem: The separation of the social from the biological. Anthropologists have not made it clear how the social world has biological implications. That US Black infant mortality is more than twice white infant mortality has certainly much more to do with social conditions than biology, but obviously mortality is a biological effect (see Race Becomes Biology).
Third problem: The popularity of pseudo-forensic anthropology, which on television seems able to identify race from bones. It is not always apparent how race identification is a probabilistic guess about social categories, not an absolute measure deduced from bones. (See the next section on Race Reconciled Re-Debunks Race for extensive discussion.)
Race Revival: What Should Anthropology Do?
Rather than examine problems with the anthropological message, some prefer the more benign possibility that the anthropological message has just not had enough time to sink in, has not been loud enough, or has not been eloquently communicated. However, the message has been coherently delivered for fifty years, communicated by some of the most effective spokespeople and writers: Ruth Benedict, Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, and even Jared Diamond in “Race without Color” (1994). Nevertheless, the race revival regularly occurs within the group of people who call themselves scientists, from people who should have heard and understood the message, and are now attacking anthropology.
Anthropology needs alternative approaches. Fortunately we can turn to the next section, Race Reconciled Re-Debunks Race.
Related Resources
Comprehensive overview: Race and Racism in Anthropology – Complete coverage from biological origins and colonial categories to structural racism, colorism, and white supremacy as analytical term.
Contemporary perspectives:
- Race as Social Construction (2024) – Why racism produces race, not the reverse
- Whiteness as Unmarked Category (2024) – White privilege, intersectionality, and institutional racism mechanisms
Historical perspectives:
- Anthropological Fieldwork Challenges Scientific Racism (2024) – How early anthropologists like Boas, Mead, and Hurston used fieldwork to challenge racial determinism
- Biological Anthropology and Racism (2011) – The entangled history of evolution studies and racial categories
Teaching resources:
- A Guide to Teaching Race after Charlottesville (2017) by Kristin L. Krueger
- Teaching Race (Bioculturally) Matters: A Visual Approach for College Biology Courses by Amelia R. Hubbard
Broader context: Power Analysis – Understanding how power systems create and maintain structural inequality