Angela Davis, Amartya Sen, and Ice Cube

This week my intro anthro class is studying race. Explaining why ‘race’ and folk heredity are bad science but omnipresent cultural constructs is something that every anthropology professor has to do over and over and over again. I sometimes find the anthropological knee-jerk against race unsatisfying because it often takes the form of a a sort of blind prejudice “culture determines everything and biology determines nothing and if you don’t agree with me you’re racist” sort of deal. Also, a lot of the time anthropological critiques of race show how race is a cultural construct and differs from place to place. While this is true, it doesn’t answer most students’ question — are human beings naturally divisible into a small number of discrete groups with differing natural characteristics and abilities? I mean, _all_ beliefs are cultural constructs, but whether they are _accurate_ or not is another question. Contemporary natural science is a cultural construct with a complex historical genealogy — but that by itself doesn’t mean I should fear driving over bridges because the engineers ‘just had culture’. Even more thoughtful critiques of authority of bench science like those found in science studies tend to make students eyes glaze over — you need to spend a _lot_ of time in graduate school before you’d trust Latour over Mayr. So I like to teach Jonathan Marks’s “What Does It Mean to be 98% Chimpanzee”:http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9172.html, since Marks (who, god bless him, has “PDFs of all his articles free online”:http://personal.uncc.edu/jmarks/pubs/main.html) deals with issues of genetics straight on and attempts to distinguish genetic science from folk heredity. It’s a snarky, pugnacious book that is highly readable and manages to squeeze in interesting little bits on the history of physical anthropology as well. I’d highly reccomend it.

At any rate, I spend a lot of the class slowly unprying my student’s idea of race. “Why are so many african americans professional athletes?” becomes “Why are so many professional athletes african american?” (because there are millions of african americans and very very few professional athletes). Then I try a thought experiment: if excellence in athletics is explained by genetic endowment, perhaps Australia’s dominance in Rugby League is due to the Australian Rugby gene? Obviously not, say my students, since Australians are white, and our weirdo American intuitions only like genetic explanations for non-white people.

Then I point to “Amartya Sen’s”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen work in “Development as Freedom”:http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-829758-0 which demonstrates that African Americans are less likely to live to 45 (if they reach the age of fifteen, i.e. with adjustments made for infant mortality) than people in rural India and China. Also I believe — although this is off the top of my head with NO evidence to back it up — based on current projections any african american born today has a 30% chance of being incarcerated. Perhaps african americans have the ‘third world conditions in first world countries gene’? (By the way, the reference to Sen’s article “The Economics of Life and Death” is incorrect in at least my version of Development as Freedom — his argument on mortality rates is actually located “here”:http://www.citeulike.org/user/rex/article/116927) None of this is an _argument_ about race, of course — it’s just some thought experiments to limber up people’s heads. Marks does most of the genetics arguments.

One of my students, however, asked me for more information about the prison and mortality figures. Now, due to my sense of professionalism, I can’t go around inflicting my lefty personal leanings on my students, and so in class I try to be very balanced. However, I am now BLOGGING so to everyone who is reading this I reccomend “Angela Davis’s”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Davis latest book “Are Prisons Obsolete?”:http://www.sevenstories.com/Book/index.cfm?GCOI=58322100778090. It’s _only seven dollars_ if you order it from Seven Stories Press, who put it out. Come on, aren’t your NPR reflexes just aching to buy this _progressive political book_ by a _strong, independent woman of color_ from a _small, independent publisher_? You know you want to.

The other option, of course, is to read “Angela Davis’s 1992 interview with Ice Cube”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0041-1191%281992%290%3A58%3C174%3ANH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7 (JSTOR enabled only :( ). Word up.