The Emperor&#8217;s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that—that doesn’t go away.

There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me—at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often…

President Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin,” The White House: Office of the Press Secretary, (Washington, D. C., July 19, 2013). http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/19/remarks-president-trayvon-martin.

The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium

The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium

Rutgers University Press
2003-01-23
272 pages
14 figures, 24 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-2847-2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-3302-5

Joseph L. Graves, Jr., Professor & Associate Dean for Research
Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering
North Carolina A&T State University & University of North Carolina, Greensboro

In this groundbreaking book, Joseph Graves traces the development of thought about human genetic diversity. He argues that racism has persisted in our society because adequate scientific reasoning has not entered into the equation. Graves champions the scientific method, and explains how we may properly ask questions about the nature of population differentiation and how (if at all) we may correlate that diversity to differences in human capacity and behavior. He also cautions us to think critically about scientific findings that have historically been misused in controversies over racial differences in intelligence heritability, criminal behavior, disease predisposition, and other traits. Greek philosophy, social Darwinism, New World colonialism, the eugenics movement, intelligence testing biases, and racial health fallacies are just a few of the topics he addresses.

According to Graves, this country cannot truly address its racial problems until people understand that separate human races do not exist empirically. With the biological basis for race removed, racism becomes an ideology, one that can and must be expunged.

Tags: Joseph Graves, Joseph Graves Jr., Joseph L. Graves, Joseph L. Graves Jr., Rutgers University Press

This entry was posted on Monday, January 9th, 2012 at 06:53Z and is filed under Books, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Monographs, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Mixed Race Studies

The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium

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