Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Research Grant: Beyond the Religious Pursuit of Race: Re-examining Secularization within Scientific Theories of Human Difference

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Introduction. The research question at the center of this project concerns how the idea of permanent racial traits, a notion consistent with the static and openly religious view of nature assumed during the 17th and 18th centuries, continued to have explanatory power within scientific discussions of human difference even after the wide acceptance of Darwinian evolution and the 19th century discoveries made in geology and archaeology. Intellectual Merits. The researcher will argue that contrary to conventional wisdom, theistic forms of reasoning concerning racial groups continued to play an important role within modern scientific formulations of race, even though explicitly religious claims about human origins were no longer thought to be empirically viable. Using archival materials, the researcher will show how American scientists and physicians drew upon 18th century naturalist ideas that racial traits were fixed, innate and the outcome of a "transcendent" force, in their effort to explain human heredity, racial admixture, and disease between the 1870s and the early 1950s. The researcher will support the view that enduring theistic notions about the "intentions of nature" justified ideas of racial fixity. Finally, the researcher will consider mid 20th century efforts to contest the notion of fixed racial traits by looking at the understudied work of the African American physician Charles V. Roman, and the famous UNESCO Statements on Race written in the 1950s. Potential Broader Impacts. With the rising interest in racially specific medicine, the increased use of genetics in the behavioral sciences, and persistent tensions between scientists and religious communities in regard to theories of human origin and evolution, it is crucial that scholars, policy makers and the lay public in the United States have a comprehensive understanding of the early history that shaped modern scientific studies of race. The aim of this dissertation is to advance current knowledge about how modern racial categories within medicine and genetics were forged through the use of both scientific and religious conceptions of the human in order to provide crucial information to scholars, policy makers, and the lay public.