Baran:В Our culture has shown through countless examples that peopleвЂ™s potentials are not based on these racial groups. In fact, thatвЂ™s what anthropology was for 100 years- a sort of вЂњracial science.вЂќ The discipline classified various racial groups in a hierarchy of moral/intellectual capacity.Дr. Herron:В These pseudo-scientific forms of racism purported to show that there were natural, biological differences between human groups. But we still have this ideology persisting today.Дr. Gould called The Mismeasure of Man exposes the bad science. So, basically, this ideology developed to justify how slaves werenвЂ™t equal biologically.And then, unfortunately, you had anthropologists and scientists of that era who went about вЂњprovingвЂќ this-poor scholarship that has been invalidated many times over.ДЄ great book by Steven J. And, on the other hand, we had this economic reality of a slavery system that was part of the transatlantic slave trade. We had, on the one hand, these national ideals of freedom and equality. Race developed at a very particular point in time as our nation was forming. University of Texas, during a time when racial tensions in the United States are high, I met with my fellow Michigan alumni to discuss the concept of race, the value of affirmative action, and the ways future generations should be taught about race. Sixteen years later, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Fisher v. Among that cohort were names like James Herron and Michael Baran, future scholars in the field and current instructors at Harvard University (they teach Race in the Americas at Harvard Extension).

On the same campus PhD candidates in the globally ranked anthropology department were publishing breakthrough dissertations on race as a cultural construct-in the United States and around the world. Portions of this blog have been updated for 2021.Д«ack in 2000, in Ann Arbor, I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, during a time when the university was fighting to preserve affirmative action. вЂњIf I can inspire deep critical thinking on some of these issues, if I can get people to think more like a social scientist or an anthropologist, then I think we all will see things differently.

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