Race Science/Race Medicine

Catalog description

This course will explore how race has been defined through medical and scientific thought from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. It examines race as it has emerged as a medical construct and a “valid” topic of scientific inquiry in Western biomedicine. Students will consider the various origins stories of race and will critically assess its utility and deployment in biomedical settings. In this seminar, students will consider the history behind the creation of racial typologies, views around racial mixing, racial assimilation, and racial essentialism, the birth and resurgence of eugenics, the emergence of race-based pharmaceuticals, and the refashioning of race in the era of genomics. Finally, we will examine the ways in which science and medicine and is allied fields have been complicit in reenforcing beliefs in embodied innate racial differences, as well as the harms that those beliefs engender.