Do we need to worry about scientists racializing their data and conclusions today?
Scientists also now claim – and I mean scientists broadly but primarily I think people who are looking at this new genetic data – they say that we shouldn’t worry about the ways in which we talked about race in the past, that scientists would never make those kinds of mistakes in their studies of human variation today. I think we always have to hold those kinds of comments with a kind of skepticism. Because we believe, and I think there’s a lot of evidence to show, that scientists are part of their social context, that their social ideas, their ideas about what race is, are not simply scientific ones, are not simply driven by the data that they’re working with. They’re also informed by the societies in which they live. And to that extent, then, it’s not a separation between science and society. It’s the ways in which science is in society. And therefore our cultural and political and social beliefs about race do inform scientists’ interpretation of their data about race. And I think it
