05/28/2020: The Complications of Race, Gender, and Class... oh my!
Race and gender are super prevalent in our society, especially now in the age of feminist uproar and gender battles. Is there more that one gender? Is race even real?
This is something I have seen many people argue differently on, especially professors. Being a biology student, biology professors seem to avoid the subject as a whole. For instance, when talking about biological sex in a genetics course, the professor emphasized we would not cover any cultural meanings, and that gender ought to stay out of the classroom. Obviously, this did not feel very welcoming to a nonbinary biology student interested in what makes a human, well, human. Race, on the other hand, has truly never even been touched upon. Humans as a whole are talked about, and occasionally variation between them, but the term race has never been brought into the conversation. I assume it is likely not to "offend" anyone.
My anthropology degree never shied away from the subject, which I found to be interesting coming into the conversation approximately 2 years later than my peers. The first course I took was Human Biological Variation, which had a whole week spent on talking about how race is fake. In forensics, the professor was insistent that when talking about sex, we were not talking about gender. One of her slides even included that you should not assume gender based on the outerwear of a body found, because transgender people and crossdressers exist. Forensics also did not cover how to determine race in skeletons, because she said it was found to be widely inaccurate and that race in anthropology today was not really considered "real".
You would assume the two subjects to be similar, considering they are both biologically based, however, this is not what is found. One group of science is more based on scientific method, the other group is based on accuracy and inclusion. If only these two could play off of each other more and provide a more accurate history of the world and its creatures.
Interesting, and somewhat disconcerting, to hear that the professor said " gender ought to stay out of the classroom." It strikes me as part of what Dr. Dunsworth piece was about: that we can't ignore the impacts sexism and racism and dualism has had on evolutionary thinking.
ReplyDeleteI didn't realized they don't talk about IDing race in forensics class. That is good to hear they are moving beyond that false understanding of how variation is partitioned out. I do wonder what the next steps will be in bioanth. Seems that there has been a lot of change going on in how we conceptualize these ideas and how binaries don't work
It was disconcerting, but I suppose he didn't want to get into a debate about gender and sex. He also constantly said gender instead of sex. We also never touched upon intersex individuals, which is 3% of the population, but we covered genetic mutations are way more rare than that. It is interesting, to say the least.
DeleteThe professor said it generally still is taught, but she did not believe in it and believed we should move past it! Even in watching the first episode of Bones (which I understand is somewhat dated) they used race to identify a victim. While I suppose it could be useful in some circumstances, there is just so much variation in day-to-day life.