WEB DuBois and Scientific Racism

evergreen_web_banner.png

KBOO is open to the public! To visit the station, contact your staff person or call 503-231-8032.


Hosted by: 
Produced by: 
KBOO
Air date: 
Mon, 02/22/2021 - 9:00am to 10:00am

Scientific racism is the long-established practice of marshalling pseudo-scientific evidence to prove the biological inferiority of African-Americans and other people of color. Patricia Kullberg reads from and comments on two works by scholars of race and science, with an emphasis on how our values shape science. Jordan Besek, Assistant Professor of Sociology at University at Buffalo, writes about DuBois and science in his article: “W.E.B. Du Bois embraced science to fight racism as editor of NAACP’s magazine The Crisis,” published December 14, 2020 in the online journal, The Conversation. Dorothy Rogers, Professor of Law and Sociology at University of Pennsylvania, examines the contemporary re-emergence of race-based science and how it serves capitalist interests in her 2011 book: Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. For more on science and social justice see: Citizen Scientists, Race-based Medicine, Methanol Refineries, Citizen Scientists, and Doughnuts, and A Medical Sea-Change.

 

W.E.B. Du Bois in his office, ca. 1948, holding the first issue of The Crisis. W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, CC BY-ND

 

Download audio file

Audio by Topic: