After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world – a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro … two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
(Du Bois 1903, 2)
For as long as I can remember I have been aware that my identity is partly shaped by how I am viewed through the eyes of others. It is a symptom of being born in a society where I am the ‘Other’. An othered existence exists in opposition to the unmarked, the centre. I knew this when I entered into the discipline of anthropology. I was aware of the legacy of ethnographic practice as well as the direct connection between the process of othering, the spreading of colonialism, the role within the imperialist conquests of the past, the ‘truth’ of scientific racism, and the foundational tendencies of anti-blackness.
The violent relationship between Americans of African descent and the medical field has been fraught with ethically questionable practices, and pain that was directly linked to the race and class of those experimented on (two memorable examples to think about are the Tuskegee syphilis study and the brutal experiments of J. Marion Sims, the ‘father of American gynaecology’, and his tests on captive African women in South Carolina). This side of American history has translated into current methods of medical care that believe that people of African descent require less medicine, have an increased genetic probability to have high blood pressure, and can handle anything due to our extraordinary strength and genetic disposition. Yet socially and economically these very traits do not translate into strength, but dialogues that include rational explanations of inequality and oppression.
The current social landscape in the United States is one of binaries. On the one hand, I see what Blakey calls the high ground of anti-racism, and on the other side of the coin is a visible resurgence of hate speech and white-supremacist dialogues masked by such terms as ‘diversity of thought’ or ‘freedom of speech’. Although these two extremes look like polar opposites, together they set the stage for a new language of racism that comes nicely packaged complete with a new-found curiosity in commercial genetic testing (thinking 23andme) and the role of DNA analysis in understanding our authentic selves. Our new fascination with the power of our DNA genetic testing and learning about our ancestral pasts through a cotton swab of spit sent away in an envelope that helps us to understand everything from our family origins to our health can actually set in motion what Blakey describes as the idea that ‘biological variation determines human social ranks and conditions … the active ingredient of racism’ (p. 1; see www.23andme.com). This is not a new phenomenon. It harkens back to a time, some consider great, when science happened to marginalized people. In this age of misinformation, it is especially important for academics to place critical limits on the role biodeterminants can play in the analysis of social sciences.
I believe that for the social sciences the observer is always part of the analysis. This is a feature and not a bug. The premise that biodeterminants can lead to an understanding of how societies are organised is a precursor for minimizing one’s own biases. As a black social scientist, I understand that there is no pretext for minimizing my biases and perspectives. There shouldn’t be. My opinion and identity have in the past come into question. I have been transparent about bringing in my life experiences and the ‘personal’ into the interpretive process of my work (Battle-Baptiste Reference Battle-Baptiste2011). There is nothing about the scientific methods and praxis that outweighs the scientist and their relationship with their research. It also seems that in this moment, where competitive ideological positions are the norm, the hard scientist should not emerge as a trusted arbiter of understanding societal structures.
Scientists are directly and indirectly influenced by their environments, their life experiences and their social outlooks. Repetitive terms such as ‘recruitment and retention’ or ‘equity and inclusion’ are beginning to dictate most campuses and workplaces. And at the same time there continues to be an absence of diversity within the scientific lab that is producing the science we are supposed to trust. In a special yearbook issue The year of physical anthropology, Susan Anton, Ripan Malhi and Agustin Fuentes point out that, ‘No matter how well-intended the practitioners, social and political ignorance can lead to “cultural harm” in scientific research, resulting in mistrust, stigmatization, or weakened political authority for communities whose members participate in these studies’ (Anton, Malhi and Fuentes Reference Antón, Malhi and Fuentes2018, 159). The chance for mitigating these harmful effects in social sciences comes from not allowing biases to be hidden by a false sense of what science should be.
The mission of biodeterministic imagination is thick and purposeful. It is dangerous because it codifies the inequities of race and class within a ‘capitalist democracy’ such as the one we have in the United States. As an archaeologist, it is through the interpretation of black biological and physical anthropologists that I have been helped to shape and inform the methods I use to interpret material remains from peoples of the past. For generations, black archaeologists and anthropologists have also felt the impact of being seen through the eyes of others and have felt the sting of a world that casts the shadow of anti-blackness upon us without any cause for concern. If these biases are allowed to be hidden under the cloak of science, then the field is fertile for agendas that are detrimental to social justice and perhaps to the social sciences writ large.
The biodeteministic imagination can be discredited over and over again. Some of the works that I have studied towards that end include biological anthropologists such as Michael Blakey, Fatimah Jackson, Teresa Leslie, Rachel Watkins and Joseph Jones. My earliest influence was the work of W. Montague Cobb. He helped me to see how the very tools used to prove my racial and social inferiority could be used as tools in disassembling the ‘race’ work of turn-of-the-century eugenics. Cobb actively and purposefully used the same methods and data as his white counterparts. Cobb disproved race as the defining factor in high-performance or advanced athletic skills. And now, in 2020, Michael Blakey has once again brought to our attention the direct connection to the consistent use of biological determinism which translates into a means to justify the status quo of social and political inequalities. It has finally come to the point where we must abandon the practice forever.
Whitney Battle-Baptiste is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Center. A historical archaeologist, her research centres on the intersection of race, gender, class and sexuality. She is the author of Black feminist archaeology (2011), which outlines the basic tenets of black feminist thought and research for archaeologists and shows how it can be used to improve contemporary archaeology as a whole.
