Overview

Thinking Race argues that racism results from a misguided blending of biological facts with pernicious socially constructed ideas. This book aims to help readers accept the reality of human difference while understanding human unity. The esteemed author team of Richard A. Goldsby, a biologist, and Mary Catherine Bateson, an anthropologist, recognize race as primarily socially constructed but also having biological reality. They argue that misunderstanding the nature of race stands in the way of addressing and solving the problems of our current racial climate. The book addresses controversial subjects, exploring whether or not race-associated biological differences are differences that might impact mental ability, medical practice, or athletic performance. Because the black/white divide is a dominant and continuing theme of U.S. history and culture, the book devotes a good deal of attention to these groups, while also covering Native Americans and Asian Americans. Thinking Race provides a thoughtful and nuanced case for viewing race as a cultural play in an ancestral theater. This perspective, anthropological and biological, will build a framework for thinking about race and provide conceptual tools for better understanding and addressing this charged and often pernicious notion.

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9781538105016

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Reviews

Is race a social construction or a biological reality? In this brave and necessary book, Richard Goldsby and Mary Catherine Bateson provide a persuasive response: it is both. Using a wealth of genetic and cultural evidence, Goldsby and Bateson shed light on a question too often dominated by heat, and they explore the implications of their answer for medicine, social policy, and politics. -- William A. Galston, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution This scholarly, but completely accessible and entertaining, treatise examines what we term race providing food for serious thought on several levels. The authors bring expertise from their respective areas of scholarship to bear on this complex topical issue. Their discussion of the intricacies involved, not readily resolved by current DNA analyses or dissection of cultural issues, gives new and thoughtful insight. Having defined race in a reasonable way next are enumerated consequences of racial discrimination along with some suggestions to balance inequity. An open-minded reading of this treatment may require rethinking of common stereotypes and abandoning racist attitudes. -- Thomas J. Kindt, author This wise book by a distinguished biologist and an acclaimed anthropologist forthrightly, clearly, and concisely summarizes the objective evidence that there are races and racial differences: readers will find some surprising. The authors' take bears on many `hot-button' issues and provides compelling and reasoned insight into how society and culture, not biology, determines racial inequality. Thinking Race is a must read. -- Lydia Villa-Komaroff, Intersections: Science, Business, Diversity; former VP Research Northwestern University If we are ever to move beyond the racial divisiveness that continues to plaque our nation, we must have courageous conversations about race. Goldsby and Bateson have written an important and engaging book that can enlighten these conversations in the interest of social justice. By explaining the biology of race, and how race is largely socially constructed, the authors help us accept human differences among us at the same time that we understand the power of human unity. -- Johnnetta Betsch Cole, President Emerita of Spelman College and Bennett College for Women

Author Information

Mary Catherine Bateson is Robinson Professor emerita of Anthropology at George Mason University in Virginia. She followed her parents, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, into anthropology, with an emphasis on Linguistics and Middle Eastern studies. She has taught at Harvard, Amherst, and Northeastern Universities, and served as visiting faculty at Spelman College and Ateneo de Manila University in Manila, and Damavand College and University of Tehran in Iran. She holds a joint doctorate in linguistics and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard and half a dozen honorary doctorates, is the author of  five books (including a memoir of her parents), and co-author of two others, Thinking AIDS with Richard Goldsby and Angels Fear with Gregory Bateson.    Richard A. Goldsby is the Thomas Walton Jr. Memorial Professor emeritus at Amherst College. Now Visiting Scientist at MIT's associated Whitehead Institute, he has taught at Amherst, the Universities of Massachusetts and Maryland, Stanford and at Yale, where he was briefly Master of Pierson College. He has written books in the areas of immunology, cancer, AIDS and race  This is the second book he has co-authored with Mary Catherine Bateson. 

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