Overview

Thinking Race clarifies the relationship between biology and race, showing how racism can result from a misguided blending of biology with social construction. Using arresting examples, Richard Goldsby and Mary Catherine Bateson aim to help readers accept the reality of human difference while understanding human unity. Controversial issues of race and IQ, race and athletic ability, and perceptions of race and beauty are examined, as are those of affirmative action and reparations for slavery. The authors also explore how income inequality, healthcare disparities, unequal access to education, an unfair justice system, and mass incarceration all call for constructive social policies that remodel American society in ways that will build a better, more resilient, and happier society. The goal is a society in which equal civil rights are clearly derived from the recognition of equal human rights, and equal opportunity provides the pathway to equitable results.

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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 College, and Northeastern University, and served as visiting faculty at Spelman College, Ateneo de Manila University in Manila, and Damavand College and the University of Tehran in Iran. She holds a joint doctorate in linguistics and Middle Eastern studies from Harvard as well as six honorary doctorates and is the author of five books (including a memoir of her parents) and coauthor 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 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 coauthored with Mary Catherine Bateson.

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