Society is abuzz these days with concepts like DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and now JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion), for the DEI Star Wars fans. I hear them flowing from the mouths of executives, politicians, grant-making agencies, and higher education folks. You would think that as a race researcher, I would be over the moon to see so many picking up the mantle of DEI. However, I grow more concerned as I notice that within this flurry, those same people aren’t addressing systemic racism and certainly not white supremacism.
When we see this in research—when researchers treat race
only as a variable—it’s troubling. Amidst the DEI movement, I’ve seen calls to
consider diversity and inclusion in proposals sent to major grant-making
agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science
Foundation (NSF). Researchers, eager to acquiesce, respond by seeking a racial
diversity of participants and reporting results based on race.
Too often, that’s where it ends. In 2012, renowned higher
education researcher Dr. Shaun Harper published an article entitled, “Race
Without Racism.” In it, he critiques higher education research publications
that focus on race and racial disparities, but do not address racism. He
argues, “In order to get beyond persistent racial disparities and to realize
the vision for a version of American higher education that is truly equitable
and inclusive, we must first take account of racism and its harmful effects on
people in postsecondary contexts.”
Harper notes that a focus on race without a consideration of
racism allows for an analysis that casts Black, Indigenous, & People of
Color (BIPOC) in a deficit light. This situates BIPOC people as a problem needing
to be fixed or helped. As anthropology scholar Dr. Bianca Williams said, “I
don’t have a problem because I’m Black, I have a problem because you’re racist.”
Applying a deficit lens to BIPOC people ignores the root of the “problem” being
examined, blames the victim, and avoids the oppressor and oppressive system.
Beyond the deficit lens, there is a more insidious trend in
research that is particularly notable in the health sciences: the connotation
of race as inherent or biological.
Some background: Race is a hierarchical social construction
created by and for those who considered themselves White. Swedish botanist Carl
Linnaeus was one of the first Europeans to classify people by what we now know
as race. Linnaeus took a break from his work of classifying plant life and
decided to try his hand at people. His classifications included skin color and
a host of negative character attributes for those who were not European or
white.
The concept of race evolved thanks to the European settlers
colonizing the U.S. who wanted to assert their self-bestowed superiority and
justify heinous and genocidal systems, such as the enslavement of Africans and
stealing land from Indigenous people.
In her 2006 book, Medical Apartheid, Harriet A.
Washington describes how the U.S.’s history of medical research and aligned
pseudoscience (particularly that of Eugenics) led to the violent dehumanization of Black people,
in particular. She describes the vital role medical and health research has
played in upholding white supremacism in its work to “prove” the superiority of
the White race.
While most health researchers have disavowed such work and
its explicit racism, frightening statistics from the last decade like that of
Hoffman et al (2016) show that not just white people, but a substantial portion
of white medical students and physicians, believe that race is biological. In
one example, 58% of white participants in the Hoffman study thought that Black
people’s skin was thicker than white people’s skin. Twenty-five percent of
white medical residents concurred.
This brings me to my point and my concern. Race as a concept
was created, developed, and promoted to uphold White supremacy in all of our
systems, including education, the law, technology, and healthcare. When
researchers and the general public try to analyze and interpret research
results that include race as a variable, but do not account for racism, assumptions of race as biological are not only possible, but
probable.
As a remedy, researchers can begin to combat this trend by
simply asking of their results: How is racism at play? Do not ask what’s wrong
with Black, Brown, and Indigenous people that they score lower on standardized
tests, have worse health outcomes, or are arrested and incarcerated more. Ask how
racism is working in this system to disenfranchise and oppress the BIPOC groups
to the point that they are experiencing these disparities. It is in this acknowledgement
and action that we can genuinely make strides to combat inequity.
I am not calling for the removal of race, even as a
variable, from research. I’m calling on researchers to also include
considerations of racism in their research to resist a deficit lens and the
association of race with human biology.
According to the Oxford definition, a Jedi is “trained to
guard peace and justice in the Universe.” As researchers, the first step in our
JEDI training is to understand how the dark forces of racism are at work,
including within our own research.
Resources:
Problematizing Race as a Variable e-Seminar - ORDE
