Bioracism reborn?

Many science bloggers and writers put their thoughts into the form of essays that discuss a new book, or several new books where the writer sees a theme. We studied an example of this kind of book-review essay this month to see how such essays can work, especially in terms of structure and argument. The form is flexible and allows writers a lot of freedom to explore an idea or topic—that is, if you can avoid the trap of starting out just summarizing the book, which can cut off one's agency as a writer.

Through the example we looked at, we also pondered a disquieting theme: the return of race science—or, as the scholars Karen Fields and Barabara Fields suggest it should be more accurately termed, "bioracism".

The texts we discussed at our November meeting:

• “Why Do So Many Researchers Still Treat Race as a Scientific Concept?”, a book-review essay by Tim Requarth, the longtime former director of NeuWrite in New York, who now directs science writing at New York University. The essay discusses the book Superior: The Return of Race Science by journalist Angela Saini.
• “Science and Racecraft”, a set of short selections from the opening chapter of the book Racecraft by the scholar-sisters Karen Fields and Barbara Fields. Cultural critic Thomas Chatterton Williams has said that Racecraft entirely transformed the way he thought about race, and author Zadie Smith has said that the book "fundamentally challenged some of my oldest and laziest ideas about race".

We also referenced this more recent commentary article published in Nature:

• "Counter the weaponization of genetics research by extremists" by Jedidiah Carlson, Brenna Henn, Dana Al-Hindi, and Sohini Ramachandran

Perhaps also of interest from Science:

• "Mysterious 'ghost' populations had multiple trysts with human ancestors: Genomic studies show interbreeding goes back at least half a million years" by Ann Gibbons. Science, 20 February 2020.

Image: Slate; whitehuone/iStock/G