Ordering the Human: The Global Spread of Racial Science (Race, Inequality, and Health)

Modern science and ideas of race have long been entangled, sharing notions of order, classification, and hierarchy. Ordering the Human presents cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship that examines the racialization of science in various global contexts, illuminating how racial logics have been deployed to classify, marginalize, and oppress. These wide-ranging essays―written by experts in genetics, forensics, public health, history, sociology, and anthropology―investigate the influence of racial concepts in scientific knowledge production across regions and eras. Chapters excavate the mechanisms by which racialized science serves projects of power and domination, and they explore different forms of resistance. Topics range from skull collecting by eighteenth-century German and Dutch scientists to the use of biology to reinforce notions of purity in present-day South Korea and Brazil. The authors investigate the colonial legacies of the pathologization of weight for the Maori people, the scientific presumption of coronary artery disease risk among South Asians, and the role of racial categories in COVID-19 statistics and responses, among many other cases. Tracing the pernicious consequences of the racialization of science, Ordering the Human shines a light on how the naturalization of racial categories continues to shape health and inequality today. Table of Contents Preface Introduction, by Eram Alam Part I: Stability and Circulation 1. Origins of Races, Organs of Intellect: Polygenism, Political Order, and the Enlightenment Construction of Cranial Race Science, by Paul Wolff Mitchell 2. Unbecoming Subjects: Psychiatry, Race, and Disordering the Human, by Eric Reinhart 3. Locating the Child in Racial Science: Scenes from Latin America, by Sebastián Gil-Riaño and Julia E. Rodriguez 4. Race and Sameness: On Ordering the Human and the Specificities of Us-ness and Other-ness, by Amade Aouatef M’charek 5. The Racial Calculus: Security and Policy During the COVID-19 Global Pandemic, by Denise Ferreira da Silva Part II: Purity and Mixture 6. Biometric Hybridity: Anglo-Indians, Race, and National Science in India, 1916–1969, by Projit Bihari Mukharji 7. “Multicultural Genes in Our Blood”? Genetic Governance and Biocultural Purity in South Korea, by Jaehwan Hyun 8. The Dilemmas of Racial Classification in Brazil: Reflections on Two Contemporary Case Studies, by João Luiz Bastos and Ricardo Ventura Santos Part III: Past and Promise 9. Facing the Past: Human Skulls, Facial Reconstruction, and National Identity in the Middle East, by Elise K. Burton 10. Racism and Weightism in the Māori Community: From Weight-Focused Health to Indigenous Solutions, by Isaac Warbrick 11. After Race Classification: Grappling with South African Indigenous DNA in Practice, by Noah Tamarkin 12. The South Asian Heart Disease Paradox: History, Epidemiology, and Contested Narratives of Susceptibility, by Alyssa Botelho and David S. Jones 13. Roots of Coincidence: The Racial Politics of COVID-19, by Banu Subramaniam List of Contributors Index