AnthroBytes: short, digest-style series produced by the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA) in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association (AAA).
Host: Dr. Siobhán McGurk.
Guest: Dr. Rachel Watkins — Associate Professor of Biological & Cultural Anthropology, American University.
Focus: Tracing the history of the race concept, unpacking "scientific racism," and spotlighting Watkins’s own scholarship.
• Race as essential biological difference: early anatomists/physicians elevated visible traits (skin color, hair texture) to markers of innate ability, intellect, morality, and “fitness.”
• Dr. Watkins (biological anthropologist) underscores: surface differences represent minimal biological power — they lie on continua of variation all humans share.
• Period of origin: long 18th–19th centuries, beginning with Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778).
Linnaeus’s famous \text{kingdom} \rightarrow \text{phylum} \rightarrow \text{class} \rightarrow \text{order} \rightarrow \text{family} \rightarrow \text{genus} \rightarrow \text{species} hierarchy included a subspecies level.
He named four human “sub-species”:
• Homo sapiens Europaeus (“European”)
• Homo sapiens Asiaticus (“Asiatic”)
• Homo sapiens Americanus (“Indigenous American”)
• Homo sapiens Africanus (“African”).
Each subspecies carried phenotypic descriptors AND behavioral/intellectual judgments (e.g., Europeans = rational; Africans = “low intellect”).
These layered descriptions forge the template for later racial hierarchies.
• 19th-century forerunners sought empirical confirmation of racial hierarchy.
• Method: harvest and measure skeletal collections labelled “White,” “Black,” “Indian,” etc.
• Craniometry (Samuel Morton):
Amassed hundreds of skulls.
Used cranial capacity & angles to “prove” European superiority.
Measurements interpreted through a priori racial categories (circular logic).
• Racial categories quickly turned hierarchical.
• Ideology: Europeans at apex; Africans at base.
• Traits as “natural” evidence that Africans required supervision ⇒ moral justification for enslavement.
• Additional pseudo-biological claims: disease susceptibility, lung capacity, pain tolerance, etc. — all mapped onto Black bodies to rationalize exploitation.
• Athleticism stereotype: enduring belief that Black bodies are innately better sprinters/jumpers — traceable from Jesse Owens vs. Hitler narrative to today’s 100\,\text{m} dash line-ups.
• “Positive” stereotypes (e.g., “Asians are math geniuses”) remain essentialist and perpetuate race thinking.
• Complementary racism = insidious because it masquerades as flattery while reifying difference.
Anthropologists juggle two imperatives:
Teach race as a social construct lacking biological validity.
Expose and analyze racism’s material impacts.
Strategy advised by Watkins: attend to context — e.g., a track final isn’t “natural,” but a product of access, training, economics, history.
• Track example: lineup dominated by named Black athletes is socially produced, not evidence of innate racial fitness.
• Basketball timeline: once mostly Jewish players → mid-20th-century Black dominance → now far more diverse. Demonstrates flux, contradicts essentialism.
• Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP): aimed to showcase shared humanity.
• But race’s social power bends interpretation of genomic data: researchers & the public mine genes for racial confirmation.
Genetic ancestry tests market “Who you are” narratives.
Violates principles: genes reveal probabilities, not discrete racial essences.
Influenced by Dr. William Montague Cobb — first African American PhD in biological anthropology.
Cobb’s skeleton collection assembled specifically to debunk skeletal race typing by illustrating intra-group diversity.
Treat humans as bio-cultural beings: biology entwined with social embedding.
Examine skeletal collections through cultural & historical lenses:
Watkins curates Cobb’s collection; analyzes not only existing skeletons but documented individuals whose remains are missing.
Experiment with non-traditional forms:
Fictional narratives to humanize skeletal data.
Reconstructing population samples holistically (including absent remains) to mirror original community makeup.
Integrate Black feminist theory:
Builds on feminist turns in archaeology & bioarchaeology (e.g., Whitney Battle-Baptiste’s “Black Feminist Archaeology”).
Calls for analogous turn in biological anthropology, still lacking.
• Biological anthropology today remains predominantly white & male.
• Need dual critique:
(a) Race/racism in materials studied (skeletal remains, genetic data).
(b) Racial politics of the field itself (gatekeeping, research questions, hiring).
• Watkins: data production must be accompanied by reflexive cultural reading of both data and researchers.
Visible human variation ≠ discrete, hierarchical races. All phenotypes reside on shared biological continua.
Scientific racism historically underwrote slavery, colonialism, segregation, and lingers via “complimentary” stereotypes.
New genetic technologies can reinscribe old racial myths unless interpreted critically.
Bioanthropology must fuse biology with culture, adopt intersectional feminist frameworks, and diversify its practitioner base.
Deconstructing race entails tackling conceptual, methodological, and institutional levels simultaneously.
Cobb skeleton catalog (Howard University).
Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Black Feminist Archaeology.
Critical analyses of HGDP & commercial genetic ancestry testing.
SCA website (colanth.org) for teaching materials; AnthroBytes podcast archives.
• Ethical: misinterpretations of biology have profound human costs; scientists bear responsibility for countering misuse.
• Philosophical: challenges Enlightenment rationalism that treats racial categories as “objective.”
• Pragmatic: educators should embed race‐as‐social‐construct lessons within discussions of systemic racism, not separate them.