With advances in genetics and high-profile conversations about race in the headlines, it can be difficult for students to know: What’s real about race? We sat down with author Dr. Rina Bliss to discuss her new Norton Short, which offers a different way of understanding how race is socially constructed—even in the age of genomics.
What first inspired you to study the social misconceptions of race and the impact these misconceptions have on marginalized communities?
As a biracial person, I was conscious of and troubled by race as far back as I can remember. For most of my childhood, I mistakenly believed that race was entirely genetic. I was told it was something fixed that you inherited from your parents, and they from theirs. But I didn’t understand what race I was supposed to be, given my parents’ opposing statuses as White and Asian/Pacific Islander. And I believed in the racial hierarchy that was implied in that lie, which people in my community and pop culture seemed to agree on—that Whites were superior to all others. I also internalized racism towards Asians and Pacific Islanders, a.k.a. my own “in-group,” believing that my mom and her people (my Indonesian ancestors) were primitive and deserving of less respect and social status. But when I saw educators and other powerful “grown-ups” in my world mistreat me and other kids of color in middle and high school by railing at us with insults or voicing stereotypes that I knew were patent lies, I started getting mad about the injustices of this belief system. I started pushing back against the racial bias and stereotyping, calling out racist epithets and derisive statements. When I got to college, I was ready to take my critical stance on stereotyping, prejudice, and bias to a scientific level.
How have developments in genetics and/or biological anthropology research impacted your research as a sociologist over the course of your career?
When I began studying the social manifestation of race as the omnipresent, everyday reality that it is, I was mostly interested in the patent prejudices that I myself had experienced and witnessed. But I soon realized that I would have to reckon with my prior belief that race was simply genetic. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, social researchers had established that race was constructed by human interaction, so there was a lot of information on interactional biases.1 But I noticed that there was a growing biomedical, physical anthropological, and social epidemiological body of research seeking to determine the relationship between race and DNA. As the Human Genome Project began working towards its final map in 2003, genomic researchers questioned whether race was in some way genetic after all. I quickly pivoted my research on the social constructions of race in everyday life to investigate the unfolding of what I found to be a new genomic construction of race in science and society. Soon after, when the field of social genomics emerged, I again pivoted to study this new research area in order to document how it too was evolving societal notions of race. Alongside these advances, race-based drugs and CRISPR sprang up. Not long after, embryo scoring and AI genomics were born. With each new technological shift, I have seized the emerging opportunity to ascertain and explain the fast-changing nature of the social reality of race.
How might What’s Real About Race? help people to teach race as a social construct rather than a biological truth?
I wrote this book to help students and nonexperts—really anybody out there who might be just as confused as I was before I began researching race—to understand how and why race is a social reality and not simply genetics. I reveal the origin of the race concept in the early Enlightenment Era, and I identify the different paradigms for how people have characterized and defined race through time—a conception that has always been unstable. I show how race began as a set of lies about human differences that spun off all kinds of injustices and inequalities. I also chart the rise of the genomic paradigm of race that has overtaken all prior paradigms to get us to where we are today. Though DNA science has tried to paint a more complex picture of human variation, scientists have used racial classification to make it seem like race is a matter of DNA and that races can be understood as genetic populations. I offer an alternative way of looking at race: as a construct that manifests our social reality, in part through scientific doctrines and discourses. I want people to come away from reading my book with a sound understanding of the process of making the concept of race as well as the incarnation of race in everyday interactions. Race is both belief and action.
How do you think new technologies, like AI, are impacted by incorrect assumptions about race, and how could that impact students in the years ahead?
AI platforms are trained on human beliefs that are embedded and encoded in human communications. AIs, like large language models, create tokens from bits of text, sound, image, or footage and then predict the next logical communication based on prior relationships between those tokens. The corpora of training data that AIs tokenize are rife with racial beliefs and bias, so AIs are now becoming a big part of the social reality of race. AI developers are horrified when their AIs spit out racist text, sounds, images, and footage, but it should be no surprise given that the relationships between the items they tokenize are conditioned and structured by racism. To battle this new high-tech form of injustice, schools will need to begin training students in critical AI analysis and require courses on data and E-ethics as they pertain to racism. I recommend starting as early as kindergarten, because my elementary school–aged children already use AI in their classrooms. They are already facing the downsides of AI constructions of race. Universities will need to move quickly on training critical AI thinkers too, especially since they are the very institutions churning out AI scientists and developers. We need a workforce that can recognize and fight the racial injustice that AI is manifesting in our world.
Throughout What’s Real About Race?, you mention government institutions and industries that are driven by these misconceptions. How do you think the public and private sectors can successfully deconstruct their understandings of race?
Critical analyses of science and technology, mine included, have shown that there are no clear divisions between governance, industry, the academy, and even the media in terms of how they conceive of, communicate about, and conduct affairs on race. What we define as race in one domain is likely to impact all others, especially when the actors defining race are considered authoritative or influential. If we want to produce a more accurate depiction of race, the social reality, then we must marshal the authoritative and influential figures in those domains to change their tune. Today, the reigning paradigm on race that has been forged from actors in all these domains is what I call “Genomic Race.” Advocates of Genomic Race claim to highlight the interactions between our DNA and our social environments. However, they rely heavily on the notion that there are some deeper genetic differences to people with ancestral lineages from different continents. This false notion of “original genetic continental races” sets us back in our collective struggle to deconstruct harmful understandings of race, and it hinders us from doing the work we need to do to manifest a better understanding, definition, and paradigm of race as a social reality.
Over the course of your research and time in the classroom, how have you seen student reactions evolve around these concepts? Do you notice a significant difference from when you first began teaching about race?
Over the course of my research and teaching, I have not seen much change in student reactions, perhaps because racial inequality is not that different today than it was when I began teaching over a decade ago. On the good side, I have consistently seen students light up with wonder, amazement, empowerment, and many other positive emotions when confronted with my analyses of and teachings on race. On the bad side, I continue to hear how difficult it is for students to access critical information on race, especially before arriving at college. With governments and districts restricting and removing content along these lines, I expect that there will be even more want and need for books that can carefully and clearly explain what’s real about race.
What do you hope students and educators will take away from What’s Real About Race?
I hope that students and educators will feel the urgency to spread the word about the social reality of race. In this book, I talk about how our perceptions of race, our experiences of race, and others’ reactions to and treatment of us, and all the connected feelings that we experience as we move through our day, are a part of this juggernaut of constructing and reconstructing race. I hope readers will want to use their platform, no matter how expansive or limited they feel it is, to stand up for the social reality of race. I hope that they will feel motivated to actively manifest a new paradigm of race.
Interested in reviewing a copy of What’s Real About Race? Request your print copy here and keep exploring the Norton Shorts series.
1. This topic is discussed in Chapter 3 of What’s Real About Race? Additional citations include Greenwald, A.G., and M.R. Banaji. “Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes, Self- Esteem, and Stereotypes.” Psychological Review 102, no. 1 (1995): 4–27; Greenwald, A.G., D.E. McGhee, and J.L.K. Schwartz. “Measuring Individual Differences in Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, no. 6 (1998): 1464–1480; Nosek, B.A., M.R. Banaji, and A.G. Greenwald. “Harvesting Implicit Group Attitudes and Beliefs from a Demonstration Web Site.” Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice 6, no. 1 (2002): 101–115.
MEET THE AUTHOR
Dr. Rina Bliss is the award–winning author of Rethinking Intelligence, Race Decoded, and Social by Nature along with the Norton Short, What’s Real About Race?. She is an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Image Credit: Cyndi Shattuck