It is unethical to teach evolution without confronting racism and sexism (updated, additional resources)

It’s been 1.5 years since I posted this: https://ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2018/11/it-is-unethical-to-teach-evolution-no.html

There were so many ugly comments under its repost at the Evolution Institute.  But what was actually worse than the inane white supremacist shit on social media was a not insignificant resistance among professors and teachers who teach biology/evolution and who felt strongly that confronting racism was not their job. 

“There’s no room in the semester” was common, and there was also plenty of “that’s not my problem.” 

Maybe recent, intense anti-racist activism in response to a rapid series of horrific, racist violence on top of a racist pandemic on top of a blatantly and shamelessly racist Administration has changed some of those scientists’ minds about what is and what is not their problem.  

If so, perhaps these resources I’m sharing below will help others design their approaches to tearing down racism in their evolution courses, like I try to do. 

In the 2018 post, I suggested that people bring in anthropologists, social scientists, journalists, historians, etc to deal with racism and sexism if they’d rather collaborate or punt on the problem, but I guess that working with colleagues in other departments isn’t taken as a serious suggestion. No idea. But it was a serious suggestion. I’m not great at this but I’m always trying to get better and I’m more than willing to help colleagues who are less experienced than I am. I’m experienced enough to get my human evolution course designated to count for “diversity and inclusion” general education credit and so are many anthropologists, some of whom may be working at your very institution! Look around!

I teach a whole unit on race/racism and sexism in my introductory Human Origins and Evolution course (APG 201). It’s at the very end. I begin the unit with our first coverage of Neanderthals and we explore how they’ve been othered throughout history. Students easily see how before any Neanderthals were known to science, that their scientific treatment fits with how Linnaeus and his peers and those he influenced (like Darwin) othered and categorized humans, justifying human oppression with bad evolutionary “logic,” in an increasingly global political economy through to today.  Darwin’s just-so story about how intelligence evolved is just horrid and so are his passages about the “lower races” and how they relate to other primates (as opposed to Europeans who are, you guessed it, the higher races). It’s always a struggle to decide whether to read those passages from Descent of Man aloud or not; some semesters I have and others I haven’t, but I always share Darwin’s b.s. on race (and gender), even if I don’t read it out loud.  After that history lesson about the foundations of evolutionary biology, we cover eugenics, Ota Benga, and how race, the system of oppression, has had negative biological consequences on human health.  It’s important that students learn that “race” is not a synonym for biological variation, ancestry, or skin color. Despite many of them being so progressive, many still think “race” is just human biological variation. It’s clear, for many of them who take APG 201, that there is no race without racism which is why race is not merely about how humans vary in skin color and so talking about skin color variation, for example, is not talking about race. We consider, deeply, how perceived physical differences are too easily employed as evidence for imaginary cognitive and behavioral differences. We take on the exclusive, oppressive history of the telling of our shared human origins story so that this story, that belongs to us all, can be embraced by us all. 

Not being able to lead those weeks of lecture and discussion in the classroom, and, instead, having to somehow lead 120 students through these issues remotely during the pandemic this semester wasn’t ideal.  But the discussion prompts that they worked on, remotely, are prompts that I will be keeping even when we return to face-to-face learning. I’m pasted them here, and at the end of this post, I included the letter I wrote to my students at the end of the semester. 

1. Facts are good and all, but…

2. Being kind to people isn’t going to end racism, sexism, etc… It takes hard work.