In its focus on genetics and race, global newspaper coverage of athletics is far from “post-racial”

Posted in Articles, Communications/Media Studies, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Social Science on 2015-09-13 02:27Z by Steven

In its focus on genetics and race, global newspaper coverage of athletics is far from “post-racial”

The LSE’s daily blog on American Politics and Policy
The London School of Economics and Political Science
London, United Kingdom
2015-09-10

Matthew W. Hughey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

Devon R. Goss, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology
University of Connecticut

With the years of racially segregated sports now long behind us, many would consider that sports coverage is color-blind and post-racial. In new research which examines newspaper coverage of race, sport and genetics from 2003 to 2014, Matthew W. Hughey and Devon R. Goss find that this is not the case. They write that the media persistently reinforces the notions that African American’s athletic success is based on biology, while whites’ comes from hard work and intelligence. They also debunk the ideas often seen in the media that race has a biological reality which can be defined by genes, and that the historic process of slavery somehow eliminated ‘weaker genes’ from the African American population, making them a more athletic race.

For many, sport represents the ultimate color-blind space, affording a level playing field where only one’s training and skills are the hallmarks of competition. Hence, racist and prejudicial beliefs and phenomena are both literally and figuratively, out-of-bounds. Moreover, sport has been understood as an activity that promotes racial harmony amongst both participants and observers. But such a claim is a bit simplistic.

To make sense of the correlation between different racial groups’ success and failures amidst different athletic events, many draw from the deep well of scientific racism to quench their thirst for explanatory knowledge. For instance, some research has found that many athletes believe that white sporting success is attributable to intelligence, while nonwhite success is accredited to genetically predisposed bodies—a longstanding cultural trope known as “white brains versus black brawn”—that has been around for at least a century. After African American boxer Jack Johnson became the heavyweight champion of the world in 1908, he precipitated a slow reconsideration of the assumption of nonwhites’ physical inferiority—a central tenet of early 20th century racial science and eugenics. Fast forward to our contemporary moment and the banal ubiquity of this trope among sports commentators is well known, and was even recently panned by the comic duo Key & Peele

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How beliefs in biological differences can undergird racial and policy attitudes

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy on 2015-08-25 01:10Z by Steven

How beliefs in biological differences can undergird racial and policy attitudes

The London School of Economics and Political Science
2015-08-24

W. Carson Byrd, Assistant Professor of Pan-African Studies
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky

Beliefs in biological differences between racial groups linger in both scientific and public discourse. Recent advances in genetics and genomics influence public understandings of racial inequality. In a recent study examining whites’ views of race, genetics, and public policies in the U.S., Carson Byrd finds that beliefs in biological differences between racial groups can influence people’s support for policies aimed at reducing racial inequalities, and uncovers the complexities of how people conceptualize and utilize race to understand everyday life.

It has been 15 years since then President Bill Clinton and leading scientists of the Human Genome Project made their highly-acclaimed proclamations that race at the genetic level does not exist. At the time this supported the long-held narrative of scholars that the once prominent beliefs in biological determinism (race as a genetic reality) and racial essentialism (human behavior is anchored in group-based biological differences) had been all but completely laid to rest in the archives of history, particularly after the fall of the Nazi regime and the end of the Holocaust after World War II. However, these beliefs in race and genetics may be making a comeback as genetic and genomic research gains in popularity and media visibility. As sociologist Lawrence Bobo and colleagues recently note in their analysis of survey data, there is a recent uptick the last decade in the belief that there are innate (i.e., biological or genetic) racial differences that drive racial inequality…

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A Post-Genomic Surprise: the molecular reinscription of race in science, law and medicine

Posted in Audio, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, Videos on 2014-11-17 02:12Z by Steven

A Post-Genomic Surprise: the molecular reinscription of race in science, law and medicine

The London School of Economics and Political Science
Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
London, United Kingdom
2014-11-06

Speaker:

Troy Duster, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology
Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy
University of California, Berkeley

Chair:

Nigel Dodd, Professor of Sociology
London School of Economics

Professor Duster will analyse the resurgence of the idea that racial taxonomies deployed to explain complex social behaviours and outcomes have a biological and genetic basis.

Download the audio (01:29:49/43.2 MB) here. Download the video (01:29:27/767.1 MB) here.

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