Professor Bobo noted in class that biology has become a virtually taboo realm for the social sciences to draw upon. Given that the hard sciences provide crucial means of explaining human activity, this appears to be a significant loss for the field of sociology and for the study of the African-American community. Such a loss can primarily be attributed, as our discussion suggested, to the suspicion generated by scientific racism.
Eugenics and Social Darwinism have made social scientists reluctant to account for biology in examining race, for fear that biological approaches have become inextricably tied to racism. Yet physiological factors account for universal human responses to stress and adversity; to recognize these responses as typical requires an understanding of biology that Social Darwinism has made difficult. Scientific racism, in other words, has held social scientists back from a comprehensive understanding of health in the communities they study.
It is also possible that the barriers scientific racism imposes are self-perpetuating. Sociologists’ unwillingness to include biological considerations in their analyses may have it difficult, for instance, to counter claims about a “culture of poverty” (often a racially coded term for African-American culture) that attribute poverty to individual decisions and cultural tendencies. Bringing in biological and psychological analysis would demonstrate that such a “culture” in fact consists of behaviors and health effects broadly observed when individuals of any background are confronted with scarcity. Because many social scientists hesitate to employ biology, it is difficult to meaningfully engage with these arguments, lending racist claims more power than they would wield absent the damaging legacy of scientific racism.
Great post Noah!
It raises issues for me about the separated realms of the social sciences and the natural sciences (I find hard/soft science to be value-laden terms that reflect the reigning hegemony of natural science as the end-all-be-all, when as we can see, it is just as subject to human folly) .
The social sciences have been given charge of the realm of the social world with its social processes, institutions, constructs and structures while the natural sciences are considered to govern “natural” phenomena. I’m a doctoral fellow in the Science, Religion and Culture program and we spend a lot of time thinking about the history of science and the production of scientific knowledge and the merits as well as pitfalls in the way it’s often taught as absolutely separate from the social world in which scientists are themselves embedded.
Your post makes me wonder, how might our knowledge look if the natural sciences took seriously that they too are part of social institutions, processes and constructs and thus, in doing their work on “natural phenomena,” they purposely gave attention to what their findings might mean for the socially constructed world? So in the same way that you suggest that social scientists learn to take seriously biology and apply it to their analyses, what might happen if we held natural scientists to that standard wherein their analyses of biology should be also contextualized within the social world? I think such interdisciplinary work would prove very useful in how our knowledge about the world is shaped and legitimized.