"When most people talk about race, they are talking about skin color,"said Sam Evans, '01, one of the student organizers. "People assume that there are natural, even genetic differences that define races. That is not the case. This discussion will challenge those assumptions."The session is being sponsored as part of Hamilton's Levitt PublicAffairs Center ongoing series on race. This event is the only one of the series to address biological issues and racial biases in science.
Panelists:
Mark Nathan Cohen, Distinguished Teaching Professor at SUNY-Plattsburgh, teaches human evolution, "race" and human variation, culture and disease, civilization and health, skeletal analysis, and colonialism. He has done archaeological fieldwork in Georgia, Wyoming, Chile, Peru, Greece, Kenya, Tanzania, and Belize. Dr. Cohen's research examines the relationship between population growth, "progress" and changes in health and life expectancy. He is the author of Culture of Intolerance, a history of chauvinism and racism in the United States (Yale U.P. 1998)
Humanities educator, journalist and consultant Barry Alan Mehler has written extensively on issues of racism, genetics and human behavior, and eugenics. He is an associate professor of humanities at Ferris State University, and the founder and executive director of the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism (ISAR). ISAR is an organization that monitors campus racism and serves as a resource center for legislators, civil rights groups, and journalists. The institute conducts seminars and workshops on confronting campus racism.
Fatimah Jackson, professor of anthropology, University of Maryland is a biological anthropologist with training in blood parasitology, hemoglobinopathy detection and population genetics. Dr. Jackson is the author of papers "Scientific limitations and ethical ramifications of a non-representative Human Genome Project: African American response" and "Assessing the Human Genome Project: An African-American and Bioanthropological Critique." The later explores the history of scientific exploitation of minority groups, particularly the Tuskeegee syphilis experiment.
Organizers:
Jinnie Garrett, professor of biology; Sam Evans '01; Sofia Nasar '00; Jason Vachon '00; Sara Jackson '00; Sara Scott '01; Ross Downing '01; Wensy De La Nuez '00; and Rebecca Hamm '00.
