GeneBites

Social scientists, genetic diversity, and human evolutionary history agree that race doesn’t have a biological basis, yet many people still believe in biological race. A recent study published in CBE—Life Sciences Education found that an undergraduate genetics laboratory activity involving instructor-led discussion reduced the incorrect belief that race has a biological basis. However, the activity did not significantly impact awareness of racial issues such as institutional discrimination and racial privilege. 

Although science has often been a driver of major advancement in society, it has also been complicit in systematic harm. For instance, biological essentialism, the belief that traits are determined by biological factors rather than being impacted by sociocultural and environmental factors, has been used to justify racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. 

“Race” generally refers to a grouping of people by physical traits based on geographical ancestry, whereas “ethnicity” is more of a cultural grouping. Although race broadly maps to geographic groups, race is not biological. Even before recent advancements in genetic sequencing technology, anthropologists have long argued against racial essentialism. 

Despite race being a social construction, racism is perpetuated even within scientific settings. For example, color-blind racial ideology, which includes “color-evasion (i.e., denial of racial differences by emphasizing sameness) and power-evasion (i.e., denial of racism by emphasizing equal opportunities)”, has been noted within STEM classrooms. Concerningly, the power-evasive aspect of this ideology is associated with anti-Black prejudice.

Several studies have found that educational strategies that discuss genetic complexity or outright challenge biological essentialism can reduce biological essentialist beliefs. Yet the question of whether debunking biological essentialism can reduce color-blind ideologies has not yet been comprehensively explored.

For this new study, researchers created an experimental laboratory activity that involved students predicting a person’s population of origin based on a computer generated facial image. The student participants were then tasked with trying to match a set of skin pigmentation gene variants to a population using data from the 1000 Genomes Project database. After this activity section, an instructor led a discussion that involved topics including how elements of the activity were oversimplified, how the genetics of skin pigmentation is much more complex, how racial classifications have changed over time, and how the concepts of race, ethnicity, ancestry, and identity are often not clearly distinguished. 

To assess the effects of this activity on participant understanding of race, its impacts were compared against those of an activity about lizard evolution that also centered on the fact that grouping based on physical traits doesn’t accurately correlate with genetic closeness. Students in both activities took a pre-test survey, post-test survey, and an end-of-semester follow-up survey that measured biological essentialism beliefs and color evasive ideology.

The researchers found that the human-focused activity significantly reduced biological essentialism belief in the post-test survey and, to a less significant extent, the follow-up survey, while the control activity had a smaller, non-significant effect. However, neither activity significantly changed awareness of institutional discrimination and racial privilege.

In order to figure out whether there were differences in effectiveness for students in different racial groups, the researchers repeated the activity the next semester with some revisions and involved more students (since most students in the class were white, more participants were needed to increase the sample of non-white students). Although both groups showed similar levels of biological essentialism beliefs in the pre-test, only the white student group had a statistically significant decrease in the post-test, illustrating that this activity was not equally effective for all students. The researchers interpreted this difference between racial groups as a product of “a failure of the measurements employed to adequately capture the nuanced views that non-white students might hold on race due to their lived experiences as people of color.”

The findings of the study support the use of the activity to lower belief that race is a genetic classification in a mostly-white undergraduate setting; however, the difference in measured effectiveness between racial groups suggests that this study may not capture the full picture of student thoughts about race. Furthermore, the finding that color-blind racial ideology was not reduced even for groups where biological essentialism belief decreased suggests that teaching tools like these discussions alone may not be enough to undo implicit racial biases.

As the researchers from the study discussed, the lack of diversity in the sample population limited the analysis potential, since there were not enough non-white participants to look at differences between different non-white racial groups. The researchers also suggested that adding in-depth interviews of participants and testing the activity in locations with different sociocultural settings and histories could be useful for understanding whether the results from the study are generalizable to other undergraduate genetics education contexts. It may be helpful for future research in this area to also consider how educational outcomes may be affected by the differences across races of the importance of race in personal identity.

As researchers gain a deeper understanding of how students think about race, they may be better equipped to develop teaching tools to tackle problems of persistent racist ideologies.

Edited by Mandy Eckhardt and Jameson Blount