SECTION 2
Cranial Capacities to Eugenics How Medicine and Health Sciences Biologize Race "During my first semester of medical school at the Joint Medical Program [JMP], Professor Osagie Obasogie asked another student and me to colead a discussion designed to provide the historical and conceptual context for modern research ethics. Upon doing the readings assigned for the discussion, [we] were shocked and angered that neither of us knew about the history of California eugenicists and their connections to Nazi Germany, despite both of us having grown up in the Bay Area and gone through undergraduate education in the UC system. We must be aware of this racist history in order to challenge its current implications in the institutions that we are a part of. I am grateful to the JMP for allowing me to integrate critical race theory into my medical education through sessions like this one, and I feel a responsibility to share what I have learned."
S EC O N D -Y E A R M ED I CA L ST U D ENT
The conceptualization of race as biology is rooted in colonization. Race began to emerge in society as a function of colonization, as European colonizers began encountering natives and importing slaves who looked different than themselves. Scientific racism emerged from theories of biological inferiority, including Carl Linnaeus’s polygenism (the belief that humankind evolved from two or more distinct ancestral types or races) and Dr. Samuel Morton’s efforts to compare cranial capacities of white colonizers, native people, and enslaved people. These flawed theories cemented societal conceptions of skin tone differences and nonwhiteness as biological concepts. The consequences of such frame-
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works during colonization and slavery resulted in the foundations of race as we know them today: With slavery, however, a racially based understanding of society was set in motion which resulted in the shaping of a specific racial identity not only for the slaves but for the European settlers as well. Winthrop Jordan has observed: “From the initially common term Christian, at mid-century there was a marked shift toward the terms English and free. After about 1680, taking the colonies as a whole, a new term of self-identification appeared—white.”60 Such historical context laid the groundwork for racial inequality, including the expropriation of property
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