Learned inequality: Racial labels in the biology curriculum can affect the development of racial prejudice

Abstract

For over a century, genetic arguments for the existence of racial inequality have been used to oppose policies that promote social equality. And, over that same time period, American biology textbooks have repeatedly discussed genetic differences between races. This experiment tests whether racial terminology in the biology curriculum causes adolescents to develop genetic beliefs about racial difference, thereby affecting prejudice. Individual students (N = 135, grades 7–9) were randomly assigned within their classrooms to learn either from: (i) four text‐based lessons discussing racial differences in skeletal structure and the prevalence of genetic disease (racial condition); or (ii) an identical curriculum lacking racial terminology (nonracial condition). Over 3‐months that coincided with this learning, students in the racial condition grew significantly more in their perception of the amount of genetic variation between races relative to students in the nonracial condition. Furthermore, those in the racial condition grew in their belief that races differ in intelligence for genetic reasons significantly more than those in the nonracial condition. And, compared to the nonracial condition, students in the racial condition became significantly less interested in socializing across racial lines and less supportive of policies that reduce racial inequality in education. These findings show how biology education sustains racial inequality, and conversely, how human genetic variation education could be designed to reduce genetically based racism. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 54: 379–411, 2017

Toward a more humane genetics education: Learning about the social and quantitative complexities of human genetic variation research could reduce racial bias in adolescent and adult populations

“…Furthermore, our race interventions used these same representations to help students learn about genetic variation. Although a visual approach to representing genetic variation is common in population genetics research (Donovan, ), the representations of variation that we used in our study do not appear to be a common component of teaching about genetic variation. Instead, students tend to learn models of genetic variation with numbers (e.g.…”

“…A principal components analysis supplemented with a parallel analysis demonstrated that these two item types, between and within items, were statistically discriminable (see Supporting Information). As in previous studies (Donovan, ), we averaged the between race and within race questions separately. Then, we applied Equation to these data, which yielded a single proportion for each student that could take on any value between 0 and 1.…”

LOOKING BACKWARDS TO MOVE BIOLOGY EDUCATION TOWARD ITS HUMANITARIAN POTENTIAL: A REVIEW OF DARWINISM, DEMOCRACY, AND RACE. John, P. JacksonJr.David, J. Depew

“…Racial essentialists believe that: (a) biology causes people of different races to be physically, cognitively, and behaviorally different; and (b) same race individuals are physically, cognitively, and behaviorally uniform (Andreychik & Gill, ). Those who combine these beliefs with the assumption that biologically influenced abilities are immutable often argue that it is pointless to intervene socially to reduce racial inequality in society (Donovan, ). Today we know that racial essentialism is not supported by scientific studies of human variation (Donovan, , ).…”

“…New experimental research has demonstrated a cause‐effect relationship between the treatment of race in the biology curriculum and the development of racial essentialism (Donovan, , , ). When students learn about the prevalence of sickle cell anemia in Sub‐Saharan African populations or the prevalence of cystic fibrosis in Northern‐European populations in middle or high school biology classes it can unintentionally cause youth to perceive more genetic variation between races than actually exists (Donovan, ) and to infer that racial groups differ in intelligence for genetic reasons (Donovan, , , ).…”

“…We learn from Jackson and Depew () that Dobzhansky used the idea of heterozygote vigor to argue that there were serious flaws in the biological assumptions used to justify segregation. Yet, after the students in these studies learned how heterozygote vigor causes the high prevalence of sickle cell anemia in Sub‐Saharan Africans they actually became less interested in socializing across racial lines (Donovan, ). In support of Lewontin's claims, as students learned about the genetics of sickle cell anemia, they constructed discourses about human genetic deficiencies to justify racial inequality in the American education system (Donovan, , , ).…”