A front page article in the New York Times (December 8, 2019) presented the case that “the science classroom may be the best place to provide a buffer against the unfounded genetic rationales for human difference that often become the basis for racial intolerance.” I wish the arguments made in the article were true.
In my experience as a teacher, better classroom instruction on topics like race are definitely necessary, but academic evidence required to pass a test alone is never sufficient to change fundamental beliefs. If it was, the world would be mobilized to combat climate change and Donald Trump would not have been elected President. For deep-seated racial animosities to change, peoples’ experiences living and working with people who are different from them will have to change as well. How effective will new lessons on race and genetics be by themselves for students who live separate lives in segregated schools and communities? The biology curriculum approach could actually be detrimental if it becomes an excuse not to address more fundamental inequality in the United States.
According to the article’s author, “Biology textbooks used in American high schools do not go near the sensitive question of whether genetics can explain why African-Americans are overrepresented as football players and why a disproportionate number of American scientists are white or Asian. But in a study starting this month, a group of biology teachers from across the country will address it head-on. They are testing the idea that the science classroom may be the best place to provide a buffer against the unfounded genetic rationales for human difference that often become the basis for racial intolerance . . . The new approach represents a major deviation from the usual school genetics fare, which devotes little time to the extent of genetic differences across human populations, or how traits in every species are shaped by a complex mix of genes and environment. It also challenges a prevailing belief among science educators that questions about race are best left to their counterparts in social studies.”
All good, but definitely not enough. As a kid and teenager growing up in the Southwest Bronx near Yankee Stadium I had very little contact with Black or Latino youngsters, in school, on sports teams, or in the neighborhood. I attended a science-themed high school and had a basic awareness of human genetics. But it wasn’t until as a college student that I began working as a community organizer and camp counselor with an interracial community center in Brooklyn that my personal experience changed and my ideas about race and equality shifted from academic to part of my lived understanding.
Historically, I two of the biggest influences on changing racial attitudes in the United States, probably even more important than school desegregation which was more sporadic, widely opposed by whites, and less effective, was the integration of the military following World War II and of major league baseball and other professional sports leagues. As a teenager in the Bronx, one of my favorite Yankees was catcher Elston Howard and we rooted for homegrown basketball great Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and Knick championship teams led by Willis Reed and Walt Frazier. As a teacher in the 1980s I saw white kids wearing Larry Bird jerseys and black kids wearing Magic Johnson, but in the 1990s, they were all wearing Michael Jordan. My teenage grandson plays on multiple soccer teams and this has given him extensive experience partnering with other teens from very diverse backgrounds. On Sunday he and a Brazilian-Mexican teammate paired for a beautiful goal that helped his Brooklyn team defeat a Bronx team made up of teens primarily from Latino and African backgrounds.
During World War II the United States military, reflecting American society, was racially segregated. More than one million African Americans served in the military during the war making up about 10% of the troops. Black soldiers stationed in the Jim Crow south were subject to intense discrimination. Jackie Robinson, who later desegregated baseball, faced court-marshal charges when he refused to sit in the back of a bus. Segregation lines broke down during the Battle of the Bulge when troops were rushed to the front regardless of race to counter a German counter-offensive. In 1948, President Truman issued Executive Order 9981 requiring the full integration of all the military services. Despite stiff resistance, by the end of the Korean War the military was effectively integrated. Since that time, American young men and women have served together, frequently with Blacks in positions of command.
The article about the biology curriculum made a series of excellent points about American attitudes about race, but again, better instruction in high school biology classes while welcome, is not sufficient to change fundamental beliefs that students learn from their families and a largely segregated American society. Genetically distinct races do not exist, but many Americans continue to believe that socially defined demographic groups inherit different skills, traits and abilities. In 2018, a survey was conducted among over 700 students attending majority-white high schools in affluent communities. Twenty percent of the students agreed with statements such as “Members of one racial group are more ambitious than members of another racial group because of genetics.” Another study reported similar results from interviews with white American adults.
I welcome the proposed changes to the biology curriculum, but academic school learning by itself is just not that powerful. A 1993 study by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian-American psychologist, on what high school students think about during class made some very strange discoveries. He found that “in a typical history class where the teacher was lecturing about Genghis Khan’s invasion of China and conquest of Beijing in 1215, only two out of 27 students were thinking about China.” But that didn’t mean these two students were thinking about the lesson either. One of the students reported that he “was remembering the meal he had when he last ate out with his family at a Chinese restaurant.” The other student “was wondering why Chinese men wore their hair in a ponytail.”