In June, CC Professor of Molecular Biology Dr. Phoebe Lostroh co-hosted a workshop with Grinnell College Professors Dr. Leslie Gregg-Jolly and Dr. Katya Gibel Mevorach at Grinnell College titled “Unteaching Racism: Understanding and Handling Misuse of Racial Categories.” The workshop was designed to support faculty members in fields where the use of racial labels are common so that they can unpack the implicit and explicit remnants of scientific racism. By examining how these categories have been misused to perpetuate racist ideologies, the workshop sought to empower faculty to challenge and dismantle these harmful practices. It was funded by a $20,000 grant, co-authored by Lostroh, Gregg-Jolly, and Mevorach, from the Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges (AALAC).
“There is no genetic basis for race,” says Lostroh. “By equipping educators with the tools to address implicit and explicit remnants of scientific racism, the workshop aimed to disrupt, and ultimately eradicate, misinformation that perpetuates discriminatory practices.”
The AALAC grant underscores the significance and potential impact of this workshop, reflecting the dedication and expertise of Lostroh, Gregg-Jolly, and Gibel Mevorach. Their collaborative effort will foster meaningful dialogue and critical engagement with issues of race and racism within the academic community.
“The grant paid to fund other faculty from around the country to come together for two and a half days this summer to talk about unteaching racism,” says Lostroh. “We had thirteen participants, about half of whom were from Biology departments, and the rest were from a variety of disciplines. Many of the people came from disciplines where it has long been known that race categories are inherited through our social life, not through our genes. But it seems like biologists still don’t always debunk this idea.”
Included as a resource in the workshop were publications by Brian Donovan ’01. After graduating from CC, Donovan attended graduate school at Stanford and began to explore how kids were learning about race in their biology curriculum. His line of research now looks at how genetics education affects social cognition, with beliefs about race and gender being just two aspects of that.
“He’s become an expert on demonstrating that if you teach genetics in the wrong way, you can unintentionally reinforce all kinds of wrong thinking about genetics, about determinism, and about reductionism,” says Lostroh. “One of my main roles in the workshop was to publicize his results and share them with other faculty because they’re so persuasive that we need to teach genetics a different way. He has not only discovered some bad ways to teach genetics, but he’s also discovered some good ways to teach genetics that actually debunk realism and the idea that race categories are biological from the very beginning in the context of a science class.”
Lostroh is a strong proponent of antiracism and its educational benefits in the classroom. She hopes that, through this workshop, the ideas she works with in her classroom every day at CC can start to affect change at other institutions.
“Antiracism belongs in our biology and genetics classrooms because throughout the history of biology, people who identify as biologists and claim biology knowledge, who claim expertise as biologists, have promoted racism,” says Lostroh. “We have to acknowledge that history and we have to actually actively unbuild that legacy or build something else to get away from that legacy.”
Lostroh points out that there are still disturbing trends where people, even in medical school, will learn racist ideas such as people with different skin colors having different physiology when it comes to their kidneys or their lungs or their pain sensitivity. She notes studies that show that people who are Black may not get prescribed appropriate pain medications because doctors are prejudice against them, or women of color, particularly Black women, having higher mortality rates during pregnancy and childbirth due to racist ideas about their anatomy or pain tolerance.
“When doctors and future doctors learn these racist ideas in the context of a biology class, or learn that genetics is simple and sort of unconsciously map race categories onto how they understand genetics, that is very harmful,” says Lostroh. “So, does it fit in with the liberal arts? Yes. We educate lots of people who go on to all kinds of careers, including careers in the biological sciences and medicine. We know that there are no biologically inborn human races from the Human Genome project, and from all the studies of genomics that we’ve done since then. So, this is an incredible scientific discovery that needs to be more widely understood.”
At the workshop, the attendees talked about individual projects that they could work on to bring this information about genetics and antiracism into their own classrooms.
“We found that several faculty, especially the ones in Biology, are definitely thinking of how to incorporate this information into their courses,” says Lostroh. “I also feel like Brian Donovan’s work was very illuminating and that many people are hoping to continue to promote his antiracist work as well.”