The rhetoric of research has drastically transformed overtime. In the past, research studies were full of documented biases that were accepted as "critical and scientific analyses" ; however, the new age has proved that we are capable of achieving scholarly equity within the STEM field by breaking the boundaries that previous STEM research had bound disenfranchised groups in.
Prior to today's advancements, research was prejudiced against towards women, people of color, the uneducated, and the most financially unstable. At the time, empirical observations and stereotypes were manipulated into reliable facts and statistical data. Research was conducted in a retrogressive fashion rather than progressive: they oftentimes began with a conclusion and then branched out from that preconceived notion to legitimize systemic oppression.
SCIENTIFIC RACISM
Biased research papers about disenfranchised groups populated the scientific field, yet those in the field accepted their results and poor methodology because it furthered the racist political agenda against minorities.
The conception of race is primarily rooted within biological features, which was attributed to scientists such as Carolus Linnaeus (1707 - 1778), who created a principal system of classification (otherwise known as Binomial Nomenclature) to divide organisms in an "orderly fashion". The application of Binomial Nomenclature also extended towards homo-sapiens; this was conventionally accepted in the world of scientific reasoning. Linnaeus' classification resulted in a racial system that left an unjust footprint not only in European hierarchy but in other social structures as well. Examining the historical context, the ones enforcing a similar classification are usually those with power. For instance, an analysis conducted within The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at The Millennium, provided an example of Thomas Jefferson who advocated in an influential essay that "all men are created equal" even though his views clearly entailed that Blacks "are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind".
Another discriminatory concept originated from a physician of medicine named Paracelsus (1493 - 1541), who held the idea that "the human races were created separately" (A Brave Old World). The attitude that stemmed from his thinking damaged social equity by enabling European monarchs to confirm their perception that other races were inferior. Europeans dominated the globe and tethered polygenic thinking with religion (i.e. thinking that classification of races was measured by God).
Polygenism - the theory that humans evolved from different origins (thereby perpetuating and inflaming scientific racism even more so) - grew in the early 19th century with well-known polygenist contributors such as Louis Agassiz, Samuel Morton, Josiah Nott, and George Robin Gliddon who "used various methods, including the measurement of cranial volume, to determine genetic inferiority of the African race" (A Brave Old World). These experiments failed to provide concrete evidence regarding "biological issues," but Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, which emerged in the 1870s, strengthened polygenist thinking with the idea of biological diversity. This was then furthered within societal hierarchies (including racial) with the "survival of the fittest" concept, as coined by sociologist Herbert Spencer. This gave cause to the growing social inequality in both England and the United States, changing the social landscape immensely. Those who adopted this theory also developed a superiority and inferiority complex, as well as a colonial mentality, that had far reaching implications on race relations to this day.
BIASED AND UNETHICAL RESEARCH
**Most, if not all, the research detailed here may be triggering or disturbing to some, so read with caution.**
During the Gilded Age, coined by Mark Twain to describe the internal, corrupt transactions of business despite the American economy gaining wealth and profit, Social Darwinism centered itself on the belief that "it is right for the strong to crowd out the weak" (Diane B. Paul). These odious doctrines and misapplication of Darwin's theory of natural selection further legitimized political and economic stances of businesses at the time, therefore "crowding out" the workers (who were oftentimes blamed that it is their fault for their financial fate) and people of color and other religions (who were oftentimes discriminated against, and were mistreated more often outside of their workplace). The concept of Social Darwinism would later become the foundation for the Eugenics movement.
Francis Galton (1822 - 1911), a statistician who studied eugenics, placed forth the idea that taxpayer money was wasted by investing them in "social programs for the biologically inferior, who were nothing but a burden to society" ("Social Darwinism"). Eugenicists usually funded programs to benefit those that fit the standards in regards to lifestyle and health:
"For instance, the Race Betterment Foundation in the United States promoted positive eugenic programs (such as regular health check-ups) to ensure well-being and longer life of those with favourable traits" ("Social Darwinism").
The Race Betterment Foundation was founded in 1911, and was one of the first scientific research bodies to support eugenics research. According to Black's book titled War Against The Weak, after World War I, German and American eugenicists cooperated in international organizations. German eugenicists enacted the 1933 law called The Prevention of Hereditarily Defective Offspring (or otherwise known as sterilization law). The Nazi regime commenced their racial science-based research and developed "a mass sterilization of genetically diseased persons" ("Nazi Racial Science"). Those who had the following hereditary conditions were subject to be sterilized: schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorder, feeble-mindedness, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington's chorea. One of them was Gerda D. who was wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was one among an "estimated 400,000 Germans who were forcibly sterilized" ("Nazi Racial Science"). The Blood Protection Law was later enacted in September 1935, in which the Nazi Regime banned marriages or any sort of sexual relation between Jews and non-Jewish Germans.
Furthermore, the incorporation of Mendelian genetics (genes and traits inherited from parents to children) into the eugenics field spurred more racial degradation, and it is especially evident in the legislatures passed in the USA prior to 1933. They legalized "compulsory sterilization, immigration restriction" towards "the genetically unfit, and the reaffirmation... of existing anti-miscegenation laws" ("Was Nazi Eugenics Created in the US?").
Stephen Jay Gould's book,Women's Brains, details the various unscientific research by scientists such as Broca and his disciples. He spoke against the cranial measurements and observations in misogynistic researches:
"Brain weight decreases with age, and Broca's women were, on average, considerably older than his men. Brain weight increases with height, and his average man was almost half a foot taller than his average woman. I used multiple regression, a technique that allowed me to assess simultaneously the influence of height and age upon brain size. In an analysis of the data for women, I found that, at average male height and age, a woman's brain would weigh 1,212 grams. Correction for height and age reduces Broca's measured difference of 181 grams by more than a third, to 113 grams."
"Women were singularly denigrated but they also stood as surrogates for other disenfranchised groups. As one of Broca's disciples wrote in 1881: 'Men of the black races have a brain scarcely heavier than that of white women." This juxtaposition extended into many other realms of anthropological argument, particularly to claims that, anatomically and emotionally, both women. and blacks were like white children—and that white children, by the theory of recapitulation, represented an ancestral (primitive) adult stage of human evolution. I do not regard as empty rhetoric the claim that women's battles are for all of us.'"
TO READ THE ENTIRE ESSAY:
Another research study that was completely dehumanizing and unethical was the 1932 Tuskegee Experiment, also known as the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, when no treatment was recognized for syphilis. Initially, 600 men were enrolled in the experiment (399 with actual syphilis, and 201 who did not have any). Participants consisted primarily of sharecroppers, most of them who had never met a doctor. The doctors who launched this experiment were from the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), who informed (lied to) their participants that they were being treated for "bad blood". In reality, the participants who willingly enrolled were not medicinally treated. Although it was intentionally made to last 6 months, the study extended to 40 years. During this extended period time, researchers provided no medical care whatsoever as the participants died. Around the mid-1960s, a disease investigator by the name of Peter Buxton discovered the Tuskegee Experiment and "expressed to his superiors that it was unethical" (Nix, Elizabeth). Since the researchers continued despite the complaints, Buxton leaked the story to a reporter, Jean Heller of the Associated Press. 28 participants had already contracted syphilis, and more than 100 had passed away in the duration of the experiment. As a consequence of this experiment, the African American community came to distrust public health care.
FOR FURTHER READING: CONTEMPORARY ISSUES RELATED TO SCIENTIFIC RACISM (Educational, Health, Social, & Occupational Statuses)
***The consequences of the this STEM-related past are still apparent today***
EDUCATION
HEALTH CARE & OVERALL HEALTH
-Racial/Ethnic Discrimination and Health - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447717/
-Effects of Gender Discrimination and Reported Stress Drug Use Among Racially/Diverse Women in Northern California - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2869482/
-THE STATE OF RESEARCH ON RACIAL/ETHNIC DISCRIMINATION - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3347711/
OCCUPATIONAL -Racial Diversity... - https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/01/09/blacks-in-stem-jobs-are-especially-concerned-about-diversity-and-discrimination-in-the-workplace/
-Fostering Success of Ethnic and Racial Minorities in STEM by Robert Palmer (Published 2012).
REFERENCES:
“A Brave Old World: An Analysis of Scientific Racism and BiDil®.”PubMed Central (PMC), 1 Jan. 2006, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2687899/#b5-mjm9_1p54.
Libretexts. “5.1: Linnaean Classification.”Biology LibreTexts, 14 July 2020, bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_General_Biology/Book%3A_Introductory_Biology_(CK-12)/05%3A_Evolution/5.01%3A_Linnaean_Classification#:%7E:text=life%20on%20Earth.-,All%20modern%20classification%20systems%20have%20their%20roots%20in%20the%20Linnaean,unique%20two%2Dword%20Latin%20name.
“Nazi Racial Science.”United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/nazi-racial-science. Accessed 13 July 2020.
Nix, Elizabeth. “Tuskegee Experiment: The Infamous Syphilis Study.”HISTORY, 29 July 2019, www.history.com/news/the-infamous-40-year-tuskegee-study.
“Social Darwinism.”The Eugenics Archives, 29 Apr. 2014, eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/tree/535eee377095aa0000000259.
“Was Nazi Eugenics Created in the US?”PubMed Central (PMC), 1 May 2004, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299061.
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