Can biology class reduce racism?
Teachers testing whether course can buffer against false rationales
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — 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 headon. 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.
At a recent training in Colorado, the dozen teachers who had volunteered to participate in the experiment acknowledged the challenges of inserting the combustible topic of race and ancestry into straightforward lessons on the 19th-century peabreeding experiments of Gregor Mendel and the basic function of the strands of DNA coiled in every cell.
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.
The history of today’s racial categories arose long before the field of genetics. Race, a social concept bound up in culture and family, is not a topic of study in modern human population genetics, which typically uses concepts like “ancestry” or “population” to describe geographic genetic groupings.
But that has not stopped many Americans from believing that genes cause racial groups to have distinct skills, traits and abilities. And among some biology teachers, there has been a growing sense that avoiding any direct mention of race in their genetics curriculum may be backfiring.
“I know it’s threatening,” said Brian Donovan, a science education researcher at the nonprofit BSCS Science Learning who is leading the study. “The thing to remember is that kids are already making sense of race and biology, but with no guidance.”
Human population geneticists have long emphasized that racial disparities found in society do not in themselves indicate corresponding genetic differences. A recent paper by leading researchers in the field invokes statistical models to argue that health disparities between black and white Americans are more readily explained by environmental effects such as racism than the DNA they inherited from ancestors.
Yet there is a rising concern that genetic misconceptions are playing into divisive American attitudes about race.
In a 2018 survey of 721 students from affluent, majority-white high schools, Donovan found that 1 in 5 agreed with statements such as “Members of one racial group are more ambitious than members of another racial group because of genetics.”
A similar percentage of white American adults attribute the black-white income gap to genetic differences, according to an estimate by a team of sociologists published this fall. Though rarely acknowledged in debates over affirmative action or polling responses, “belief in genetic causes of racial inequality remains widespread in the United States,” wrote Ann Morning, of New York University, and her colleagues.
For his part, Donovan has argued that grade-school biology classes may offer the only opportunity to dispel unfounded genetic explanations for racial inequality on a mass scale. Middle schools and high schools are the first, and perhaps the only, place that most Americans are taught about genetics.
The new curriculum acknowledges there are minor genetic differences between geographic populations loosely correlated to today’s racial categories. But the unit also conveys what geneticists have reiterated: People inherit their environment and culture with their genes, and it is a daunting task to disentangle them. A key part of the curriculum, Donovan said, is teaching students to “understand the limits of our knowledge.”
In the pilot study that helped Donovan secure a research grant from the National Science Foundation, students in eight classrooms exposed to a rudimentary version of the curriculum were less likely than others to endorse statements suggesting that racial groups have defining qualities that are determined by genes. The new study will measure the curriculum’s effect on such attitudes by asking students to fill out surveys before and after the unit.
The training exercise, which a reporter attended on the condition that names would be withheld to avoid jeopardizing the study, showed what it might take to offer students, as one Colorado teacher put it, “something better than ‘don’t worry about it, we’re 99.9 percent the same.’ ”
The lessons are structured around two fictional teenagers, Robin and Taylor, who both understand that the differences between the DNA in any two people make up about one-tenth of 1 percent of their genome.
But they disagree about how those differences intersect with race.
Taylor thinks that there are genetic differences between people but that those differences are not associated with race.
Robin thinks that the genetic differences within a racial group are small and that most genetic differences exist between people of different races.
The truth is that neither has a completely accurate view.
As human populations spread around the globe, with people living in relative isolation for millenniums, some differences emerged. But the genetic variation between groups in, say, Africa and Europe are much smaller than the differences within each group.
Taylor, who had downplayed the significance of race, eventually had to admit there were some proportionally small differences between population groups. And Robin had to acknowledge having vastly overemphasized the amount of DNA differences between races.
But the two fictional teenagers still clashed over the opening question. Robin believed that there are genes for athletic or intellectual abilities and that they are the best explanation for racial disparities in the NFL and in the worlds of math and science. Taylor said genes had nothing to do with it.
Again, neither was completely right.
In their typical classes, the teachers said, they highlight traits driven by single genes — the texture of peas, or a disease such as cystic fibrosis. It is an effective way to convey both how traits are transmitted from one generation to another and how alterations in DNA can produce striking consequences.
But such traits are relatively rare. In Donovan’s curriculum, students are taught that thousands of variations in DNA influence a more common trait such as height or IQ. Only a small fraction of the trait differences between individuals in the same ancestry group has been linked to particular genes. Unknown factors and the social and physical environment — including health, nutrition, opportunity and deliberate practice — also influence trait development. And students are given data about how racism has produced profoundly different environments for black and white Americans.
For Robin, the lessons said, grasping the complexity of it all made it impossible to argue that there was a gene, or even a few genes, specifically for athletics or intelligence, or that the cumulative effect of many genes could make a definitive difference.