Genetics and Identity
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Genetics and Identity Introduction to the Special Issue Brian Donovan 1 & Ross H. Nehm 2 Accepted: 4 November 2020 / Published online: 14 November 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Many countries throughout the world are struggling to address longstanding inequalities stemming from deeply ingrained societal prejudices about race, ethnicity, sex, gender, disability, and sexual orientation.1 Prejudice can manifest itself in many different and often cryptic forms. A cognitive form of prejudice that influences how humans—particularly those living in Westernized cultures—make sense of societal inequalities is genetic essentialism (Henrich et al. 2010). Genetic essentialism is the belief that people of the same socially-defined group (e.g., race or gender) share genes that make them physically, cognitively, and behaviorally uniform, and distinct from other groups (Dar-Nimrod and Heine 2011). Several studies demonstrate that genetic essentialism mediates and moderates prejudiced attitudes toward racial minorities (Dar-Nimrod and Heine 2011), women (Brescoll et al. 2013; Morton et al. 2009b), and transgender individuals (Ching and Xu 2018). It also factors into ethnic violence, segregation, and discrimination (Halperin et al. 2011; Kimel et al. 2016; Morton et al. 2009a; Williams and Eberhardt 2008). As genetic science advanced through the twentieth century, this new knowledge was often used to reinforce existing sexist and racist social policies (Jackson and Depew 2017). Throughout this history, essentialist assumptions about social identities were embedded into United States (US) laws (Fox 2019; Jackson and Depew 2017; Kitcher 2001; Omi and Winant 1994), and cultural artifacts (Nelkin and Lindee 1995), such as educational materials (Donovan 2015b; Donovan et al. 2019; Morning 2008; Nehm and Young 2008; Willinsky 1998). As a consequence, US society—like many others—is imbued with implicit and explicit messages 1 We do not have the space in our introduction to unpack the definitions of these social concepts. Please refer to the papers in the Special Issue for a thicker description of their various conceptualizations. While we contend that these social categories are socially constructed through a complex interplay of culture and cognition, we also acknowledge that biological differences can be found within and between the groups that make up these social categories.
* Brian Donovan [email protected] Ross H. Nehm [email protected]
1
BSCS Science Learning, 5415 Mark Dabling Blvd, Colorado Springs, CO 80918, USA
2
Program in Science Education, Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University, Life Sciences Building 650, Stony Brook, NY 11794-5233, USA
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B. Donovan, R. H. Nehm
reinforcing genetic essentialism (Nelkin and Lindee 1995) and very few messages suggesting otherwise (Nelkin and Lindee 2004). Genetics education in America serves as an example. Several experiments have found that when students learn about racial differences in genetic disease prevalence (e.g., sickle cell anemia), it can uni
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