David E. Fastovsky

Here the striking inequities between races that currently obtain in the United States are highlighted. Racial justice is defined and presented as a subset of social justice, itself a product of European enlightenment philosophy. The evolution of the concept is traced through the establishment United Nations and the “Declaration of Human rights” to the work of 21st century philosophers. Attention is given to the concept of injustice and, in particular, racialized social injustice. The distinction is developed between personal and systemic injustices; as well as de facto and de jure injustices, as exemplified by racial segregation. Finally, five major subject areas (or themes) associated with racial injustice are visited, and detailed data associated with each are presented. These themes are housing; wealth; penal systems; schools; and health & mortality. The chapter highlights startling, but consistent, race-associated inequalities in each of these themes. The suite of data presented in this chapter provides essential context for understanding the immediacy of this issue.

This chapter contains the introductory lessons to help students learn about race/racism within the context of a biology class. There are three activities in this chapter: Activity 1: Defining Race and Racism; Activity 2: Biological grouping; and Activity 3: What does science say about human grouping? Working Toward Solutions. These activities aim to guide students through an understanding of the concepts of race and biological grouping. Students will begin defining race and analyzing data related to racism to understand its importance. Students will then explore how humans can actually be grouped based on biological data, before exploring what science and evolutionary theory actually say about race, then begin to create an action plan. These activities have students move beyond the problems created by racism to researching solutions that can reduce and remediate these problems.

Here is found a historical treatment of the specious science that ultimately, along with the “Curse of Ham,” justified the racist caste system in the United States. Linnæus proposed that human diversity could be arranged along a scale of increasing humanity, and as evolution came to be recognized as having taken place, Linnæus’s scale of humanity was contextualized broadly within the scientific community into an evolutionary model in which the most highly evolved humans were whites. Various “scientific” measures, such as skull size (whites were supposed to have larger skulls) were used to support this. Because other varieties (“races”) were determined to be not as highly evolved, it was recognized in the late 1800s that humanity could improve itself by culling inferior members from its ranks. This was scientifically sanctified by eugenics where the maintenance of racial “purity” was the subject of legislation against interaction and intermarriage, and “inferior” races have been, until quite recently, the subjects of government-funded biological experimentation. During the Trump Presidency, white supremacy—heretofore a politically marginal community—moved into mainstream discourse.

This chapter offers the last set of prescribed lessons and provides students with opportunities to find solutions to the problems of racism by looking into the biological and social benefits of diversity. Through their exploration students will learn about the immediate and long-term benefits of an inclusive, pluralistic multiracial democracy. Students will then look at how diversity can provide benefits to scientific fields and society in general. These lessons focus on diversity and taking positive action. The activities in this chapter are: Activity 6: Benefits of diversity and inclusion; Activity 7: Making Connections/Reflection; and a suggested additional activity: Understanding Variation in Human Skin Color from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

This chapter focuses upon post-1865 racism in the United states. The discordance between freedom and slavery there was particularly marked, given its founding philosophies. However, while slavery was legally abandoned in 1865, the caste system, upon which it had been established, remained so deeply ingrained that it continues to corrode American society to this day. The evolution of that corrosion is the subject of this chapter, as it moves from the early days of post-Civil War Reconstruction, through the imposition of “Jim Crow,” the suite of racist behaviors and laws that ensured that non-whites remained subordinate in virtually every measure available, to the present. Oppression is divided in this chapter between the Spanish terms descarado and solapado; the former overt unapologetic racism, and the latter a more covert form of oppression, in which the oppressor, while appearing and/or claiming to help relieve oppression, is actually magnifying it.

Chapter 1 is an introduction to the unusual approach of introducing racial justice in a high-school biological sciences classroom. It begins with the key observation that ultimately race-based oppression is always justified by science; that is, that there is some inherent biological determinism to racial hierarchies. A brief introduction to evolutionary biology as the unifying concept of the biosciences is given, followed by the point that as a result of the human developmental trajectory, high school is an excellent time to introduce such topics to students; who will have the intellectual maturity to distinguish between robust and weak science, as well as sufficient abstract reasoning to understand right, wrong, and moral ambiguity. It serves as contextual background for the three Lessons that are presented in Chapters 2–4.

This chapter contains lessons on the history of race-based oppression. The activities in this chapter ask students to explore historical scientific racism (oppressive application of science) and look at human migration through the lenses of biology. Utilizing the tools and practices of science (asking questions, planning and carrying out investigations, analyzing and interpreting data, engaging in argument from evidence, obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information), students will also explore the political rhetoric of human migration and its biological validity. The two activities in this chapter are: Activity 4: The historical relationship between racism and science, through storytelling; and Activity 5: Migration Lesson.

This chapter is a concise summary of modern ideas about the theory of evolution by natural selection. It begins with science as a way to understand the natural world, reminding readers that science, unlike religion, consists of theories requiring constant testing and modification or rejection as the tests refine understanding of phenomena. A history and explication of evolutionary thought, from ~1600—present includes: Evolution pre-natural selection; Darwin’s contribution; Mutationism; the New Synthesis; Punctuated evolution; Macroevolution; and Evo-Devo (Evolution and Development). A section positions evolutionary events in geological time. Some of the key controversies associated with evolutionary thought are introduced; however, it will be clear to readers of this Chapter that this is a strictly evolutionary text, in which, in the Conclusion, they will read that “Biology cannot be properly taught without teaching the theory of evolution with all of its predictive and explanatory power.”

Here the historical roots of “America’s original sin” are presented to show how slavery came about in a country that was designed from the outset to be a country of free people. Slavery is traced from its inception as wartime spoils through its colonial adoption as a raced-based commodity which, by the mid-nineteenth 19th century, reached its apotheosis in the southern states in America, and ultimately provoked civil war. By the late-1400s, slavery by wartime captives was abandoned, and instead, Africans were kidnapped and sold; thus slavery evolved from a caste system based upon war spoils to one based upon skin -color. Virtually from the beginning of the slave trade, the moral discordance between freedom and slavery required justification, which was provided through biological and religious explanations. In both explanations, slaves were determined to be inferior and, in effect, sub-human, a determination that opened the door to sub-human treatment of them. Capitalism intensified and accelerated the system. In short, four relatively recent events powered slavery in the United States: the transatlantic slave trade, colonization by Western European nations, 19th century capitalism, and a rigid of caste system.

In this guide, educators and authors David Upegui and David E. Fastovsky offer a pedagogical prescription for how you can integrate the study of racial justice with evolutionary biology in your existing high-school biology curriculum. Designed as a practical manual for teaching, the chapters focus on teaching concepts of equity through evolutionary biology modules, a cornerstone for building students’ scientific understanding of biotic diversity. The book provides pedagogical components alongside historical and scientific components, with contextual chapters that give teachers the background knowledge to understand the historical relationship between science and racism for topics such as natural selection, social justice, and American slavery and colonization. Ready-to-use lesson plans are situated in a historical and theoretical context of science as it relates to racial oppression, and demonstrate how rigorous science education can lead to your students’ liberation and personal empowerment despite the historically problematic history of some applications of science. These lesson plans and classroom exercises are presented in a way that introduces the timely extra dimension of anti-racism into the existing biology curricula without significantly increasing teaching loads. The contextual material provided allows the lessons to be implemented across a variety of classrooms regardless of initial familiarity with DEI. Ideal for secondary biology teachers and their students, particularly in grades 10-12, this book synthesizes timely ideas for high-school educators, harnessing the power of rigorous science to combat marginalization. Lessons and activities have been classroom-tested and are aligned with three different standards: Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS); College board (AP Biology); Vision and Change; and use the 5E format.