In Christian B. Sundquist's article "The Meaning of Race in the DNA Era: Science, History, and the Law", the author asserts a claim that the scientific classification and social segregation of several different peoples into racial subcategories was never 'inevitable' or 'socially justified', claiming that the separation of different races, even in the scientific front, is merely a result of archaic belief systems that now have researchers on two-century-long wild goose chases for the "race gene". Sundquist starts by defining terms such as "race", "sociobiology", and "anthropology", giving several definitions in many contexts, and then follows up by examining the work of famous scientists such as Blumenbach and Darwin, and how their beliefs and studies have influenced the world's thinking for generations. His purpose is to counter the perceived justification that many scientists have in searching for a biological difference between different races, since they do such under false pretenses, and such work will only prove to further separate different cultures on not only the social platform but on the professional and scientific platforms as well. He writes for those either involved in those fields or affected by those fields who also share his ideology that the "race race" is merely a sham reflecting 18th- and 19th-century closed-minded and misinterpreted beliefs and values.
Article Link: http://www.temple.edu/law/tjstel/2008/fall/Sundquist.pdf
MLA Citation:
Sundquist, Christian B. "The Meaning of Race in the DNA Era: Science, History, and the Law." Sundquist
Macro (February 3rd 2009). Web. 13 April 2012.
Annotation:
Sunquist's work will give a background to the setting for potential race theory studies in modern science, showing both a before and after of race theory and how it may still be studied under different names, and how the works of famous theorists may have directly or indirectly contributed to both the race theory of the past and the racial studies of the present.
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