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Abstract
The idea that race is a social construct is something of an article of faith in sociology today. Moreover, sociologists often contend that scientists across the disciplinary spectrum have arrived at the same conclusion. In this view, academics have reached a consensus on the constructed nature of race, while the American public retains traditional, essentialist beliefs in race as a biological marker.
This scenario raises the question of why such a science/lay gap might persist, nearly 60 years after the biological concept of race came under heavy academic attack in the wake of World War II. Borrowing from the sociology of knowledge, this overarching inquiry translates into four research questions that trace the career of racial constructionism across the stages of knowledge production, transmission, and reception: (1) How do social and natural scientists today define the concept of race? (2) What kinds of understandings of race do scientists transmit to the American public? (3) How does the non-academic public react to scientists' messages about race? (4) How do conceptions of race vary with individual socio-demographic characteristics and with institutional setting?
To address these questions, this project collects and analyzes data from two sources: a sample of 92 high-school textbooks published from 1952 to 2002, and interviews with 92 faculty and undergraduate students at four northeastern universities. These qualitative data bring nuanced empirical information to the study of racial conceptualization, an area of inquiry that has received little research attention compared to the ongoing and large-scale investigation of Americans' racial attitudes.
The dissertation findings cast serious doubt on the presumption of an ideological divide between unified scientists on one hand and the public on the other. The results also contradict several expectations about the relationships between social status and racial conceptualization. They point to the importance of moral boundary-marking as an implicit force shaping debate about the nature of race. Finally, I place race thinking in its broader social and historical context, considering why the race concept has taken certain forms in the past, and suggesting directions it might take in the future.
