WEEKNIGHTS AT THE WAGNER: The Myth of Innate Racial Difference

WEEKNIGHTS AT THE WAGNER: The Myth of Innate Racial Difference: From the Era of Slavery to the Era of Eugenics With Dr. Rana Hogarth

This talk examines claims about the supposed peculiarities of Black people’s bodies that have shaped the contours of medical knowledge production during the era of slavery and beyond. These claims were features, not aberrations, in the production of Western biomedical knowledge. The talk will demonstrate how, over centuries and across the distinct geographies of the plantation Americas, these claims became harnessed to advance faulty racial logic that held Blackness to be a heritable, biological trait that could determine one’s physical and intellectual “fitness.” The reach of this faulty logic was evident in early attempts to study racial fitness by anthropologists, physicians, statisticians, and eugenicists. Finally, this talk will demonstrate how early twentieth- century white eugenicists took up the study of racial fitness in the form of race crossing studies to highlight the supposed inferiority of mixed race people with African ancestry.

About the Speaker:

Rana Hogarth is associate professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She holds a Ph.D. in History, with a concentration in History of Science/History of Medicine from Yale University and an M.H.S. in Health Policy from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is the author of Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Her research has appeared in Social History of Medicine, American Quarterly, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, American Journal of Public Health, and in the edited volume Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery, edited by Sean Morey Smith and Christopher Willoughby (LSU Press, 2021).

The Museum will be open to visitors until the talk begins at 6 PM.

This event will be in-person and will not be recorded.

THINGS TO KNOW FOR YOUR VISIT

• Walk-in attendees are welcome. Advance ticket reservations are appreciated and will speed up your entry.

• Masks are recommended but not required

• There is no coat check or place to stow personal items – please travel light

• To protect the specimens and our historic interiors, photography is not allowed in the museum and food and drink are not permitted in the building.

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