Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #NeuroRacism

Most recents (4)

[#NeuroRacism | Eugenics 🧵]

What we hope to show today is that there are real consequences to this racist way of pursuing science. This is more than just an academic debate.

There is, perhaps, no better example than the eugenics movements of the 20th century. Old propaganda saying, “Some people are born to be a burde
Controlling human reproduction for some "greater good" is nothing new. Plato and other ancient Greeks advocated for it.

It was in just 1883 that Francis Galton, who coined the term, consolidated these thoughts with a Darwinistic notion of humans "winning" natural selection. White marble statue of PlatoPortrait of Francis Galton with a bald head and long sidebur
Those ideas didn't go unnoticed, and it is easy to forget how widespread (and legal) they were. International conferences, official policies in multiple countries, support from hundreds of influential people.

Unlike phrenology, this wasn't a short-lived idea - this was the norm. Report of proceedings of the first international eugenics coNewspaper story entitled, “Registering Human Pedigrees”
Read 8 tweets
Going to try to live tweet some take-homes from this panel on #neuroracism for anyone who is missing it. #BlackInNeuroWeek @blackinneuro
Nice to see that the panelists are a mixture of later and earlier career neuroscientists!
@dhsmoove_dotcom talking about changing the nomenclature around the Tuskegee syphilis study -> United States Public Health Service syphilis study in Tuskegee
Read 46 tweets
[#NeuroRacism | Phrenology 🧵]

Phrenology was the study of head shapes and sizes. It was a pseudoscience wildly popular between 1820-1850.

Surprisingly, its beginnings did not completely overlap with race. Instead, it started by looking at criminality Figure showing the location of 30-something “organs” in Four images depicting different views (front, back, side and
The work that Franz Gall, founder of phrenology, did was more related to the origins of what we now call criminology - as in finding biological explanations for crime and criminality.

Gall believed that changes in the brain manifested as bumps on the skull that can be measured. Black and white sketch of Franz Gall, who has a noticeably lFranz Gall is pictured with boils on his head looking at sku
What Gall created, George Combe helped spread, even reading the heads of Queen Victoria's kids. At his height, Combe's books were outselling Darwin's.

Cheap and colorful pamphlets also popularized this new science, making it approachable to everyone - including slave owners. Black and white sketch of George Combe
Read 9 tweets
[#NeuroRacism | Before Neuroscience 🧵]

To start the story of racism in neuroscience, we'll have to go back even before neuroscience existed, to the age of Enlightenment.

This is when the scientists tried, for the first time, to classify humans. Oil painting of room all full of white people from the Age o
As it was in vogue at the time to try to classify and rationalize everything, one of the key debates was between monogenism and polygenism.

The question was: do all races come from one ancestor or did we all come from different origins?

You can imagine how this is gonna go... Black and white sketchings of different faces and correspond
We also didn't distinguish between race and species at the time, we'd just barely coined those terms.

So when different races were discussed, there was an implication of types and sub-types of humans. In that sense, being white was the norm by which the other races deviated. Very stereotyped drawings of European, Native American, Blac
Read 6 tweets

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