We need to think about science as a practice of a specific type of history. When it gives us a story about where we come from, it is giving us a version of our historical past, but that version is a flat past. It's a very un-nuanced account of our diversity. What we need to compliment this are more robust social histories that fill in the details of what we think we can say about our genetic story.

Historian Terence Keel explores the pre-modern Christian origins of modern racial thought - from the 'God in nature' that scientists still bring with them into their explorations of race and human diversity, to the ways empiricism blind us from the historical and cultural context of scientific inquiry - and argues for a deeper questioning of our stories about ourselves.

Terence is author of Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science from Stanford University Press.

Guest

Terence Keel

Terence Keel is a Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles where he teaches in the Department of African American Studies and the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. He also directs the UCLA Lab for BioCritical Studies and also serves as the Advisor for Structural Competency and Innovation for the UCLA Simulation Center at the David Geffen School of Medicine.

The ancestor's blind spot: On race, science and Christian thought.

Terence Keel

Fast Food's Bad Bargain For Black America / Naa Oyo A. Kwate

The Lost Cause Against Reconstruction / Kidada Williams

SuperTruth® - The Cambridge Holocaust

The History of Personhood in the Abortion Debate / Brianna Muir

The long life of the death of the Roman Empire.

Hierarchy, division and filing cabinets at the dawn of the information age.

Coroners Complicit in Obscuring Violent Deaths in State Custody / Terence Keel