Dasgupta Kushan, Iturriaga Nicole, Panofsky Aaron
Institute for Society and Genetics, University of California, Los Angeles, 621 Charles E. Young Dr. South, Box 957221, 3360 LSB, Los Angeles, CA 90095-7221, USA.
Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of California, Irvine.
Soc Probl. 2024 Nov;71(4):1200-1215. doi: 10.1093/socpro/spad007. Epub 2023 Mar 6.
Scholars and practitioners position health disparities research as an important tool for redressing race-based inequities and re-conceptualizing racialized health outcomes in non-essentialist terms. Given this context, we explore a peculiar phenomenon, which is the circulation of such research among white nationalists. We discover that white nationalists incorporate and respond to health disparities research not solely to defend racist and essentialist reasoning, but also to project a discourse that indicts the science establishment for ostensibly incorporating liberal politics, corrupting inquiry, and obfuscating understanding of biology in the name of anti-racism or social constructionism. We term this practice "lay agnotology," as it involves white nationalists capitalizing on their role as non-specialists to charge the health disparities field and its expert contributors with an alleged set of institutionalized biases that produce ignorance about the 'truth' of race. We connect this finding to the literature on racialized ignorance, as it demonstrates how stories about the institutional nature of science can be as central to myth-making about race as stories about the scientific nature of people.
学者和从业者将健康差异研究视为纠正基于种族的不平等以及以非本质主义术语重新概念化种族化健康结果的重要工具。在此背景下，我们探讨一种奇特现象，即此类研究在白人民族主义者中的传播。我们发现，白人民族主义者纳入并回应健康差异研究，不仅是为了捍卫种族主义和本质主义推理，还为了构建一种话语，指责科学机构表面上以反种族主义或社会建构主义之名纳入自由政治、腐蚀研究并模糊对生物学的理解。我们将这种做法称为“外行不可知论”，因为它涉及白人民族主义者利用其非专业人士的角色，指控健康差异领域及其专家贡献者存在一系列所谓的制度化偏见，这些偏见导致对种族“真相”的无知。我们将这一发现与关于种族化无知的文献联系起来，因为它表明关于科学的制度性质的故事与关于人的科学性质的故事一样，在关于种族的神话制造中至关重要。
