Ron Mallon's Constructing Race

On September 28, 2017 Ron Mallon from Washington University’s St. Louis campus presented a Berger lecture titled Constructing Race (and other human kinds, minds, and residue). The first suggestion of the lecture was that there is no intrinsic biological difference between people of different races and that many within the social sciences view this as “debunked”. The basis for this argument is that genetic diversity is present in all population, even when separated by race. The common view of how to address race as a social construct is through the lens of psychological strategy, meaning we examine the root cause of racism such as differential treatment, discrimination, implicit and explicit racism, and social norm. Mallon believes that there …show more content…
He was examining such small-scale attitudes and behaviors that it felt as though the title was too open. He was not lecturing on how race is constructed, but instead on the lingering (and often small and/or subtle) effects of systemic racism in the United States. His lecture indicates that this idea of residual strategy for addressing race is just a small tipping point of what can be done and it felt like it came without the strategy. When asked questions that were pointed towards the topic of addressing solutions to racism, Mallon struggled to hypothesize any answers. This lead to a sense of frustration from those who stayed for the lecture and for the QA time afterwards. I have not read his book, but from his answers to the many questions imploring him for actual strategy that could be utilized, he fell short and never indicated that these answers or suggestions were addressed in his book. I would like to see how this information can be better utilized in order to address racism, the effects of the many accumulation mechanisms that exist in our culture, and how we can truly make reparations for the residue of systemic