Normalizing race in (gifted) education: genomics and spaces of White exceptionalism

ABSTRACT

This paper utilizes the concept of ‘discriminate biopower’ to explore how advancements in social and behavioral genomics might inform the racially exclusionary nature of one of the most inequitable and academically coveted environments in American public education: gifted education. In its birth, gifted education became a mechanism for regulating the politics of race and equity in the American education system. Underpinning gifted education’s contested history is the conflation of Whiteness with exceptionalism and the proliferation of false genetic ideologies about biological differences between races. Genetics and education are re-intersecting today as social and behavioral genomics examine whether, how, and why genetic differences between individuals relate to differences in characteristics such as educational attainment or intelligence. This paper identifies three mechanisms through which social and behavioral genomics might be recruited for biopolitical governance strategies that maintain or exacerbate the racially exclusionary nature of gifted education: distractionism, determinism, and sociopolitical invisibility. Although these mechanisms are not predestined, researchers will need to employ proactive and socially responsible collaboration and communication to prevent genomics from normalizing racial exclusion in education.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• gifted education
• inequality
• genomics
• discriminate biopower
• race

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Stanford Training Program in ELSI Research [T32HG008953].

Notes on contributors

Daphne Oluwaseun Martschenko

Daphne O. Martschenko, PhD is a Research Fellow at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, a BioFutures Fellow in the Stanford Department of BioEngineering, and co-founder of the international Race, Empire, and Education Research Collective. Dr. Martschenko holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in Politics, Development, and Democratic Education and in 2019 received a Ph.D. in Education, also from the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral work investigated teacher perspectives on the role and relevance of genetic data for education, focusing on how behavioral genetics research on educational attainment and intelligence intersected with educators’ conceptualizations of racial and socioeconomic disparities in the American education system. Daphne’s work advocates for and facilitates research efforts that promote socially responsible communication of and community engagement with social and behavioral genomics.