Of the many obstacles to racial justice in America, none has received more recent attention than the one that lurks in our subconscious. As social movements and policing scandals have shown how far from being “postracial” we are, the concept of implicit bias has taken center stage in the national conversation about race. Millions of Americans have taken online tests purporting to show the deep, invisible roots of their own prejudice. A recent Oxford study that claims to have found a drug that reduces implicit bias is only the starkest example of a pervasive trend. But what do we risk when we seek the simplicity of a technological diagnosis—and solution—for racism? What do we miss when we locate racism in our biology and our brains rather than in our history and our social practices? In Race on the Brain, Jonathan Kahn argues that implicit bias has grown into a master narrative of race relations—one with profound, if unintended, negative consequences for law, science, and society. He emphasizes its limitations, arguing that while useful as a tool to understand particular types of behavior, it is only one among several tools available to policy makers. An uncritical embrace of implicit bias, to the exclusion of power relations and structural racism, undermines wider civic responsibility for addressing the problem by turning it over to experts. Technological interventions, including many tests for implicit bias, are premised on a color-blind ideal and run the risk of erasing history, denying present reality, and obscuring accountability. Kahn recognizes the significance of implicit social cognition but cautions against seeing it as a panacea for addressing America’s longstanding racial problems. A bracing corrective to what has become a common-sense understanding of the power of prejudice, Race on the Brain challenges us all to engage more thoughtfully and more democratically in the difficult task of promoting racial justice.

A bold, brain-based teaching approach to culturally responsive instruction To close the achievement gap, diverse classrooms need a proven framework for optimizing student engagement. Culturally responsive instruction has shown promise, but many teachers have struggled with its implementation—until now. In this book, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain-compatible culturally responsive instruction. The book includes: Information on how one’s culture programs the brain to process data and affects learning relationships Ten “key moves” to build students’ learner operating systems and prepare them to become independent learners Prompts for action and valuable self-reflection

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture. Visit the book's free Discussion Guide here.

"Poignant....important and illuminating."—The New York Times Book Review "Groundbreaking."—Bryan Stevenson, New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy From one of the world’s leading experts on unconscious racial bias come stories, science, and strategies to address one of the central controversies of our time How do we talk about bias? How do we address racial disparities and inequities? What role do our institutions play in creating, maintaining, and magnifying those inequities? What role do we play? With a perspective that is at once scientific, investigative, and informed by personal experience, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt offers us the language and courage we need to face one of the biggest and most troubling issues of our time. She exposes racial bias at all levels of society—in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and criminal justice system. Yet she also offers us tools to address it. Eberhardt shows us how we can be vulnerable to bias but not doomed to live under its grip. Racial bias is a problem that we all have a role to play in solving.

Leading neuroscience researchers are racing to unlock the secrets of the mind. On the cusp of decoding brain signals that govern motor skills, they are developing miraculous technologies that will enable paraplegics and wounded soldiers to move prosthetic limbs and will give all of us the power to manipulate computers and other objects through thought alone. These fiercely competitive scientists are vying for government and venture capital funding, prestige, and wealth. Part life-altering cure, part science fiction, part Defense Department dream, these cutting edge brain-computer interfaces promise to improve lives-but they also hold the potential to augment soldiers' combat capabilities. In The Brain Electric, Malcolm Gay follows the dramatic emergence of these technologies, taking us behind the scenes in operating rooms, startups, and research labs, where the future is unfolding. With access to many of the field's top scientists, Gay illuminates this extraordinary race-where science, medicine, profit, and war converge-for the first time. But this isn't just a story about technology. At the heart of the scientists' research is a group of brave patient-volunteers, whose lives are given new meaning through these experiments. The Brain Electric asks us to rethink our relationship to technology, our bodies, even consciousness itself, challenging our assumptions about what it means to be human.

Punchy and perceptive, Evans' passionate and wide-ranging debunking of hereditarian views of race in areas ranging from archaeology to IQ and sport deserves a wide readership.' Professor Saul Dubow, University of London 'Smart, accessible and stimulating, Black Brain White Brain is by far the most important book yet written to systematically debunk society's lingering attachments to race science and its pet topics of intelligence, genetics and civilization. Black Brain White Brain should be required reading in every undergraduate university course, in every high school and in every home.' Professor Jonathan Jansen, University of the Free State Over the last decade the media have given new life to an old idea - one at least as old as colonialism and slavery: that intelligence is defined by race and, more specifically, that white and Asian people are innately smarter than black people. The prime sources for these successive waves of publicity are psychologists but a handful or renegade scientists, pop science writers and journalists have joined the throng. Gavin Evans demonstrates why they are wrong - that their ideas are based on an out-of-date understanding of genetics, on a profound ignorance of the African anthropological record and a misplaced faith in the idea that IQ tests measure hardwired general intelligence, and that average IQ scores of different populations can be fruitfully compared. Black Brain, White Brain shows that there are no hardwired differences in intelligence or character between the races, and that human brainpower has probably not evolved for 100,000 years.

For nearly two centuries, the racial significance of the human brain has absorbed a huge amount of scientific energy, despite the frequency of shortcomings and disappointing results. This book tries to show and explain the resilience of such a thorny issue.

Four important works which provided the first major scientific proof of the importance of race in civilization, and the correlation between brain volume, race intelligence, and achievement, written by the famous French founder of the science of crowd psychology. "The Influence of Race in History" analyzes the role of race in influencing history, pointing out that group psychology, and not anatomical characteristics, are the real racial divides, and that "peoples whose mental constitution is similar will have similar destinies when they are placed in analogous circumstances." "How Races and Peoples Transform their Civilizations" shows, with examples, how culture is not directly transferrable between races, and that higher culture can never be transferred to those races who were incapable of creating it in the first place. "Anatomical and Mathematical Researches into the Laws of the Variations of Brain Volume and their Relation to Intelligence" is without question one of the most significant and all-encompassing studies on human brain and skull volume and their relation to intelligence, for which the author was awarded prizes by the French Academy of Sciences and the Anthropology Society of Paris. In this paper, Le Bon proves conclusively the existence of differences in cranial capacity and brain volume between races, and between different levels of intelligence within any given race. "On the Capacity of the Skulls of a Certain Number of Celebrated Men" provides further examples of leading men who prove the conclusions of the link between cranial capacity and Civilizational achievement.