NYT: "Taking Aim at Smithsonian, Trump Wades Into Race and Biology"

"His executive order faulted an exhibit which 'promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct,” a widely held position in the scientific community.'"

While there has been a vibe shift in the more nimble spheres of discourse, in the marble museums of our culture, thinking about race hasn’t moved on at all from the hysteria of June 2020. Thus, from the New York Times’ news section:

Taking Aim at Smithsonian, Trump Wades Into Race and Biology

His executive order faulted an exhibit which “promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct,” a widely held position in the scientific community.

By Zachary Small

Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology.

March 31, 2025, 6:39 p.m. ET

When President Trump issued an executive order claiming that the Smithsonian Institution had “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology,” he singled out a sculpture exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington.

The exhibition, called “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” explores how, for more than 200 years, sculpture has both shaped and reflected attitudes about race in the United States.

The president’s order noted, among other things, that the show “promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’”

In interviews, several scholars questioned why the executive order appeared to take issue with that view, which is now broadly held. Samuel J. Redman, a history professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst who has written about scientific racism, said that “the executive order is troubling and out of step with the current consensus.” He added that pseudoscientific attempts to create a hierarchy of races with white people at the top were seen “in places like Nazi Germany or within the eugenics movement.” …

The quotation about race as a human invention appears to come from the wall text in the show, which notes that humans are “99.9 percent genetically the same” and introduces part of a statement on race and racism by the American Association of Biological Anthropologists.

“Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation,” the statement reads. “Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters.

Race is, of course, about who your ancestors are.

Of course, we’ve had huge advances in the 21st century in DNA scans since DNA entrepreneur Craig Venter more or less socially constructed the Race Does Not Exist conventional wisdom in his speech at the 2000 White House Human Genome project ceremony. Now, if you have four grandparents from one place, such as Provence, commercial race science firms like Ancestry.com and 23andMe can usually nail their average location down to within a hundred miles or so, much less just get correct the continent.

Of course, before mass migration, you could pretty much do the same just by looking at people. As recently as the 2002 World Cup, anthropologist Dienekes could overlay photos of World Cup and other national teams to get a sense of what the indigenous people of each European country look like on average. E.g., compare Germany to Poland.

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