When the subject is race, Museum of Science takes multimedia approach

Displays draw on science, culture, history, and politics

January 16, 2011|Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

Although it most likely goes unnoticed at the time, white people get introduced to the irrational rationality of race early on — very early. “All right, children,’’ the kindergarten teacher says, “please draw a picture of yourself.’’ So little Johnny and little Janey reach for their Crayola boxes. Do they take out a white crayon to color in their skin? Of course not. They take out a peach one. In a further twist, that particular crayon was introduced in 1949 as “flesh.’’ The good people at Binney & Smith changed the name in 1962 at the urging of civil rights groups.

If that isn’t lesson enough, white folks get another chance a few grades later when they use their crayons to color in maps for geography class. Surely, no child — Caucasian or otherwise — has ever instinctively reached for peach when coloring in the Caucasus Mountains.

It’s just such confounding illogic that motivates “RACE: Are We So Different?’’ which opens today at the Museum of Science and runs through May 15. Developed by the American Anthropological Association, the exhibition draws on science and culture, history and politics. It surveys race as concept and the almost always unfortunate consequences that concept has had and continues to have.

Race is a relatively recent term, dating from the Age of Discovery, with its many European encounters with non-European others. (Of course, go back far enough, and we’re all non-Europeans, humankind having originated in Africa.) The first legal use of the word “white’’ in America wasn’t until 1691, when the increasing importance of slavery added a whole new dimension of complexity to the concept of race.

A better word than “concept’’ would be “construct.’’ That’s what race is. Black and white and yellow and red aren’t biological categories as, say, male and female are. Race is more of a social, or even psychological, category, as class is; and, like class, it owes far more to culture and society than it does to genetics.

Does that surprise you? Consider the fact, as “RACE’’ reminds us, that such fundamental physical characteristics as blood type and fingerprint pattern are not racially determined. Or that even something commonly assumed to be a function of race, sickle cell anemia, is associated genetically not with race but regions with endemic malaria — as we learn from a display about an Italian-American man with the condition.

The sheer unpredictability of race is brought home more happily by a display called “Who’s talking?’’ It consists of photographs of a dozen men and women with audio of them speaking. Which voice belongs to which person? Spoiler alert: The blond guy with rosy cheeks has a spliff-thick Jamaican accent.