Dr. Rina Bliss, an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University, discusses her most recent book, What’s Real About Race?, with Upstart Crow host William Miller.

In her scholarship, Dr. Bliss researches, writes about, and speaks about—as she puts it on her website—“the personal and social significance of new genetic sciences.” Her work “is centered at the intersection of sociology, psychology, and technology, offering a full-spectrum understanding of how our social worlds shape our personal worlds, affecting the health and quality of our lives.”

She brings her years of scholarship and observations to What’s Real About Race?

Published recently by W.W. Norton, the book looks at historic perspectives on race, views of race currently, and factors shaping the future view of race.

In the year 2000, President Bill Clinton and a half-dozen other world leaders joined to celebrate the finding of a science research project—an effort to map the genome of humans from around the world determined, as Dr. Bliss says, that “humans were 99.9 percent (genetically) the same.” Because people had conflated race and DNA, this finding challenged a lot of thinking.

But did it change minds? Following that declaration by scientists, there came another—“if race is not biological, what is? A social construct.” What does that even mean? Dr. Bliss answers that question, as well as what race being a social construct means given that people observe differences between themselves and other people. Where do those differences come from? What is the reality of race?

For the future, Dr. Bliss says we need “a new paradigm of race as well as a new language for talking about race”—but where would that come from, and how would those elements solve the race-related problems we see around us? She has ideas, which she discusses here.

One thing, she says, stop calling race a “social construct” and think of it as a “social reality.”

"We are all one family. So this idea of continental difference or division... it really cancels out any ability for us to recognize that we are all brothers and sisters." — Dr. Rina Bliss, author of What’s Real About Race

Check out Dr. Bliss’s website: https://www.drrinabliss.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.rinabliss/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rina-bliss-28263714/

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