Racial Justice

View a recording of the February 25, 2021 event sponsored by the San Francisco Asian Art Museum:

With film clips and discussion, this DEAI series workshop explores a dangerous idea that has threatened the American Dream from the beginning: the belief that some groups and individuals are inherently superior to others and more deserving of fundamental rights. View excerpts from the 2018 documentary “A Dangerous Idea,” which reveals how biologically determined politics has disenfranchised women and people of color and provided a rationale for state-sanctioned crimes committed against America’s most vulnerable citizens, and discuss the meaning, use, and misuse of gene science. With UC Berkeley bioethicist and Center for Genetics and Society senior fellow Osagie K. Obasogie, Marcy Darnovsky, executive director at the Center for Genetics and Society, and “A Dangerous Idea” filmmaker Stephanie Welch. Moderated by Milton Reynolds.

Bill McKibben and john a. powell came discuss the “Climate Crisis, Designer Babies, and Our Common Future.” The event was moderated by Osagie K. Obasogie, Professor of Bioethics at UC Berkeley.

A new survey has found implicit biases in medical students that may explain why black patients are sometimes under treated for pain, with some students believing that black people feel less pain and have thicker skin than white people.

The resurgence of race as biological concept is one of the most pressing social justice challenges raised by recent developments in genetic science and technologies. Dorothy Roberts, noted professor of law at Northwestern University,  discusses her efforts to communicate this trend, and to place it within broad social and political contexts in the United States, in her recently published book Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. Dorothy is interviewed by UC Berkeley associate professor of bioethics David Winickoff.