{"id":61864,"date":"2021-10-20T01:58:04","date_gmt":"2021-10-20T01:58:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=61864"},"modified":"2021-10-21T18:19:02","modified_gmt":"2021-10-21T18:19:02","slug":"can-skeletons-have-a-racial-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=61864","title":{"rendered":"Can Skeletons Have a Racial Identity?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Can Skeletons Have a Racial Identity?<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2021-10-19<\/p>\n

Sabrina Imbler<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>
Forensic anthropologists<\/a> have relied on features of face and skull bones, known as morphoscopic traits<\/a>, such as the post-bregmatic depression \u2014 a dip on the top of the skull \u2014 to estimate ancestry. John M. Daugherty\/Science Source<\/em><\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A growing number of forensic researchers are questioning how the field interprets the geographic ancestry of human remains.<\/em><\/p>\n

Racial reckonings were happening everywhere in the summer of 2020, after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis by the police<\/a>. The time felt right, two forensic anthropologists<\/a> reasoned, to reignite a conversation about the role of race in their own field, where specialists help solve crimes by analyzing skeletons to determine who those people were and how they died.<\/p>\n

Dr. Elizabeth DiGangi<\/a> of Binghamton University and Jonathan Bethard<\/a> of the University of South Florida published a letter<\/a> in The Journal of Forensic Science<\/em><\/a> that questioned the longstanding practice of estimating ancestry, or a person\u2019s geographic origin, as a proxy for estimating race. Ancestry, along with height, age at death and assigned sex, is one of the key details that many forensic anthropologists try to determine.<\/p>\n

That fall, they published a longer paper<\/a> with a more ambitious call to action: \u201cWe urge all forensic anthropologists to abolish the practice of ancestry estimation.\u201d<\/p>\n

In recent years, a growing number of forensic anthropologists have grown critical of ancestry estimation and want to replace it with something more nuanced…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A growing number of forensic researchers are questioning how the field interprets the geographic ancestry of human remains.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,2039,8],"tags":[5198,31619,32136,31620,32139,32137,32140,2640,32138,32135,31625,2327],"class_list":["post-61864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","tag-ales-hrdlicka","tag-ann-ross","tag-elizabeth-digangi","tag-forensic-anthropology","tag-joe-hefner","tag-jonathan-bethard","tag-kate-spradley","tag-new-york-times","tag-norman-sauer","tag-sabrina-imbler","tag-shanna-williams","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61864"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61914,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61864\/revisions\/61914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}