The Science of Blackness: Biology and Social Science in Black-Focused Scholarship, 1900–2020

In recent years, scholars have argued that biological ideas about Black people have returned to both the biomedical and social sciences. In this article, we extend such research by broadening its scope across time and disciplinary space, examining—through citation network, semantic, and qualitative content analyses—more than 50,000 articles about Black people in scholarly journals between 1900 and 2020. In so doing, we make two core contributions. First, we identify the mid-twentieth century as the highwater mark for social scientific thinking about Blackness, and show how deeply connected this thinking was to the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in which it was produced. Second, we demonstrate the ways in which the recent “return” of biological ideas about Black people differs from the accounts against which mid-twentieth-century social scientists argued. Compared to the early twentieth century, the line between biological and social scientific accounts of Black people has been blurred, making accounts in both at once less overtly racist and also potentially more difficult to challenge.