Professor Alan Goodman Honored with Biological Anthropology Award for Book on Race

From the award committee:

This highly accessible and intellectually rigorous text does the difficult work of engaging with incredibly thorny issues ranging from racialized measures of IQ to DNA ancestry while providing detailed and scientifically grounded answers in a narrative framing. In a chapter entitled “Athletics, Bodies, and Ability,” Graves and Goodman challenge our perceptions of the ways we assess athletic dominance via a detailed explanation of how these metrics have changed over time.
 
While unpacking biological traits we have to come value (strength, speed, and agility), they also highlight factors that play a significant role in the success of athletes on the international stage — including population size and gross domestic product. One of the notable strengths of this text comes in the authors’ willingness to move beyond explaining what is not scientific about the race concept, and clearly articulating how the naturalization of this concept begets racism. In a section on environmental racism, Graves and Goodman highlight how housing inequity has resulted in poor Black and brown communities being at higher risk for the negative downstream effects of a worsening climate.
 
The authors concisely dismantle many of the more egregious misconceptions/uses of “race” that are not only historically embedded in society but are ignorantly and consistently promulgated to a massive audience by way of popular culture avenues, especially social media. They also provide much-needed historical context for these ideas and offer concrete steps to dismantle them. This book should be shared widely and often; it needs to be read by as large an audience as possible. Assign it in your classes, talk about it to colleagues across disciplines, give it to racist neighbors and family members. Joseph Graves and Alan Goodman continue to fight the good fight — this book is a valued addition to the canon of biological anthropology in the 21st century.
 
The committee was impressed by the fact that this text could be used in university settings or given to a curious friend. The authors are clear on both the public’s assumptions about what undergirds racial inequity and animus, and how to communicate scientific and anthropological knowledge that would best support a better understanding of human biological diversity.
 
Goodman’s work aims to enable us to “better understand the processes by which political/economic systems such as inequality and racism have biological consequences as indicated by measures of stress, health, and nutrition.” His research ranges from explorations of childhood growth and nutrition in Egypt and Mexico to analyses of evidence of nutrition, pollution and migration in dentition.
 
The W.W. Howells Prize was established in 1993 to honor William White Howells, then emeritus professor of anthropology at Harvard University, in recognition of the important contributions Professor Howells made to biological anthropology and anthropology in general.
 
Goodman received his Ph.D. in biological anthropology from the University of Massachusetts. He joined the faculty at Hampshire after completing a predoctoral fellowship in stress physiology at the Karolinska Institute, and a post-doctoral fellowship in international nutrition at the University of Connecticut and the Mexican National Institute of Nutrition.