Beyond Biological Essentialism: White Nationalism, Health Disparities Data, and the Cultivation of Lay Agnotology

Abstract

Scholars and practitioners position health disparities research as an important tool for redressing race-based inequities and re-conceptualizing racialized health outcomes in non-essentialist terms. Given this context, we explore a peculiar phenomenon, which is the circulation of such research among white nationalists. We discover that white nationalists incorporate and respond to health disparities research not solely to defend racist and essentialist reasoning, but also to project a discourse that indicts the science establishment for ostensibly incorporating liberal politics, corrupting inquiry, and obfuscating understanding of biology in the name of anti-racism or social constructionism. We term this practice “lay agnotology,” as it involves white nationalists capitalizing on their role as non-specialists to charge the health disparities field and its expert contributors with an alleged set of institutionalized biases that produce ignorance about the “truth” of race. We connect this finding to the literature on racialized ignorance, as it demonstrates how stories about the institutional nature of science can be as central to myth-making about race as stories about the scientific nature of people.