Measurement on the Color Line: Scientific Instruments and the Making of Human Categories

"Everyone thinks they know what race is—but do they?" Ideas about racial categories and racial differences have been created and sustained through scientific, biological, anthropological, and medical practices. Measurement on the Color Line traces the development of present-day notions of race through the sciences, measurements, and data that produced them.

From the eighteenth century to the present, scientific instruments have been used in studies that make claims about race and racial difference. Specific categories of people have been formed through acts of observation, measurement, and quantification. New sciences and technologies have been repeatedly applied to answer familiar questions about race. Since the end of the nineteenth century, some physicians and social scientists have offered a counter-narrative to challenge race-making measurements.

Curated by Evelynn M. Hammonds, the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard, the exhibition draws directly from her co-authored book, with Bates College Professor Rebecca Herzing, The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics. Her research highlights how early scientific disciplines, including anthropology and medicine, sought physical justifications for social hierarchies. 

Measurement on the Color Line includes objects graciously lent from several institutions and individuals, including the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, the Dittrick Museum of Medical History at Case Western Reserve University, Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College, Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard Divinity School Library, Harvard Law School Library, Houghton Library, and artists Lucy Kim and Wendel White.

Photographs © Tony Rinaldo