Of the many obstacles to racial justice in America, none has received more recent attention than the one that lurks in our subconscious. As social movements and policing scandals have shown how far from being “postracial” we are, the concept of implicit bias has taken center stage in the national conversation about race. Millions of Americans have taken online tests purporting to show the deep, invisible roots of their own prejudice. A recent Oxford study that claims to have found a drug that reduces implicit bias is only the starkest example of a pervasive trend. But what do we risk when we seek the simplicity of a technological diagnosis—and solution—for racism? What do we miss when we locate racism in our biology and our brains rather than in our history and our social practices? In Race on the Brain, Jonathan Kahn argues that implicit bias has grown into a master narrative of race relations—one with profound, if unintended, negative consequences for law, science, and society. He emphasizes its limitations, arguing that while useful as a tool to understand particular types of behavior, it is only one among several tools available to policy makers. An uncritical embrace of implicit bias, to the exclusion of power relations and structural racism, undermines wider civic responsibility for addressing the problem by turning it over to experts. Technological interventions, including many tests for implicit bias, are premised on a color-blind ideal and run the risk of erasing history, denying present reality, and obscuring accountability. Kahn recognizes the significance of implicit social cognition but cautions against seeing it as a panacea for addressing America’s longstanding racial problems. A bracing corrective to what has become a common-sense understanding of the power of prejudice, Race on the Brain challenges us all to engage more thoughtfully and more democratically in the difficult task of promoting racial justice.

For nearly two centuries, the racial significance of the human brain has absorbed a huge amount of scientific energy, despite the frequency of shortcomings and disappointing results. This book tries to show and explain the resilience of such a thorny issue.

Based on new research in exercise physiology, author and running expert Matt Fitzgerald introduces a first-of-its-kind training strategy that he's named "Brain Training." Runners of all ages, backgrounds, and skill levels can learn to maximize their performance by supplying the brain with the right feedback. Based on Fitzgerald's eight-point brain training system, this book will help runners: - Resist running fatigue - Use cross-training as brain training - Master the art of pacing - Learn to run "in the zone" - Outsmart injuries - Fuel the brain for maximum performance Packed with cutting-edge research, real-world examples, and the wisdom of the world's top distance runners, Brain Training for Runners offers easily applied advice and delivers practical results for a better overall running experience.

Biological races do not exist—and never have. This view is shared by all scientists who study variation in human populations. Yet racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of race remain deeply ingrained in Western society. In his powerful examination of a persistent, false, and poisonous idea, Robert Sussman explores how race emerged as a social construct from early biblical justifications to the pseudoscientific studies of today. The Myth of Race traces the origins of modern racist ideology to the Spanish Inquisition, revealing how sixteenth-century theories of racial degeneration became a crucial justification for Western imperialism and slavery. In the nineteenth century, these theories fused with Darwinism to produce the highly influential and pernicious eugenics movement. Believing that traits from cranial shape to raw intelligence were immutable, eugenicists developed hierarchies that classified certain races, especially fair-skinned “Aryans,” as superior to others. These ideologues proposed programs of intelligence testing, selective breeding, and human sterilization—policies that fed straight into Nazi genocide. Sussman examines how opponents of eugenics, guided by the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas’s new, scientifically supported concept of culture, exposed fallacies in racist thinking. Although eugenics is now widely discredited, some groups and individuals today claim a new scientific basis for old racist assumptions. Pondering the continuing influence of racist research and thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, Sussman explains why—when it comes to race—too many people still mistake bigotry for science.

Topics with racial implications have been hotly debated in the psychological literature for most of this century and are often in the news. Graham Richards takes a historical look at how the concepts of "race" and "racism" emerged within the discipline and charts the underlying premises of some famous studies in their social and political contexts. No-one is allowed to be objective in this arena, as opponents will always argue that they are not. This account is bound therefore to be controversial and excite interest whether or not readers agree with Richards' stance.

In academia, as well as in popular culture, the prefix "neuro-" now occurs with startling frequency. Scholars now publish research in the fields of neuroeconomics, neurophilosophy, neuromarketing, neuropolitics, and neuroeducation. Consumers are targeted with enhanced products and services, such as brain-based training exercises, and babies are kept on a strict regimen of brain music, brain videos, and brain games. The chapters in this book investigate the rhetorical appeal, effects, and implications of this prefix, neuro-, and carefully consider the potential collaborative work between rhetoricians and neuroscientists. Drawing on the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of rhetorical study, Neurorhetorics questions how discourses about the brain construct neurological differences, such as mental illness or intelligence measures. Working at the nexus of rhetoric and neuroscience, the authors explore how to operationalize rhetorical inquiry into neuroscience in meaningful ways. They account for the production, dissemination, and appeal of neuroscience research findings, revealing what rhetorics about the brain mean for contemporary public discourse. This book was originally published as a special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly.