Hue-Man

J. Cecilia Cardenas-Navia is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Color Struck: The Sciences of Skin Color and the Formation of Identity in America,” traces the scientific, social, cultural and political lives of melanin in the United States from the 1950s to the present.

The rise of this new era – the melanin era – allowed for diverse interpretations of skin color against a backdrop of social change and new scientific/biomedical inquiries. From Black Power to Michael Jackson, Ray Bradbury’s works to melanin supremacy, she offers alternate frameworks for discerning human difference and disentangling “race,” biology, ancestry and culture. Ultimately, she aims to emancipate skin color from its troubled past, lending to new understandings of the long civil rights movement and the genomic age.

The development of modern genetics extended to the melanin sciences as skin color became a means to trace human origins, migration and evolution. Melanin’s scientific legitimacy became tied to its role as a beneficial adaptation to UV radiation and was neatly illustrated through GIS mapping; molecular biologists hypothesized different genes and gene cascades responsible for skin color differences.

Although the language of “race” predominated in these studies, two additional forums investigated melanin to divergent ends: animal studies and creation museums. Zebra fish, pigeons and albino gorillas became ciphers for culture-free exemplars of human behavior, simultaneously highlighting aggressive tendencies and survival mechanisms. Proponents of scientific creationism built and staffed museums in Kentucky and California that not only proposed alternate frameworks for human difference, but offered seemingly more progressive visions of inclusion across color lines. Examination of these conflicting narratives underscores that greater societal and scientific advancement remains mired in tragic histories and closed-minded sociocultural commitments.

Admission is free.