Calculating Race

Scholars have not fully grasped the role that risk assessment calculations play in creating and maintaining [racial] disparities,” writes Benjamin Wiggins in the introduction to Calculating Race, a study that “expands our understanding of [these] disparities in the United States by recounting how people of color were constructed as a risk and at risk” (p. 4). Wiggins investigates the rise of actuarial science in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the centrality of racism to its formulations and its consequences; racism produced inequalities in health and safety that the expanding risk society then punished through the denial of insurance and loans, and through unequal rates of arrest and incarceration. This challenging and thought-provoking work is “a history of a system of thought” and decidedly “an American history from above” that rarely looks at the intersection between actuarial science and policy, or the ground-level experiences of its victims (p. 7). For those who specialize in bottom-up social history, Calculating Race offers a thoughtful exploration of the way that algorithms shaped and controlled the lives of Americans in unequal ways long before our time

Actuarial science · Centrality · Criminology · Denial · Economics · Inequality · Intersection (aeronautics · Psychoanalysis · Race (biology · Racism · Sociology · Engineering · Gender Studies · History · Mathematics · Psychology · Race, Genetics, and Society

• Fit to Protect

  Melissa Burch•Current Anthropology•2024

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