Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66 by Projit Bihari Mukharji, and: Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America by Leslie A. Schwalm, and: Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools by Christopher D. E. Willoughby (review)

Reviewed by:

• Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66 by Projit Bihari Mukharji, and: Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America by Leslie A. Schwalm, and: Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools by Christopher D. E. Willoughby
• Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (bio)

Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66 By Projit Bihari Mukharji. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. 348. Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America By Leslie A. Schwalm. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 215. Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools By Christopher D. E. Willoughby. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. 267.

Recently, I visited a university to deliver a distinguished guest lecture. I chose as my topic the question of why particle physics is an area of research worth pursuing, and in the lecture, I attempted to answer. After-ward, a brown-skinned student approached me and asked, "I was wondering, as a fellow mixed person, how do you phenotypically experience Black spaces?" A bit taken aback, I explained that I have never publicly identified myself as mixed but always as Black, and that I think "y'all students" need to stop doing race science. He looked at me with a genuinely confused expression on his face: he did not understand why I was mentioning race science at all. This story alone makes the case for why new scholarship on the history and development of race science continue to be not only intellectually but also socially and politically significant. With Brown Skins, White Coats by Projit Bihari Mukharji, Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America by Leslie A. Schwalm, and Masters of Health by Christopher D. E. Willoughby, we gain new perspectives on how the race science of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced the social power relations that govern our twenty-first-century lives.

As Mukharji explains in Brown Skins, White Coats, the first known use of "phenotype" (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) was in 1910 by botanists, and it emphasized the observed appearance of an organism (p. 105). Brown Skins is primarily concerned with concepts of race that go beyond the visible, which is why Mukharji's discussion of phenotype is closer to the middle than the beginning of the book. He explains attempts by Indian scientists to delineate a concept of race through the ability to taste phenylthiocarbamide, an example of how conceptions of race need not [End Page 701] necessarily rely on visible markers. This note about phenotype is significant in part because it is a word that I hear commonly invoked in American social discourse about the appearance of African-descended peoples in the Americas. I found myself wondering how the word went from the purview of white botanists to being understood as a socially significant term among African Americans.

Brown Skins, White Coats is an important intervention in U.S.-published literature on race science history, which tends to focus on European and white American theorists and perpetrators of race science. The reason for this traditional emphasis is obvious, but such a practice also risks rein-scribing American hegemony while eschewing a more global and holistic understanding of how race has operated around the world. Mukharji significantly expands our understanding of twentieth-century history of science and postcolonial state building by introducing us to a cast of European and Indian scientists who were interested in potential nonvisible markers of genetic "race" groups. These interests often overlapped with received notions of caste among Hindus—which Mukharji refers to as a "racial logic" in the introduction, but not race itself—but the practice of race science in India was more expansive than an attempt to reify the long-standing caste structure.

Mukharji's work shows that people arrived at their interest in organizing groups by apparently distinct genetic features for diverse reasons, and an investment in caste was not necessarily the motivating factor. Based on the title, I expected a book that analyzed colorism and other visible markers—a sign of my own bias as a U.S.-born and...