Forensic anthropology’s race problem
I’m pausing the Antihero Trilogy to share a story I published this week, about a debate roiling in U.S. forensic anthropology. For decades, forensic anthropologists have performed what they now call “ancestry estimation,” but which is still, essentially, the practice of predicting the race of an unidentified person based on features of their skull. And by race, I mean the U.S.’s Big Five: white, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American. For just one glimpse into how wild this is, think of everyone who’s classified as Hispanic in the U.S.—how many countries they’re from (including the U.S. itself!), how many twists and turns of history have shaped the populations of those countries, and yes, how different all those people can look from each other. Some forensic anthropologists are calling to stop the practice all together; others are trying to decouple it from racial categories once and for all. This was another really challenging story for me, and I hope you find it as interesting as I do!
When an unidentified body arrives in the laboratory of Allysha Winburn, a forensic anthropologist at the University of West Florida, it’s her job to study the bones to help figure out who the person was when they were alive—to give the biological remains a social identity. “We have this vast population of possible missing persons the [remains] could match, and we need to narrow down that universe,” she says.
She measures the length of the limb bones to estimate height and examines the bones’ development to estimate age at death. She studies the shape of the pelvis for clues to the person’s likely sex. And, until recently, Winburn measured features of the skull, such as its overall length and the width of the nasal opening, to do what forensic anthropologists call ancestry estimation. By statistically comparing the measurements with those from skulls with known identities, she could predict the continental ancestry—and the commonly used racial categories that may correspond to it—that a person likely identified as when alive. In other words, she could predict whether they identified as Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American.
But Winburn, who is white, is now questioning whether she should continue to do so. And she’s not the only one: Over the past year, debate about ancestry estimation has exploded in U.S. forensic anthropology, with a flurry of papers examining its accuracy, interrogating its methods, and questioning its assumptions.