Tukufu Zuberi
age: 42
Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
In an effort to challenge the pre-vailing notions of race and the misinterpretation of race-differentiated data in America, Tukufu Zuberi not only examines the use of racial statistics in society — he challenges the very notion that race exists. His new book, Thicker Than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie, suggests that race is a political myth, a holdover from the colonial era when whites sought to justify the enslavement of Africans and Native Americans — and that continued use of race as a causal factor of social differences contradicts current scholarship across the disciplines. "Race is an idea created to perpetuate racial injustice, not a physical reality," says Zuberi. "It's not biological; the Human Genome Project proved that." Zuberi's tendency to question the very foundations of belief asserted itself early. He recalls childhood dinner-table discussions in which he challenged his parents to articulate the merits and bases of their Pentecostal faith — discussions he says today were a "critical discourse that helped me to understand what religion was about and the role it served in society." In his work as a professor of sociology and principal researcher at Penn's Population Studies Center, he combines a demographer's facility for numbers and statistics, an orator's gift for rhetoric, and a lightning-quick mind that provides total recall of nearly every book he's read — down to the footnotes.
What's the dumbest thing you ever did? "Took a train to New York for a meeting in D.C."
What do you fear? "Ignorance."
-excerpt from Phillymag.com article
Edited by Sarah Jordan
Photography by Jim Graham and Brian Velenchenko
In the November 2001 issue
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