Not black and white
Four Harvard College freshmen huddled around an iPad, trying to identify the race of the man in the picture before them. It was harder than they thought it would be. “That’s not a race,” said Rachel Gladstone as she looked at one of the choices on the bottom of the screen. “He’s Jewish,” said Morgan Matthews. “Look, you say what it is, and we’ll choose something else,” joked Luka Oreskovic. “How about Red Sox Nation?” asked Jermaine Heath. (It was, to be fair, an actual choice.) The four were playing a learning game designed for “Race: Are We So Different?,” an exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Science (MOS) that tells the story of race in the United States by exploring the science of human variation, the history of the idea of race, and contemporary experience. The students visited the MOS in May on a field trip organized by Harvard College Dean Evelynn M. Hammonds, their...