Ingenious: Dalton Conley
When Dalton Conley, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, talks about race, his authority is based on more than academic research. Every day he straddled the lines of race in the New York City housing project where he grew up in 1970s, a white kid, son of bohemian artists. The apartment complex, Masaryk Towers, then and now stands in a largely Puerto Rican and African-American neighborhood on the Lower East Side. As Conley explained when he stopped by the Nautilus office last week for an interview, his childhood was like a social science experiment. “Even when you flip the script and you are the minority, you see the stark advantages of whiteness and the divisions of social and cultural capital,” he said.
Traversing the flagrantly unequal means of living in Manhattan shaped the path of Conley’s career. “I made a daily journey from my home neighborhood to the wealthier area in New York’s Greenwich Village, where we were lying about our address so I could go to school,” he said. “I think that’s what really made me aware of socioeconomic disparities and made me even as a child start to realize the kind of level of inequality and lack of social mobility and lack of equal opportunity we have in the United States.”
Given the history of using biology for political means, it’s really important to say that race as we know it is not a biological concept.
After earning a Ph.D. in sociology, Conley wrote about his childhood in a 2000 memoir, Honky. He is the author of three other books that trace the social currents that drive upward and downward mobility in America, and how they leave a lasting mark on families. He had begun to feel, though, sociology was not getting him as far as he wanted to go. “I had gone down a rabbit hole to try to understand what is the true effect of income and wealth on kids’ outcomes, and what is spurious, and what makes up that spurious effect?” he said. “Is it cultural? Is it genetic?” Ultimately, he said, “I decided to go into the belly of the beast and try to understand how genetics might be influencing how kids turn out socioeconomically.”
In 2009, Conley earned a Ph.D. in biology, specializing in genomics. The results of his biological education appear between covers in 2017’s The Genome Factor: What the Social Genomics Revolution Reveals About Ourselves, Our History & Our Future, co-written with Jason Fletcher, a professor of public affairs with appointments in sociology, applied economics, and population health sciences, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In our Nautilus interview, Conley confronted the controversies that infix discussions about race. A recent podcast interview between author Sam Harris and Charles Murray, coauthor of , the notorious 1994 book that delves into race and IQ, inspired a volley of exchanges. Throughout, Conley spoke with calm conviction, drawing from both biology and sociology, to bolster his view that race is not a scientific category. Genomics, he explained, is now filtering out the myths and misinformation, proffered by both the political left and right, about race, intelligence, and success.
