Embodiment and/as evidence

Though Cheng does a good job deconstructing the nature/culture binary — that is, demonstrating that even behaviors and feelings so deeply ingrained as to seem innate, such as the black children's revulsion at the black dolls, can have cultural sources — "The Melancholy of Race" still utilizes a problematic mind/body duality. Cheng seems to accept the fact that there are two types of oppression: visible damage, and "immaterial" and "unquantifiable" psychological damage (25). This binary seems driven by the same Cartesian complex surrounding race and evidence she is critiquing: that the territory of science is nature and therefore racist tendencies proven experimentally (as in Clark's experiment) are natural; that emotions do not count as evidence for unequal treatment because they are not measurable or concrete (i.e., do not constitute "the deprivation of quantifiable benefits" (4)). Which leads us to technology: Clark was not as respected as a scientist as behavioral scientists currently are because now emotions and psychological damage are in fact becoming quantifiable. The advent of more rigorous scientific technologies (I thought of cognitive neuroscience, but I'm sure one could find other examples) is collapsing the dichotomy of subjective and internal vs. objective and observable evidence. Is this increasing physicality of psychological proof going to change our idea of legal proof? Does it render obsolete the construct of biological versus cultural race relations, showing that cultural oppression is felt not intangibly but very corporeally ("melancholia" comes from the Greek word for "black bile," thought to be the most dangerous substance in the body and lead to cancer and depression), or at least nervously, and can in fact become embodied?