Race and Medicine

Posted in Anthropology, Course Offerings, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, United States on 2013-11-24 23:19Z by Steven

Race and Medicine

Princeton University
AAS 403 / ANT 403 (EM)
Spring 2013-2014

Carolyn M. Rouse, Professor of Anthropology

In 1998, then-President Clinton set a national goal that by the year 2010 race, ethnic, and gender disparities in six disease categories would be eliminated. While the agenda, called Healthy People 2010, was a noble effort, many of the goals were not met. This course examines what went wrong. For a final project, students will be asked to propose their own solutions for eliminating health disparities.

Sample reading list:

  • Brian Smedley, ed., Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial & Ethnic Disparities
  • Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid:The Dark History of Medical Experimentation
  • Agustin Fuentes, Race, Monogamy and Other Lies They Told Me
  • Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics
  • Jonathan Kahn, Race in a Bottle: Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age
  • Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

For more information, click here.

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The Martinican concept of “creoleness”: A multiracial redefinition of culture.

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2013-11-24 03:44Z by Steven

The Martinican concept of “creoleness”: A multiracial redefinition of culture.

Mots Pluriels
Number 7, (July 1998): Third Space and Cross-Cultural Identities—Mestissage – Tiers Espace – Identite

Beverley Ormerod, Associate Professor of French
University of Western Australia

In the 1930s, black and coloured intellectuals from the French Caribbean colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guyane sought for the first time to define their cultural identity in terms of their historical and racial affiliations with Africa, rather than their political and educational ties with France. During centuries of colonial rule, class barriers had effectively separated darker-skinned from lighter-skinned West Indians; the school system had reinforced European aesthetic norms, and had demanded the repudiation of Creole, the language associated with black slaves, in favour of French. The Négritude movement, inaugurated with L.-G. Damas’ Pigments (1937) and Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Return to my Native Land, 1939), rejected this cultural predominance of France and emphasized the writers’ membership of the African diaspora. To the Martinican Césaire is attributed the neologistic term, Négritude, which stressed the vital importance to the poet’s ideology of his adherence to the black race. He and Damas brandished the terms “Negro”, “Africa”, “instinct” and even “savage” in their verse, delineating a new Caribbean cultural profile in truculent defiance of the prejudices of their likely public. For their message was addressed not only to French readers, but (and perhaps primarily) to the Francophile coloured and black bourgeoisie in the West Indies which had acquiesced in Europe’s dismissal of Africa as a site of racial and cultural inferiority.

For the Caribbean inventors of Negritude, Africa was more than simply an emblem of ethnic authenticity. Their invocation of this distant, unknown continent was intended to heal psychological wounds passed down from the first black West Indians, those generations of Africans exiled from their native lands and forced into captivity in a white-dominated society on the far side of an uncrossable ocean. In praising Africanness, early twentieth-century Caribbean writers were rejecting European stereotypes of race, colour, mental and physical attributes. Their belief in a cosmic connection with Africa expressed the hope of future acceptance in a spiritual homeland. Their blackness of skin, traditionally devalued by the white race, became the passport to kinship with a newly valorized African world of cultural difference.

Where did this leave the substantial part of the Caribbean population that, after centuries of African-European sexual relations and the 19th-century importation of Indian and Chinese labour, was neither white nor black? Césaire, whose demands for social justice were as eloquent in his literary as in his later political career, claims in his Cahier an affinity with all victims of racial oppression, asserting his solidarity with “the Jew-man, the Kaffir-man, the Hindu-man in Calcutta, the Harlem-man who doesn’t vote” – the worldwide victims of prejudice, verbal abuse, famine, torture and pogroms. But, speaking from the viewpoint of a black West Indian, Césaire holds up African culture as the single great alternative to European culture, the sovereign remedy for the alienation provoked by European colonialism. The founders of Negritude make an unspoken assumption that the Caribbean non-white individual will opt to be assimilated into the African cultural sphere. While invoking the Hindu in Calcutta, for example, Césaire does not consider the different cultural position of the large number of West Indians descended from coulis or “East Indian” indented labourers, whose syncretic life-style may combine Eastern religious practices with West Indian social elements. It is noticeable that French Creole, the linguistic link between the diverse elements of the French Caribbean population, is given no role in Negritude. Even standard French, for that matter, has an ambiguous status in the Cahier: linguistically it is a showcase for Césaire’s verbal subtlety and erudition, but thematically it is rejected as Césaire ostentatiously turns away from the French rationalist tradition towards the kinetic energy of African sorcery. African culture is equally embraced by Damas: it is symbolized by the banjo that his Guyanese mother vainly attempts to make him replace by the more socially acceptable violin (“mulattos don’t do that/leave that to blacks“); this imposition is angrily refused by the poet, just as he refuses identification with the white side of his ancestry: “How can they possibly dare/to call me “whitened”/when everything in me/aspires only to be Negro/as black as my Africa/that they stole from me”. Only a rare voice, like that of the mulatto poet Gilbert Gratiant, expresses a divergent view at this time—choosing to celebrate the double fusion (cultural and biological) of Africa and France in his veins, and at the same time making Creole his literary language of choice…

Read the entire article here.

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24,000-Year-Old Body Shows Kinship to Europeans and American Indians

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Europe, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation on 2013-11-21 00:16Z by Steven

24,000-Year-Old Body Shows Kinship to Europeans and American Indians

The New York Times
2013-11-20

Nicholas Wade

The genome of a young boy buried at Mal’ta near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia some 24,000 years ago has turned out to hold two surprises for anthropologists.

The first is that the boy’s DNA matches that of Western Europeans, showing that during the last Ice Age people from Europe had reached farther east across Eurasia than previously supposed. Though none of the Mal’ta boy’s skin or hair survives, his genes suggest he would have had brown hair, brown eyes and freckled skin.

The second surprise is that his DNA also matches a large proportion — about 25 percent — of the DNA of living Native Americans. The first people to arrive in the Americas have long been assumed to have descended from Siberian populations related to East Asians. It now seems that they may be a mixture between the Western Europeans who had reached Siberia and an East Asian population...

…There they lay for some 50 years until they were examined by a team led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen. Dr. Willerslev, an expert in analyzing ancient DNA, was seeking to understand the peopling of the Americas by searching for possible source populations in Siberia. He extracted DNA from bone taken from the child’s upper arm, hoping to find ancestry in the East Asian peoples from whom Native Americans are known to be descended…

…The other surprise from the Mal’ta boy’s genome was that it matched to both Europeans and Native Americans but not to East Asians. Dr. Willerslev’s interpretation was that the ancestors of Native Americans had already separated from the East Asian population when they interbred with the people of the Mal’ta culture, and that this admixed population then crossed over the Beringian land bridge that then lay between Siberia and Alaska to become a founding population of Native Americans.

“We estimate that 14 to 38 percent of Native American ancestry may originate through gene flow from this ancient population,” he and colleagues wrote in an article published Wednesday in the journal Nature

Read the entire article here.

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The genes that build America

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Barack Obama, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Politics/Public Policy, Slavery, United States on 2013-11-19 04:17Z by Steven

The genes that build America

The Guardian
2007-07-14

Paul Harris, US Correspondent

From the discovery that presidential hopeful Barack Obama is descended from white slave owners to the realisation that the majority of black Americans have European ancestors, a boom in ‘recreational genetics’ is forcing America to redefine its roots. Paul Harris pieces together the DNA jigsaw of what it really means to be born in the USA

Al Sharpton walked into a South Carolina pine forest just outside the sleepy southern town of Edgefield and stopped at a cluster of toothlike unmarked gravestones. This was the former plantation on which a few generations ago his ancestors had worked, lived, loved and died, owned as property by white masters. ‘You must assume that it’s family here,’ Sharpton said, referring to the abandoned slave graveyard.

A few weeks previously Reverend Sharpton, one of America’s most outspoken black civil rights leaders, had not known of the cemetery’s existence. But researchers had explored his genealogy and broken the news to him. Sharpton’s story had an astonishing twist: the genealogists discovered that his ancestors had once been owned by the ancestors of Strom Thurmond, the Senator and former segregationist who once ran for president on a racist platform. The phrase ‘ironic coincidence’ did not begin to cover it…

Read the entire article here.

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Victoria to fly flag in memory of executed Métis leader Louis Riel

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Canada, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Politics/Public Policy on 2013-11-17 03:14Z by Steven

Victoria to fly flag in memory of executed Métis leader Louis Riel

Times Colonist
Victoria, British Columbia
2013-11-15

Richard Watts

The infinity-embossed flag of the Métis Nation will fly at municipalities around B.C. as they proclaim Saturday as Louis Riel Day.

Victoria, Langford and Sidney have agreed to the proclamation. Victoria has even agreed to fly the flag of the Métis Nation, a white infinity symbol (a sideways “8”) on a solid blue, black or red background.

Today, at Royal Roads University in the Blue Heron House, Métis culture will be showcased with a short film, bannock and tea, from 10 a.m. to noon.

Bill Bresser, president of Métis Nation Greater Victoria, said the celebration is part of a growing recognition across Canada that now sees Riel, not as an executed villain but as a defender of the Métis.

“He is now recognized not as a traitor but somebody fighting for his people and the rights and property of people that were being taken advantage of,” said Bresser.

Also, Bresser said, Métis people are now being recognized as legitimate builders of the modern country…

Read the entire article here.

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There’s a long story behind ‘anti-Haitianismo’ in the Dominican Republic

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Audio, Caribbean/Latin America, Census/Demographics, Law, Media Archive, Social Science on 2013-11-15 02:54Z by Steven

There’s a long story behind ‘anti-Haitianismo’ in the Dominican Republic

PRI’s The World
Public Radio International
2013-11-14

Christopher Woolf, Producer

Tens of thousands of people in the Dominican Republic are being stripped of their citizenship, on the grounds that they or their ancestors were illegal immigrants.  Thousands have already been deported across the border to Haiti, because it is assumed all illegal migrants come from there.

The court ruling applies to anyone whose family arrived in the country after 1929 and can’t document their status. Being born in the Dominican Republic doesn’t make a difference.

Some are calling it the latest manifestation of “anti-Haitianismo” in the Dominican Republic. Both countries are on the same island of Hispaniola.

Their relations are a story of race, identity, and money. The Dominican Republic is not a rich country, but it’s a lot better off than its neighbor, Haiti.

In terms of per capita GDP, it’s about six times richer. So thousands of Haitians go to the Dominican Republic to find work. Haitians and their descendants may make up as many as one in ten of the Dominican Republic’s population. Some Dominicans are unhappy about that, as they see Haitians as different, and some fear for the identity of their nation.

Haitians are different from their Dominican neighbors in several ways. Firstly, language: most Dominicans speak Spanish, while most Haitians speak Creole, based on French. Then, there’s the issue of race.

Haiti is overwhelmingly black; whereas Dominicans identify more with the European part of their heritage, rather than the African part. Most Americans would describe most Dominicans as black. And DNA tests taken over the last decade confirm that most Dominicans have black ancestry in their family history to varying degrees.

But race in the Dominican Republic and in other parts of the Caribbean does not mean the same thing as it does in the United States. Dominicans use a variety of words to self-identify, such as moreno, trigueno, and blanco-oscuro, indicating different colors or different types of mixed racial origins. But not many will choose the term “black.”…

Read the entire article and listen to the story here.

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What’s Biology Got to Do with It? The Social Life of Genetics

Posted in Anthropology, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2013-11-12 04:26Z by Steven

What’s Biology Got to Do with It? The Social Life of Genetics

Brooklyn Historical Society
Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations
Saturday, 2013-11-16, 15:00-18:00 EST (Local Time)

Part One of the reading series Quantifying Bloodlines

  • What do we learn about ourselves through genetics and genealogy?
  • How does DNA connect with what we know about our family’s ancestry and cultural heritage?

Join anthropologist, Jennifer Scott in conversation with sociologist Ann Morning, author of The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference (2011), for a discussion examining the social life of DNA.

Having read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, we will explore the tremendous social impact of one woman’s cellular legacy upon the world. We will discuss the impact on her direct descendants as Henrietta Lacks’ family discovers how their genes were used to make unprecedented medical advancements and enormous profits without their consent. Looking at the connections between biology and culture, this discussion session will explore the meanings of heredity, inheritance, and questions of bioethics.

Please plan to have read the book prior to our meeting.

This reading and discussion group is co-sponsored by MixedRaceStudies.org

For more information, click here.

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Trayvon, Postblackness, and the Postrace Dilemma

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Barack Obama, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Social Justice, United States on 2013-11-06 03:01Z by Steven

Trayvon, Postblackness, and the Postrace Dilemma

boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture
Volume 40, Number 3 (Fall 2013)
pages 139-161
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-2367072

Richard Purcell, Assistant Professor of English
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

If President Barack Obama crystallizes the intersection of postrace and postblack idealism, nothing has exposed the fraught relationship between the two than the shooting death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. What Trayvon Martin’s death has brought to the fore is what contemporary intellectuals are attempting to think when they think postblackness and, for that matter, postrace. What way of understanding race knowledge in our present does postblackness offer us, especially in a postrace era? The answer: both blindness and insight. Through a meditation on the relationship between Trayvon Martin, postrace, and postblackness, this essay aims to demonstrate this blindness and insight. On the one hand, postblackness has the potential to provide a bulwark against the persistent biologisms in contemporary race thinking. Yet, it is also used in our postrace era as a term to indulge in a weaker mode of criticism: debunking—a critical posture that has allowed critics to ignore and even circulate more insidious forms of race thinking.

Read or purchase the article here.

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Blood: The Stuff of Life [Lecture]

Posted in Anthropology, Canada, Live Events, Media Archive, Social Science on 2013-11-04 05:17Z by Steven

Blood: The Stuff of Life [Lecture]

The CBC Massey Lectures
CBC Radio-Canada
2013-11-04, 19:00Z (14:00 EST)

Blood is a bold and enduring determinant of identity, race, gender, citizenship and belonging. But should it be? In this visual narrative based on excerpts from the 2013 Massey Lectures, Lawrence Hill explores the scientific and social history of blood, and the ways that it unites and divides us today.

Is Race a Fiction? is a live video stream and chat with author Lawrence Hill, host Paul Kennedy and guests as they examine the ties between blood and culture, nation state and racial identity. This discussion is based Lawrence Hill’s new book Blood:The Stuff of Life where Hill touches on his personal history and the history of race within Canada and internationally.

Panel participants include:

  • Lawrence Hill: Blood: The Stuff of Life is Lawrence Hill’s ninth book. His earlier works include the novels Some Great Thing and, and the memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada.
  • Hayden King is an Anishinaabe writer, student, teacher, researcher at Ryerson University, McMaster University and Beausoleil First Nation.
  • Priscila Uppal is a poet, novelist, playwright and York University Professor in the Department of English.
  • Karina Vernon is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto and co-founder and editor of Commodore Books, the first black literary press in western Canada.

For more information, click here.

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Mirror, Mirror – Who Is that Woman on TV?

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Communications/Media Studies, Media Archive, Social Science on 2013-11-04 05:03Z by Steven

Mirror, Mirror – Who Is that Woman on TV?

Inter Press Service News Agency
2013-10-21

Fabiana Frayssinet

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 21 2013 (IPS) – Carla Vilas Boas is of mixed-race descent – African, European and indigenous – like a majority of the population of Brazil. But she spends hours straightening her hair, trying to look more like the blond, blue-eyed women she sees in the mirror of television.

The 32-year-old domestic worker acknowledges that Brazil’s popular telenovelas have started to include characters like her – people from the country’s favelas or shantytowns, who work long workdays for low wages.

But among the actors and the models shown in ads, “there are only a few darker-skinned people among all the blue-eyed blonds. And you wonder: if I buy that shampoo and go to the hairdresser, can I look like that?” she remarked to IPS.

But her hair “never looks that way,” even with the new shampoo or the visit to the hairstylist, and Vilas Boas said that makes her feel “really bad.”

More than half of the women in this country of 200 million people – where over 50 percent of the population identified themselves as black or “mulatto” in the last census – do not identify with the images they see on TV.

Experts say that because of the prejudices reflected in the choice of actors and models, advertisers potentially lose a large segment of consumers…

Read the entire article here.

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