Mixed Race Studies

Day of Absence 2016: Carolyn Prouty – Race-Based Medicine: What It Is And Why It’s a Problem

The Evergreen State College Productions
Olympia, Washington
2016-04-06

Carolyn Prouty

There is no biological basis for race; it is a socially constructed concept. Nonetheless, the structural nature of racism in society manifests itself in different health outcomes for peoples identified as different races, both as the health effect of experiencing racism, and interactions of people of color within the American health care system. Historically, it is clear how biology and anthropology have been misused in explaining differences between groups of humans, and these patterns have helped to reveal unexamined biases of researchers. Yet current uses of genetics in medical practice and research still follow some of these same erroneous paths, for example, confusing ancestry with race, conflating socio-economic conditions with race, and substituting common (and readily recombined) superficial hereditary traits such as skin color and hair shape as proxies for more substantive genetic markers. In this session, we will outline these ideas from biology, medicine, and sociology, beginning with Dorothy Roberts’ TED talk, “The Problem with Race-Based Medicine”, and investigate their applications in current and future practice. We’ll spend time in small group and larger group discussions, as we deconstruct the biology of race, expose some structural biases of American medicine and examine the implications of race-based medicine.

String of Pearls: Exploring the Melungeon mystery

SWVa Today
Wytheville, Virginia
2016-03-29

Margaret Linford, President
Smyth County Genealogical Society, Marion, Virginia

Judge Isaac Freeman spoke to the Smyth County Genealogical Society on Tuesday, March 22, regarding the Melungeon people. He has been intrigued by this topic for many years. His father was best friends with local historian Goodridge Wilson, who often spoke of the Melungeons. Judge Freeman said he can remember him talking about which local families were part of this unique group.

“Where have all the purebred Melungeons gone?” This question was posed in an article many years ago. Judge Freeman laughed as he shared this question with our group. “Of course,” he said, “the answer to this question is that there is no such thing as a ‘purebred’ Melungeon.”

Who are the Melungeons? There is no simple answer to this question. In N. Brent Kennedy’s book, “The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People: An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America,” he proposes that Turkish slaves were brought to America by Portuguese sailors. Once they arrived in America, they joined with female Cherokee Indians and other local tribes. This was the beginning of the “Melungeons.”

Most definitions of the Melungeons simply state that they are a “mixed race people.”…

Read the entire article here.

AmbryShare Restores Genes to the Public Domain

The Huffington Post
2016-03-29

Amal Cheema, Biochemistry and Political Science Student
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

“As a stage four cancer survivor, I find it shocking that public and private laboratories routinely lock away vital genomic information. That practice is delaying medical progress, causing real human suffering, and it needs to stop.” —Ambry Genetics CEO and founder Charles Dunlop

In its purest form, science seeks to determine how the world works and endeavors to improve the human condition. Yet, the current culture of research undermines this value-system, as institutions across the nation look for ways to capitalize on discoveries. The commodification of information, particularly of the genome, hinders innovation and prevents the discovery of novel drugs and cures., researchers can either seek revenue for their underfunded research or ensure the accessibility of scientific knowledge, but they can’t do both.

It’s not clear whether academic solidarity will prevail, universities increasingly rely upon licensing revenues and keep information proprietary. Although genes can no longer be patented in the U.S. due to the 2013 Supreme Court case, Association for Molecular Pathology et al. v. Myriad Genetics, most researchers perceive little benefit in sharing raw data. They silo their work and therefore, hamper innovation. The solution to this roadblock lies in the new, remediating, and open-access genomic libraries.

Ambry Genetics (Ambry), a leading genetics company, recently revealed its bypass to closed-door labs and patented information. It created a genomic library, AmbryShare, making the DNA data of 10,000 people available online to the public. And it’s the first private company to do so. While Ambry retains copyright, researchers now can easily download the data for free and investigate the genetic determinants of disease…

…Yet AmbryShare is not without its critics. Some fear that the database will lead to false positives and privacy breaches. Bioethicists like Dorothy Roberts of UPenn Law worry about false positives, such as race-specific gene differences. Roberts asserts that society has politically constructed race without a biological basis, and that researchers could support racism by misattributing differences in the genome as evidence of race. Scientists can address this concern by removing the race question from patient profiles…

Read the entire article here.

Taking race out of human genetics and memetics: We can’t achieve one without achieving the other

OUPblog: Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the Thinking World
2016-03-23

Carlos Hoyt

Carlos Hoyt explores race, racial identity and related issues as a scholar, teacher, psychotherapist, parent, and racialized member of our society, interrogating master narratives and the dominant discourse on race with the goal of illuminating and virtuously disrupting the racial worldview. Carlos holds teaching positions at Wheelock College, Simmons College, and Boston University in Boston Massachusetts, and has authored peer-reviewed articles on spirituality in social work practice and the pedagogy of the definition of racism. He is the author of The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race, published by Oxford University Press.

Acknowledging that they are certainly not the first to do so, four scientists, Michael Yudell, Dorothy Roberts, Rob Desalle, and Sarah Tishkoff recently called for the phasing out of the use of the concept/term “race” in biological science.

Because race is an irredeemably nebulous, confused, and confusing social construct, the authors advocate for replacing it with “ancestry.” “Ancestry,” they say, is a “process-based” concept that encourages one to seek information about genomic heritage, while race is a “patternbased” concept that induces one to organize individuals into preconceived hierarchical groupings based on shifting, murky, and contradictory combinations of appearance, geography, ability, worth, and the like.

If biological science seeks and relies on valid and maximally precise population level comparisons between groups, and race is an irrefutably imprecise proxy for consistent and concordant biological/genetic comparison, then of course we should stop using it in biology and switch over to “ancestry,” “genetic heritage,” or some other term that actually gets at what’s real, reliable, and useful. It doesn’t feel like a rocket-science proposition. And yet biological science hasn’t been able to heed the call and make the shift. And I sadly forecast that the shift won’t soon – or ever – be made – unless and until we take the step that even the well-meaning authors of this call for stop short of taking…

Read the entire article here.

I Can’t Breathe

Boston Review
2016-03-21

Anne Fausto-Sterling, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor Emerita of Biology and Gender Studies
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Race in Medical School Curricula

In the fall of 2015, U.S. college students ignited in protest about campus and national racism. Chanting “I Can’t Breathe” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”—recalling the final cries and acts of unarmed African Americans who died at the hands of police—the scholar-activists joined the Black Lives Matter movement that has burgeoned since the shootings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and many others. At my home base, Brown University, school officials responded by drafting a detailed action plan and inviting community comment, a process that is ongoing. While the plan pays attention to student demands for more diversity in the faculty and the student body, as well as improvements in campus climate, it fails to address the need to reevaluate and revise the curriculum in both undergraduate and professional schools—particularly with regard to what we do and do not teach about race, to how both silence and subtly coded messages continue to transmit racial bias.

Integrating studies of race, ethnicity, class, and gender into the curriculum is not easy. And it does not suffice to develop specialized elective courses, such as the one I offered more than twenty-five years ago—Women and Minorities in Science. Such courses exemplify what we, in the early days of women’s studies, used to refer to derisively as “just add women and stir.” The “stir” approach addresses problems of representation but does not challenge underlying theories of disciplinary knowledge.

Biology courses should not be able to get by, for example, with only mentioning a few famous scientists of color and then returning to business as usual. To properly address race, courses need to present the still-disputed science behind concepts of race and genetics, or examine how Darwin’s racial views led him to develop the idea of sexual selection, or teach about the genetics of skin pigmentation and convergent evolution of human phenotypes. Change that matters can only come from altering the content and pedagogy of mainstream courses for generations to come…

Read the entire article here.

“Whitening” and Whitewashing: Postcolonial Brazil is not an Egalitarian “Rainbow Nation”

The Postcolonialist
2014-03-04

Sarah Lempp

To commemorate the 500th anniversary of its “discovery” by Portuguese sailor Alvares de Cabral in 2000, Brazil officially presented itself as a “rainbow nation” without discrimination or racism; a place where people from various ethnicities live peacefully together. That the “discovery” caused slavery and death for millions of Indigenes and Africans was overlooked. The Portuguese colonization was seen as a “non-imperial act, an exercise of fraternity and intercultural and interethnic democracy”, says Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos.[1]

The German author Stefan Zweig, who fled to Brazil from Nazi Germany, already considered Brazil a paradise characterized by hybridity and said in 1941 that Brazil “has taken the racial problem, that unsettles our European world ad absurdum in the simplest manner: in plainly ignoring its validity.” (translation S.L.)[2] According to Zweig, “for hundreds of years the Brazilian nation relies on the sole principle of free and unrestrained mixing, perfect equality of black and white, brown and yellow. (…) There are no limits to colours, no boundaries, no supercilious hierarchies…”[3]

Hence the image of Brazil as a tolerant, peaceful, “mestiço” nation is not at all new. But it ignores then and still today the multifaceted forms of discrimination and specifically Brazilian shapes of racism…

Read the entire article here.

Should biologists stop grouping us by race?

STAT: Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine
2016-02-04

Sharon Begley

More than a decade after leading geneticists argued that race is not a true biological category, many studies continue to use it, harming scientific understanding and possibly patients, researchers argued in a provocative essay in Science on Thursday.

“We thought that after the Human Genome Project, with [its leaders] saying it’s time to move beyond race as a biological marker, we would have done that,” said Michael Yudell, a professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University and coauthor of the Science paper calling on journals and researchers to stop using race as a category in genetics studies. “Yet here we are, and there is evidence things have actually gotten worse in the genomic age.”…

Read the entire article here.

Teaching medical students to challenge ‘unscientific’ racial categories

STAT: Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine
2016-03-10

Ike Swetlitz

Dr. Brooke Cunningham talks about race to medical students at the University of Minnesota. Jenn Ackerman for Stat

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. — Medical students looking to score high on their board exams sometimes get a bit of uncomfortable advice: Embrace racial stereotypes.

“You see ‘African American,’ automatically just circle ‘sickle cell,’” said Nermine Abdelwahab, a first-year student at the University of Minnesota Medical School, recounting tips she’s heard from older classmates describing the “sad reality” of the tests.

Medical school curricula traditionally leave little room for nuanced discussions about the impact of race and racism on health, physicians and sociologists say. Instead, students learn to see race as a diagnostic shortcut, as lectures, textbooks, and scientific journal articles divide patients by racial categories, reinforcing the idea that race is biological. That mind-set can lead to misdiagnoses, such as treating sickle cell anemia as a largely “black” disease.

“Right now, students are learning an inaccurate and unscientific definition of race,” said Dorothy Roberts, a law and sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who coauthored a recent paper in Science arguing for an end to the use of biological concepts of race in human genetics research.

“It’s simply not true that human beings are naturally divided into genetically distinct races,” Roberts said. “So it is not good medical practice to treat patients that way.”

Change is starting to come, but slowly…

……Cunningham also traced racial stereotypes through centuries of medical science, from an 1850s medical definition of drapetomania — “the disease causing Negroes to run away” — to the modern day, when a mainstream formula to measure kidney function and a common test of lung capacity differ for “whites” and “blacks.”

“I think it’s revolutionary to be teaching that way to first-year medical students,” said Dr. Helena Hansen, a professor with dual appointments in both New York University’s anthropology department and the medical school’s psychiatry department. She said Cunningham is one of a small but growing number of faculty members challenging the status quo.

Hansen said Cunningham’s lecture “fundamentally challenges” a central premise in clinical medicine: that racial categories are well-defined and universally applicable…

Read the entire article here.

Hew To The Line And Let The Chips Fall Where They May.

The Broad Ax
Salt Lake City, Utah
1903-09-05 (Volume VIII, Number 45)
page 1, columns 5-6
Source: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. United States Library of Congress.

(For “The Broad Ax”)

1, 2, 3, 4, 5,—8. The reader will observe the figures at the beginning of this paragraph; but, until he finishes this article, he is not likely to bestow upon them the significance to which they are justly entitled.

A farmer had in his fruit orchard a robust hardy apple tree. It was what fruit raisers denominate “a standard tree;” that is, it was a tree grown from the seed of the tree from which its predecessors had grown; and so on, backward and backward. There had been no admixture with apple trees of a different variety. The farmer, wishing to improve the flavor of the fruit this standard tree yielded, he grafted into its trunk, or bole, theyoung shoot of a pear tree; and true enough, the next year’s apples had a sort of pear flavor. Experimenter, as he was, he then grafted into it the sion of the plum tree. The apples of the year that followed were of still better flavor than those that had preceded them. A third grafting of a quince followed; then peach and apricot making a fourth and a fifth. A sixth and seventh unsuccessful attempt was made; and, although the standard tree still lived, its owner discovered that at each succeeding grafting, it looked less robust, and there were not so many apples. In time, there was but half a crop after the first grafting! but a quarter of a crop after the second grafting; but an eighth of a crop after the third grafting; and but a sixteenth after the fourth grafting. The fifth grafting lessened the supply to a thirty-second; the sixth to a sixty-fourth; the seventh to a 128th, and after the 8th grafting, there was no fruit at all.

The farmer was puzzled; and, on reviewing the matter, he then remembered that with the fruit of each grafting there was a corresponding quick ness in the decay of the fruit yield. And he noticed, also, that although the hardy standard tree, had lived and yielded fruit, the supply of the fruit lessened with each grafting.

Poor man! He was puzzled exceedingly. Why? Because he did not comprehend that great law of nature which says–“Thus far mayst go, but no farther!”

The great law, under which, we are born, live and grow, is a fixed, unalterable law. To a certain extent we can and do violate it; but we cannot violate it beyond a certain limit.

The black race (African), the pure black blooded, is one of the five races of mankind that have reached the plane of memory, foresight, refection. The other four races are the white (Caucasian), red (the Indian), the brown (the Malay), and the yellow (Chinese). The cultivation of the mind will put either of these five races on its own plane; and the plane of one race is no higher than another; but no race can reach, its own plane or the, plane of another by mixing. Mongrels have no plane—no race—because their blood is a compound of various degrees of other bloods. Therefore if a race of people wish to become elevated, if they desire to stand upon a mental and physical platform as high as tat upon which another race occupies, they must propagate exclusively among themselves. A pure-blood man or woman must marry a pure-blooded woman or man. If a pure blooded offspring is expected. A race of people, no matter whether black, brown, red, yellow or white, cannot reach its true plane by mixture. It is against Nature’s fixed law—a crime which Nature punishes, and how? Why? By extinction.

The figures show—what? Why, the gradual deterioration of a race, that indulges in mixing with other races. Each mixture lessens the number of offspring; and there is a proportional shortening of the life period. When an eighth mixture Is reached, there is no further offspring! There are many pretty octoroon girls and some fine looking octoroon boys; but there are no octoroon mothers or fathers. Many quinteroons (five eighths white) pass for octoroons, but they are not such.

Let the pure black man and the pure black woman unite. Let them teach their children the importance of race purity and in time their offspring will rise to a plane as high as is the plane upon which stands any other race. Let the black race arouse its racial pride; its ambition; let it cultivate the faculty of reason and cram into its brain everything that is educational. By so doing it will become elevated.

Respectfully,
“THE DOCTOR”

Racialization, between power and knowledge: a postcolonial reading of public health as a discursive practice

Journal of Critical Race Inquiry
Volume 1, Number 2 (2011)

Patrick Cloos
University of Montréal

This paper presents and discusses the interdisciplinary theoretical perspective that has been built from a doctoral research on contemporary notions of ̒ race ̓ in the field of public health in the United States. In this context, ̒ race ̓ was seen as an object that emerged from the discourse, lying between power and knowledge as suggested by Foucault, while public health is an apparatus that put the discourse and the formation of the object into operation. Some authors in the field of postcolonial studies emphasize the representational power associated with the discourse that corresponds to a system of opposition and difference creating a dichotomy and ensuring the domination of some over others. This article argues that ̒ race ̓, as an idea of difference, will persist as long as historical conditions and people allow it.

Read the entire article here.