Mixed Race Studies

Rulemaking under way for DNA testing for Hawaiian homelands

The Associated Press
2015-12-28

Jennifer Sinco Kelleher

This Dec. 24, 2015 photo provided by Pat Kahawaiolaa shows Kahawaiolaa taking a selfie at Keaukaha Beach Park in Hilo, Hawaii. He is among those with at least 50 percent Native Hawaiian blood who are eligible for low-cost land leases from the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands. The department is proposing a rule that would allow use of DNA evidence as proof of an applicant’s Hawaiian blood quantum. (Pat Kahawaiolaa via AP)

HONOLULU (AP) — When the state deemed Leighton Pang Kee ineligible for one of the most valuable benefits available to Native Hawaiians — land at almost no cost — because he couldn’t show that he was at least 50 percent Hawaiian, he sued.

Pang Kee knew he was, and needed to figure out a way to prove it. According to his lawsuit, his mother was at least 81.25 percent Native Hawaiian, but his birth certificate didn’t list his biological father.

But he knew who his father was. Pang Kee, who was adopted, found his late father’s brother, got a DNA sample that showed there was a 96.35 percent probability that Pang Kee and the man were related, the lawsuit said.

While that initially wasn’t enough for the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, the agency eventually settled, and has proposed rules that would allow the use of DNA evidence to prove ancestry.

Hawaiians don’t typically fixate on how much Hawaiian blood they have when it comes to asserting ancestral identity.

“A Hawaiian is a Hawaiian is a Hawaiian,” said Michelle Kauhane, president and CEO of the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement. “Whether they have a drop or more than 50 percent.”

One of the only times blood quantum is relevant is for applying for a homestead lease. Those with at least 50 percent Hawaiian blood quantum can apply for a 99-year lease for $1 a year…

This Thursday, Dec. 24, 2015 photo shows houses in the the Hawaiian homestead community of Papakolea in Honolulu.The state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands has proposed rules that would allow people applying for a homestead lease to use DNA evidence to prove ancestry. (AP Photo/Audrey McAvoy)

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Hairy Paws and Bald Heads: Anxiety and Authority in W. D. Howells’ An Imperative Duty

American Literary Realism
Volume 48, Number 2, Winter 2016
pages 95-111

James Weaver, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

Intensely concerned with the cultural and personal implications of miscegenation and its resultant social upheaval, W. D. Howells’ An Imperative Duty (1891) documents how late-nineteenth-century racial fears become entangled in the medical discourse of the period. Ultimately a romance that brings together the liberal-minded nerve doctor Edward Olney and the refined but tragically mulatta Rhoda Aldgate, the novel traces the ways in which Olney both contests and affirms a racially and socially conservative point of view. As Michele Birnbaum points out, the novel “narrate[s] the young woman’s coming of age as a medical condition.” We might also see Howells’ novel as the coming-of-age story of its protagonist doctor—a coming of age that relies heavily upon his personal and professional relationship with that young woman. Importantly, we can see Olney’s change over the course of the narrative not just as the expression of his developing love for Aldgate but as the incremental recovery of his professional identity. Despite the personal transformations Olney experiences during the course of Howells’ novel, his professional transformation emerges as the more accurate index of Olney’s attitude toward issues of race and class. As Olney assumes a democratic openness toward Aldgate’s “taint” of dark ancestry, he also assumes a medical authority that transforms his romance with her into a doctor-patient relationship. That relationship is further predicated on Olney’s lingering anxieties over his medical authority and economic stability as well as on a troubling erasure of Aldgate’s racial identity. Reading An Imperative Duty in light of such influential contemporary medical texts as S. Weir Mitchell’s Doctor and Patient and George M. Beard’s American Nervousness, then, enables us to see Olney’s transition from nervous doctor to nerve doctor—a distinction that, however coy, aptly indicates how Howells’ hero-doctor is able to “cure” not only his and Aldgate’s racial anxieties but also his own nagging fears about his social, cultural, and medical authority.

Recent criticism of Howells’ novel has usefully explored the ways in which it engages with the racial discourse of the time, as critics have tried to assess the race politics ultimately articulated by Howells. Many of those essays have situated An Imperative Duty against the backdrop of U.S. immigration debates and concerns over citizenship; in dialogue with developments in realist aesthetics and American pragmatism; or in relation to the tradition of passing novels, the trope of the tragic mulatto, and late-nineteenth-century fears about miscegenation. In this essay I’d like to frame my analysis of An Imperative Duty and Dr. Olney against a different cultural backdrop: the rise of “nervous diseases” and the corresponding efforts in the American medical community to organize professionally and consolidate power and privilege through its possession of scientific knowledge. By folding this consideration of Dr. Olney’s professional identity into our larger understanding of Howells’ novel, I hope to illuminate the ways in which the racial and medical discourses of the novel intersect with and reinforce one another, reasserting an entrenched white male privilege despite initially seeming to question those avenues of power.

Before I turn to Howells’ novel, though, let me contextualize that analysis by rehearsing in general terms the late-nineteenth-century medical discourse regarding neurasthenia and by outlining the power relations embedded in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. George M. Beard first employed the term “neurasthenia” to describe a state of nervous exhaustion in an 1869 speech to the New York Medical Association. A Yale graduate and two-year veteran of the Union navy’s medical staff during the Civil War, Beard finished his medical degree at New York’s College of Physicians in 1866 and almost immediately began a focused study of nervous diseases that culminated in his 1881 text American Nervousness, his most comprehensive treatise on neurasthenia, its causes and effects, and its national significance. In that text, Beard argues against a faculty psychology interpretation of nervousness, contending that the term does not indicate “unbalanced mental organization” or “a predominance of the emotional” but rather “a lack of nerve-force.” As he writes, “Nervousness is nervelessness.” For Beard, neurasthenia was thus a strictly…

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Philosophy of race meets population genetics

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Volume 52, August 2015
pages 46–55
Genomics and Philosophy of Race
DOI: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.04.003

Quayshawn Spencer, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
University of Pennsylvania

Highlights

• I discuss the recent human population-genetic research that has revived biological racial realism.
• I summarize four semantic and metaphysical objections to the new biological racial realism.
• I show that each objection stems from an implausible semantic or metaphysical assumption.
• I provide 3 suggestions for how to productively move forward in the debate.

In this paper, I respond to four common semantic and metaphysical objections that philosophers of race have launched at scholars who interpret recent human genetic clustering results in population genetics as evidence for biological racial realism. I call these objections ‘the discreteness objection’, ‘the visibility objection’, ‘the very important objection’, and ‘the objectively real objection.’ After motivating each objection, I show that each one stems from implausible philosophical assumptions about the relevant meaning of ‘race’ or the nature of biological racial realism. In order to be constructive, I end by offering some advice for how we can productively critique attempts to defend biological racial realism based on recent human genetic clustering results. I also offer a clarification of the relevant human-population genetic research.

A Radical Solution to the Race Problem

Philosophy of Science
Volume 81, Number 5 (December 2014)
pages 1025-1038
DOI: 10.1086/677694

Quayshawn Spencer, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
University of Pennsylvania

It has become customary among philosophers and biologists to claim that folk racial classification has no biological basis. This paper attempts to debunk that view. In this paper, I show that ‘race’, as used in current U.S. race talk, picks out a biologically real entity. I do this by, first, showing that ‘race’, in this use, is not a kind term, but a proper name for a set of human population groups. Next, using recent human genetic clustering results, I show that this set of human population groups is a partition of human populations that I call ‘the Blumenbach partition’.

Read or purchase the article here.

What ‘biological racial realism’ should mean

Philosophical Studies
June 2012, Volume 159, Issue 2
pages 181-204
DOI: 10.1007/s11098-011-9697-2

Quayshawn Spencer, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
University of Pennsylvania

A curious ambiguity has arisen in the race debate in recent years. That ambiguity is what is actually meant by ‘biological racial realism’. Some philosophers mean that ‘race is a natural kind in biology’, while others mean that ‘race is a real biological kind’. However, there is no agreement about what a natural kind or a real biological kind should be in the race debate. In this article, I will argue that the best interpretation of ‘biological racial realism’ is one that interprets ‘biological racial realism’ as ‘race is a genuine kind in biology’, where a genuine kind is a valid kind in a well-ordered scientific research program. I begin by reviewing previous interpretations of ‘biological racial realism’ in the race debate. Second, I introduce the idea of a genuine kind and compare it to various notions of natural and real biological kinds used in the race debate. Third, I present and defend an argument for my view. Fourth, I provide a few interesting consequences of my view for the race debate. Last, I provide a summary of the article.

Read or purchase the article here. Read the author’s manuscript here.

Catherine Bliss Examines Race and Science in the Post-Genomic World

Science of Caring: A Publication of the UCSF School of Nursing
University of California, San Francisco
December 2015

Diana Austin

Catherine Bliss (photo by Elisabeth Fall)

When Catherine Bliss, assistant professor in the UC San Francisco School of Nursing Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, first set out to write a book on race and genomics, she decided to do more than just talk to scientists about their work. She went into their labs to observe what they actually did and consider what effect those practices might have on how science treats issues of race. She also interviewed them about their backgrounds and personal experiences to examine how their ideas of race were formulated. Those discussions and observations formed the basis for Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice (Stanford University Press, 2012), which explores the idea of race in a post-genomic world and the implications it has for social justice and health.

Looking at How Scientists Approach Race

Introductions from noted sociologist Troy Duster helped open the doors to the labs of well-known genome scientists, such as National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins; and she interviewed luminaries like biotechnologist Craig Venter, who was among the first to sequence the human genome. What Bliss found was that, despite the consensus among genomic scientists that there is little genetic basis for the concept of race, notions of race continue to inform and affect scientists’ work – especially in the health sciences, where the very real problems of access and inclusion for minorities prompt researchers to continue to use race as a central factor in designing projects.

Bliss says, “I would ask about their practices, and then I’d look into their labs at what they were actually doing. I asked them about the technologies they used. It turned out that some were racialized.”…

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Panel Discussion: Social Inequalities in Health

National Institutes of Health (U.S.). Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research
Bethesda, Maryland
2015-05-08, 14:00 EDT (Local Time)

The NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research will host the Panel Discussion: Social Inequalities in Health, on May 8, 2015, at the NIH Campus, as part of the 2014-2015 BSSR Lecture Series to promote open and engaged discussion about cutting edge research in the behavioral and social sciences field.

Panelists:

• Ann Morning, PhD, New York University
• Dorothy Roberts, JD, University of Pennsylvania
• Jo Phelan, PhD, Columbia University

Watch or download the video (01:56:15) here.

Biological races in humans

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Volume 44, Issue 3, September 2013
Pages 262–271
DOI: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2013.04.010

Alan R. Templeton, Charles Rebstock Professor of Biology Emeritus
Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri

Highlights

• Races are highly genetically differentiated populations with sharp geographical boundaries.
• Alternatively, races can be distinct evolutionary lineages within a species.
• By either definition, races do not exist in humans but do exist in chimpanzees.
• Adaptive traits such as skin color do not define races and are often discordant with one another.
• Humans populations are interwoven by genetic interchanges; there is no tree of populations.

Races may exist in humans in a cultural sense, but biological concepts of race are needed to access their reality in a non-species-specific manner and to see if cultural categories correspond to biological categories within humans. Modern biological concepts of race can be implemented objectively with molecular genetic data through hypothesis-testing. Genetic data sets are used to see if biological races exist in humans and in our closest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee. Using the two most commonly used biological concepts of race, chimpanzees are indeed subdivided into races but humans are not. Adaptive traits, such as skin color, have frequently been used to define races in humans, but such adaptive traits reflect the underlying environmental factor to which they are adaptive and not overall genetic differentiation, and different adaptive traits define discordant groups. There are no objective criteria for choosing one adaptive trait over another to define race. As a consequence, adaptive traits do not define races in humans. Much of the recent scientific literature on human evolution portrays human populations as separate branches on an evolutionary tree. A tree-like structure among humans has been falsified whenever tested, so this practice is scientifically indefensible. It is also socially irresponsible as these pictorial representations of human evolution have more impact on the general public than nuanced phrases in the text of a scientific paper. Humans have much genetic diversity, but the vast majority of this diversity reflects individual uniqueness and not race.

Read or purchase the article here. Read the author manuscript here.

Why Your Race Isn’t Genetic

Pacific Standard
2014-05-30

Michael White, Assistant Professor of Genetics
Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri

DNA doesn’t determine race. Society does.

If you glanced around the room at a conference of geneticists, it would be easy to guess where in the world all the attendees’ ancestors came from. Using skin color, hair, facial features, and other physical traits, you could distinguish the East Asians from the South Asians and the Africans from the Europeans. Our broad racial categories appear to be founded on genuine biological differences between people from different geographical regions. And these differences seem to define a set of natural human groups, the product of the last 70,000 years or so when modern humans emerged from Africa to colonize the other continents, acquiring distinct physical traits as they adapted to new environments.

The concept of human races appears to be solidly grounded in present-day biology and our evolutionary history. But if you asked that conference of geneticists to give you a genetic definition of race, they wouldn’t be able to do it. Human races are not natural genetic groups; they are socially constructed categories…

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The Juggler’s Children: A Journey into Family, Legend and the Genes that Bind Us

Random House Canada
2013-03-26
400 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780679314592
eBook ISBN: 9780307372154

Carolyn Abraham

Carolyn Abraham explores the stunning power and ethical pitfalls of using genetic tests to answer questions of genealogy—by cracking the genome of her own family.

Recently, tens of thousands of people have been drawn to mail-order DNA tests to learn about their family roots. Abraham investigates whether this burgeoning new science can help solve 2 mysteries that have haunted her multi-racial family for more than a century. Both hinge on her enigmatic great-grandfathers—a hero who died young and a scoundrel who disappeared. Can the DNA they left behind reveal their stories from beyond the grave?

Armed with DNA kits, Abraham criss-crosses the globe, taking cells from relatives and strangers, a genetic journey that turns up far more than she bargained for—ugly truths and moral quandaries. With lively writing and a compelling personal narrative, The Juggler’s Children tackles profound questions around the genetics of identity, race and humanity, and tells a big story about our small world, with vivid proof that genes bind us all to the branches of one family tree.