Mixed Race Studies

The Franklin Institute Speaker Series: Does Race Exist? (9/12/18)

The Franklin Institute
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2018-09-13

On September 12, 2018, as part of The Franklin Institute Speaker Series, University of Pennsylvania professors Sarah Tishkoff and Dorothy Roberts joined The Franklin Institute’s chief bioscientist Jayatri Das for a program titled “Does Race Exist? Exploring the Future of Genetics, Ancestry, and Medicine.”

The Problems With Raced Based Medicine

LabRoots
2019-02-18

Abbie Arce

Race is often used in medicine to evaluate symptoms, make diagnoses, and decide on a course of care. These systems of evaluation are often inaccurate representations of reality, based on stereotypes.

For example, minorities are much less likely to be prescribed pain medication based on these kinds of preconceived notions about race. This type of race-based medicine has a way of blinding doctors to other more important factors such as an individual’s family or social history, symptoms, or related illnesses…

Read the entire article here.

Skin Color and the Nature of Science

The American Biology Teacher
Volume 80, Number 3 (March 2018)
page 163
DOI: 10.1525/abt.2018.80.3.163

Douglas Allchin, Lecturer, History of Science and Technology
Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science
University of Minnesota

Skin color is the trait most commonly associated with race. Consider just the “black” in the Black Lives Matter name or the “white” in white nationalist rallies. Skin color and the concept of race are ideologically charged—and socially divisive. But scientifically, what is the nature of this relationship?

A study led by Sarah Tishkoff published not long ago in Science contradicts many widespread views of skin color and further dispels the very concept of human races in biology. The group identified at least eight genes for skin color, but the genes do not cluster neatly into predictable groups, or races. They further found that the genes do not align with conventional racial groups:

• The same depigmentation gene that led to “white” skin in the lineage of most Europeans (SLC24A5) is also common in East Africa, where skin color is much darker.
• Another pair of genes linked to lighter skin, hair, and eye color among Europeans actually originated in Africa, where among the San people in southern Africa, it also contributes to lighter skin tones.
• By contrast, a gene for darker pigmentation now common in Africa appears to be widespread in non-African groups as well: Indians, Melanesians, and Australian Aborigines.
• Some darker skin colors result not by increasing dark pigments but by reducing yellow and red pigments.

The routes to skin color are many and varied, and not exclusively determinant of any geographic or ancestral group. Trying to define race by skin color genetics is hardly “black and white.”…

Read the entire article here.

Testing Common Misconceptions about the Nature of Human Racial Variation

The American Biology Teacher
Volume 79 Number 7 (September 2017)
pages 538-543
DOI: 10.1525/abt.2017.79.7.538

Amelia R. Hubbard, Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Wright State University, Dayton Ohio

Race is a hot-button topic in American society, but one that needs to be addressed in the biological science curriculum. This paper examines how college students in a large introductory course came to understand race through the exploration of four key concepts about the nature of human biological and genetic variation. Using clicker data collected from four courses (n = 296), change in starting and ending understanding of content was compared using paired t-tests and mean difference scores. Results indicate statistically significant improvement in student understanding of common fallacies of the “biological race concept” after a single exposure to content.

Read or purchase the article here.

‘Race is not biological, it’s a social construct’: Scientists say ethnicity does NOT determine health risks – and doctors who say so are just fueling ‘racial prejudice’

The Daily Mail
2019-02-16

Mia De Graaf, Health Editor
Washington, D.C.

Researchers presented papers at a conference this week on race and genetics. This graph, presented by Brian Donovan at BSCS Science Learning says we often see race as disparate circles in a Venn diagram. Actually, he and other say, it’s more like circles on top of each other.

• New research adds fuel to the firey debate about race and genetics
• Experts told a conference we should not use race as a risk factor for health
• They say differences between racial groups are minimal and differences within groups are huge

Race is not a legitimate category to use in medicine, top scientists declared at the world’s biggest science conference this week.

In the US, African Americans are told to watch out for hypertension, white people for multiple sclerosis, Asians for heart disease, Hispanics for diabetes, and so on.

But on Friday, leading biologists said those general warnings are based on ‘bad science’ and do no more than fuel ‘racial prejudice’.

Among them, anthropologist Keith Hunley of the University of New Mexico presented a new map of genomes around the world, finding few differences between the clusters of racial groups that are often cited in medical research.

By lumping people into distinct broad categories, he and others warned, we risk ‘hyping’ certain inherited health risks for some and underestimating them for others – while sewing division, stereotypes and ignorance within society…

‘We have this notion that there are variants that are unique to certain groups, that there are genes that are unique to certain groups. And that’s almost never the case,’ Dr Hunley said as he described his presented his paper at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference…

Read the entire article here.

What’s DNA Got to Do with It

The Progressive: A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good
2019-01-11

Starita Smith
Denton, Texas

I see similarities between Elizabeth Warren’s situation and that of many black people.

As U. S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., campaigns for a possible 2020 presidential run, she reminds me of some long-standing issues about racial identification.

Warren, whom President Donald Trump has pejoratively labeled “Pocahontas” for claiming she has American Indian heritage, took a DNA test to prove it. When the results showed she has hardly any, she was criticized for falsely claiming native ancestry. Some speculate this may hurt her presidential aspirations.

Warren’s predicament points up the historical, legal and cultural arbitrariness of racial categories. For example, if Warren had proclaimed she had even one African ancestor, she would be defined as black legally and socially in most of the U.S. That’s because our nation uses the one-drop rule, or hypodescent, as the definition of who is black…

…The rule has been used in court repeatedly. One of the most famous cases involved Susie Guillory Phipps, a Louisiana woman, who presumed she and all her ancestors were white, yet when she tried to get a passport, she discovered that she was listed as black on her birth certificate. According to The New York Times, because she had a black ancestor – an enslaved woman, 222 years back in her family history – she was black…

Read the entire article here.

Part I: The DNA Trail from Madagascar to Manhattan

Radiant Roots, Boricua Branches: Musings on My Tri-racial Black and Puerto Rican Ancestry.
2015-01-27

Teresa Vega

Map of Indian Ocean Countries

This blog post is dedicated to my M23 Malagasy ancestors who survived the Middle Passage and made it to New York and New Jersey. This is Part I of a two part series and is focused on my family’s Malagasy ancestry. My next blog post will discuss how my ancestors arrived in New York based on the actions of unscrupulous NY merchants and pirates.

About Madagascar and DNA

Over the past decade, there have been numerous studies done that describe the origins of the Malagasy, the people of Madagascar. For example, in 2005, Hurles et al. discussed the dual origins of the Malasy people as being Southeast Asian and East African. His study was followed by one done in 2009 by Sergio Tofanelli et al. In this article, they wrote:

“Our results confirm that admixture of Malagasy was due to the encounter of people surfing the extreme edges of two of the broadest historical waves of language expansion: the Austronesian and Bantu expansions. In fact, all Madagascan living groups show amixture of uni-parental lineages typical present in African and Southeast Asian populations with only a minor contribution of Y lineages with different origins. Two observations suggest that the Y lineages with “another origin” entered the island in recent times: 1) they are particularly frequent in the Tanosy area (Fort Dauphin), and around Antananarivo, where commercial networks and the slave trade had a focus; 2) they matched with haplogroups typical of present Indo-European (Europeans) and Arabic speaking (Somali) people.”.

In addition, a 2012 study by Cox, et al. noted that most Malagasy people can trace their mtDNA back to 30 Indonesian women who made up the founding population of Madagascar. Given the fact that Southeast Asian Y-DNA was also found among the Malagasy, it is assumed that there were also some Indonesian men among this group of women. These women went on to have children with the Indonesian men present as well as men from Africa. Later migrations from Africa also included Southeast African Bantu mtDNA haplogroups from north of the Zambezi River. In 2013, Melanie Capredon et al. also discussed the Arab-Islamic contribution to the Malagasy gene pool as a result of Indian Ocean slave trade…

Read the entire article here.

Two Sisters Bought DNA Kits. The Results Blew Apart Their Family.

The Wall Street Journal
2019-02-01

Amy Dockser Marcus

^©Hurwitz and Dolvin family

In an age of ubiquitous direct-to-consumer genetic testing, family secrets are almost impossible to keep.

Sonny and Brina Hurwitz raised a family in Boston. They both died with secrets.

In 2016, their oldest daughter, Julie Lawson, took a home DNA test. Later, she persuaded her sister, Fredda Hurwitz, to take one too.

In May, the sisters sat down at the dinner table in Ms. Hurwitz’s Falls Church, Va., home to share their results. A man’s name popped up as a close genetic match for Ms. Hurwitz. Neither had ever heard of him.

Ms. Lawson searched for the man on Facebook . When she saw his photos, she knew. He looked like their late father. Based on his age and the close physical resemblance, Ms. Lawson immediately told her sister, “He’s got to be our brother.” This was their father’s secret. He had a child they never knew about.

Then came a second shock. Ms. Lawson’s test showed she didn’t appear to have any genetic connection to this new man. This was their mother’s secret: Ms. Lawson was the product of a brief extramarital affair. The man who raised her wasn’t her biological father.

The revelations ricocheted through the family. They created new bonds with people who were once strangers. They caused tension with family they had known all their lives. And they sparked a fight between the sisters about the bonds of loyalty—and how much their parents should have told them.

Ms. Lawson, 65 years old, said she is still grappling with “the pain of knowing my life was a lie and having all these questions that can’t be fully answered because both my parents are gone.”

The hardest part, she said, came the moment she and Ms. Hurwitz, 52, realized they were half, not full, sisters.

“We held each other,” Ms. Lawson said, “and we sobbed.”…

Read the entire article here.

Genesis of U.S. Colorism and Skin Tone Stratification: Slavery, Freedom, and Mulatto-Black Occupational Inequality in the Late 19th Century

The Review of Black Political Economy
First Published 2018-05-21
21 pages
DOI: 10.1177/0034644618770761

Robert L. Reece, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Texas, Austin

Studies show lighter skinned Black people are advantaged on a number of social indicators—a phenomenon called “colorism.” These studies generally contend preferences for light-skinned and/or Mulatto slaves endured the postbellum period to shape social outcomes into today. Following this idea, other studies examine differences in social outcomes between Mulattos and Blacks in the 19th century, but few empirically connect antebellum life to postbellum Mulatto–Black stratification. With that in mind, I examine whether the socio-economic differences between Mulattos and Blacks varied across geographic space in proportion to places’ reliance on slave labor and the characteristics of its free African American population. This allows me to examine whether differences in economic status between Mulattos and Blacks are a result of Mulatto advantage in the form of privileged positions during slavery. My results reveal that Mulattos have higher occupational statuses relative to Blacks in places where slavery was more prominent and where free Mulattos were literate. This suggests the intraracial hierarchy established during slavery was more likely to be replicated in places where slavery was more important, and Mulattos were able to capitalize on freedom by leveraging their literacy into better economic statuses after emancipation. These results support the idea that skin color stratification was initiated at least in part by practices during chattel slavery and offers some plausible mechanisms for its transmission.

Read the entire article here.

The DNA Industry and the Disappearing Indian

TomDispatch.com: A regular antidote to the mainstream media
2018-11-29

Aviva Chomsky, Professor of History; Coordinator of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies
Salem State University, Salem, Massachusetts

DNA, Race, and Native Rights

Amid the barrage of racist, anti-immigrant, and other attacks launched by President Trump and his administration in recent months, a series of little noted steps have threatened Native American land rights and sovereignty. Such attacks have focused on tribal sovereignty, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), and the voting rights of Native Americans, and they have come from Washington, the courts, and a state legislature. What they share is a single conceptual framework: the idea that the long history that has shaped U.S.-Native American relations has no relevance to today’s realities.

Meanwhile, in an apparently unrelated event, Senator Elizabeth Warren, egged on by Donald Trump’s “Pocahontas” taunts and his mocking of her claims to native ancestry, triumphantly touted her DNA results to “prove” her Native American heritage. In turning to the burgeoning, for-profit DNA industry, however, she implicitly lent her progressive weight to claims about race and identity that go hand in hand with moves to undermine Native sovereignty.

The DNA industry has, in fact, found a way to profit from reviving and modernizing antiquated ideas about the biological origins of race and repackaging them in a cheerful, Disneyfied wrapping. While it’s true that the it’s-a-small-world-after-all multiculturalism of the new racial science rejects nineteenth-century scientific racism and Social Darwinism, it is offering a twenty-first-century version of pseudoscience that once again reduces race to a matter of genetics and origins. In the process, the corporate-promoted ancestry fad conveniently manages to erase the histories of conquest, colonization, and exploitation that created not just racial inequality but race itself as a crucial category in the modern world.

Today’s policy attacks on Native rights reproduce the same misunderstandings of race that the DNA industry is now so assiduously promoting. If Native Americans are reduced to little more than another genetic variation, there is no need for laws that acknowledge their land rights, treaty rights, and sovereignty. Nor must any thought be given to how to compensate for past harms, not to speak of the present ones that still structure their realities. A genetic understanding of race distorts such policies into unfair “privileges” offered to a racially defined group and so “discrimination” against non-Natives. This is precisely the logic behind recent rulings that have denied Mashpee tribal land rights in Massachusetts, dismantled the Indian Child Welfare Act (a law aimed at preventing the removal of Native American children from their families or communities), and attempted to suppress Native voting rights in North Dakota…

Read the entire article here.