Mixed Race Studies

Race, Identity, and Medical Genomics in the Obama Age (Lecture by Duana Fullwiley)

Fall 2010 Honors Colloquium: RACE
University of Rhode Island
Edwards Auditorium, URI Kingston Campus
Tuesday, 2010-10-05, 19:00 ET (Local Time); (23:00Z)

Duana Fullwiley, Assistant Professor of African and African American studies and of Medical Anthropology
Harvard University

A series of public programs at the University of Rhode Island presented by the URI Honors Program

Join us! The public is invited to attend this series of free events.

Perceptions about race shape everyday experiences, public policies, opportunities for individual achievement, and relations across racial and ethnic lines. In this colloquium we will explore key issues of race, showing how race still matters.

Watch the lecture below:

Other articles by or about Duana Fullwiley:

• “Race and Genetics: An Attempt to Define the Relationship”
• “Race in a Genetic World”
• “The Biologistical Construction of Race: ‘Admixture’ Technology and the New Genetic Medicine”
• “Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They?”

From “Race in a Genetic World”:

“I am an African American,” says Duana Fullwiley, “but in parts of Africa, I am white.” To do fieldwork as a medical anthropologist in Senegal, she says, “I take a plane to France, a seven- to eight-hour ride. My race changes as I cross the Atlantic. There, I say, ‘Je suis noire,’ and they say, ‘Oh, okay—métisse—you are mixed.’ Then I fly another six to seven hours to Senegal, and I am white. In the space of a day, I can change from African American, to métisse, to tubaab [Wolof for “white/European”]. This is not a joke, or something to laugh at, or to take lightly. It is the kind of social recognition that even two-year-olds who can barely speak understand. ‘Tubaab,’ they say when they greet me.”

Fall 2010 Honors Colloquium: RACE

University of Rhode Island
Tuesday evenings, 19:00 ET (Local Time); (23:00Z through November; 00:00Z on Wednesday after November 9).
2010-09-14 through 2010-12-07
Edwards Auditorium, URI Kingston Campus

A series of public programs at the University of Rhode Island presented by the URI Honors Program

Join us! The public is invited to attend this series of free events.

Perceptions about race shape everyday experiences, public policies, opportunities for individual achievement, and relations across racial and ethnic lines. In this colloquium we will explore key issues of race, showing how race still matters.

You will be able to watch the Colloquium live by clicking here or watching below. This link will only work in real time, while the presentation is going on.

Note: the live feed is only active during live events.

Includes noted scholars (Times and dates below are in UTC.  Please read carefully!):

2010-10-05, 23:00Z
Race, Identity, and Medical Genomics in the Obama Age
Duana Fullwiley, Assistant Professor of African and African American studies and of Medical Anthropology
Harvard University

2010-10-12, 23:00Z
The Invisible Weight of Whiteness: The Racial Grammar of Everyday Life in Contemporary America
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

2010-11-31, 00:00Z
How Black Women’s Stories Complicate Race and Gender Politics
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies
Princeton University

For more information, click here.

What Can DNA Really Tell Us About Race?

UCtelevision
Unviersity of California
2007-04-25
00:54:55

Introduction by
Howard Winnant, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Troy Duster, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

and
Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge
New York University

One of the leading authorities on race and science, Troy Duster discusses how the understanding of race is being reshaped by the genomics revolution. Sometimes unintentionally and sometimes not so innocently, genomics may be generating a new and more sophisticated racism, not so different from the eugenics-based and criminological racism that flourished in decades gone by. Series: “Voices” [7/2007] [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Science] [Show ID: 13008]

The Ambiguous Meanings of the Racial/Ethnic Categories Routinely used in Human Genetics Research

Social Science & Medicine
Volume 66, Issue 2 (January 2008)
pages 349-361
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2007.08.034

Linda M. Hunt, Professor of Anthropology
Michigan State University

Mary S. Megyesi, M.Sc.
Michigan State University

Many researchers are currently studying the distribution of genetic variations among diverse groups, with particular interest in explaining racial/ethnic health disparities. However, the use of racial/ethnic categories as variables in biological research is controversial. Just how racial/ethnic categories are conceptualized, operationalized, and interpreted is a key consideration in determining the legitimacy of their use, but has received little attention. We conducted semi-structured, open-ended interviews with 30 human genetics scientists from the US and Canada who use racial/ethnic variables in their research. They discussed the types of classifications they use, the criteria upon which they are based, and their methods for classifying individual samples and subjects. We found definitions of racial/ethnic variables were often lacking or unclear, the specific categories they used were inconsistent and context specific, and classification practices were often implicit and unexamined. We conclude that such conceptual and practical problems are inherent to routinely used racial/ethnic categories themselves, and that they lack sufficient rigor to be used as key variables in biological research. It is our position that it is unacceptable to persist in the constructing of scientific arguments based on these highly ambiguous variables.

…A number of serious problems with using race/ethnicity as a variable in genetics research have emerged in our analysis of our interviews with this group of genetic scientists. At the most basic level, the common racial/ethnic classifications they routinely use are of questionable value for delineating genetically related groups. The ubiquitous OMB categories in fact were designed for political and administrative purposes; they were not designed for use as scientific variables (Kertzer & Arel, 2002; Shields et al., 2005). These are notably ambiguous and arbitrary categories, based on strikingly diverse criteria such as skin color, language, or geographic location. They do not compose clear classifications, but instead are overlapping and not mutually exclusive. In the absence of clear principles for applying the labels, in practice, different aspects of an individual’s identity are arbitrarily prioritized, in order to fit individual cases into the schema.

A serious conceptual problem that reinforces the use of these questionable categories is that many of the researchers presume racial admixture is relatively rare and recent, and that specific geographically defined groups, such as Finnish or Japanese, can unproblematically be equated with broad socially designated racial/ethnic groups, such as white or Asian. However, this logic relies on several unsubstantiated assumptions: that historically there were pure racial types associated with particular geographic locations; that migrations were sporadic and relatively rare; and that racial/ethnic groups are primarily endogamous. (A recent study of the views of genetics journals editors reports similar findings: Outram & Ellison, 2006.) These assumptions are contrary to much of what is known about human population history. Genetic isolation among humans is in fact quite rare: human populations have always exchanged mates across broad geographic areas throughout time, producing clinal variation (gradual variation between places), rather than clearly distinct genetic stocks. Furthermore, racial admixture is not an exceptional event; indeed, there has been significant intermarriage between socially designated groups throughout history (Weiss, 1998; Harry & Marks, 1999; Race Ethnicity and Genetics Working Group, 2005). Compounding these conceptual problems is the practical fact that assigning these labels to individuals is often done in the absence of any specific knowledge of their actual familial migration histories.

Heavy reliance on self-identification, as reported by these researchers, further amplifies the imprecision to these variables. Despite its popularity, this method for classifying cases is extremely problematic. Racial/ethnic identities are inherently amorphous constructs; they are multiple and fluid, and may change as a person moves between social, economic and geographic contexts (Berry, 1993; Hunt, Schneider & Comer, 2004). There is no way to know what criteria an individual may apply when classifying their own racial/ethnic identity, and the criteria is likely to vary dramatically from person to person. Although some researchers collect additional information about parents and grandparents, this is only done for certain racial/ethnic groups, and never with others, and there appears to be no standard criteria for assigning group membership based on the additional information…

Read the entire article here.

The physical and mental health of multiracial adolescents in the United States

University of Pennsylvania
2007
101 pages
ISBN: 9780549117445

Jamie Mihoko Doyle
Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
University of Pennsylvania

A dissertation in Demographic Presented to Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in partial fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Healthy People 2010 objectives cite the need to eliminate racial disparities in health by the year 2050. However, with increases in intermarriage and migration, a growing number of individuals are self-identifying with more than one race. It is unclear whether they constitute a growing, at-risk population that policy interventions currently overlook. This analysis evaluates the physical and mental health status of multiracial adolescents, particularly in comparison to single race groups. The data are from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a nationally representative study of approximately 20,000 youth ages 12-18 interviewed in 1995 and re-interviewed 6 years later. The main outcome measures for physical health include weight status (Body Mass Index) and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). For mental health, the measures include depression (CES-D) and self-esteem (Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale). Sexual debut was also examined. Generalized Estimating Equations are used for all analyses using logistic regression and Generalized Linear Mixed Models are used for continuous dependent variables to correct for the Add Health study design. Overall, findings from this dissertation demonstrate that socioeconomic privilege does not necessarily confer positive physical and/or mental health. Interracial families have a mid- to high-socioeconomic profile; yet Asian-White multiracials exhibit a poor mental health profile and Black-White multiracials exhibit the highest risk of having STDs as adults. Moreover, most multiracial subgroups resemble their single-race minority counterparts on most outcomes considered. In terms of physical health, Asian-White and Black-White mutltiracials are not at a disproportionately high risk of being obese as young adults, irrespective of how races are categorized. This thesis has uncovered several mediated mechanisms for these patterns–yet this diverse area of research on multiracials is still in infancy. The role of peer networks, culture, and school contexts in shaping the physical and mental health of multiracials are all interesting avenues for a future researcher to pursue.

Table of Contents

Purchase the dissertation here.

Biological and Social Consequences of Race-Crossing

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 9, Issue 2 (April/June 1926)
pages 145–156
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330090212

W. E. Castle (1867-1962)
Bussey Institution, Harvard University

What constitute the essential differences between human races seems to be a question difficult for anthropologists to agree upon but from a biologist’s point of view those appear to be on safe ground who base racial distinctions on easily recognizable and measurable differences perpetuated by heredity irrespective of the environment.  See Hooton, 1926.  It is still a moot question how races originate, not merely in man, but also among lower animals and plants.  At one time natural selection was thought to be an all-sufficient explanation of the matter, but the more carefully the question is studied and the more exact and experimental in character the data which enter into its solution, the more fully we become convinced that forms of life are rarely static, that organic is the rule rather than the exception. Change is inevitable and is not limited to useful or adaptive variations.  Natural selection undoubtedly determines the survival of decidedly useful variations, which arise for any reason, and also the extinction of those which are positively harmful, but a host of there variations fall in neither of these categories and survive among the descendants as a matter of course, quite unaffected by natural selection.

The experimental study of evolution indicates that genetic (hereditary) variations are all the time arising, and with especial frequency in such organism are bisexual and cross-fertilized.

In a state of nature no species can long be separated by geographical barriers into  non-interbreeding groups, without the origins of specific or racial differences between such groups…

Read or purchace the article here.

Black, White and Other… Worldwide

The Huffington Post
2010-07-27

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

Even though the 21st century is seeing an exponential increase in reports of multiracial ancestry worldwide, exactly what makes a person multiracial remains a puzzling concept. According to the Association of Multiethnic Americans and Project RACE, the definition of a multiracial/interracial person is either someone whose parents were of more than one race or racial background, or someone who had parents that were of different racial groups. But what about those who identify with more than one racial background, irrespective of their parents’ identities? Or, those who identify with a racial background completely different from those of their parents?

Case in point: Nmachi Ihegboro, a blond haired and blue-eyed white baby born earlier this month to proud black Nigerian parents Ben and Angela Ihegboro in London UK. Nmachi’s parents are somewhat mystified about how they could create a white child and they are not the only ones. According to the New York Post, genetics experts are also baffled. So far they have offered three theories: (1) Nmachi “is the result of a gene mutation unique to her. If that is the case, Nmachi would pass the gene to her children — and they, too, would likely be white. (2) She’s the product of long-dormant white genes… that might have been carried by” her ancestors “for generations without surfacing until now.” Genetics professor Sykes of Oxford University thinks that some form of mixed race ancestry would seem to be necessary, and notes that sometimes multiracial women can carry some genetic material for white children and some genetic material for black children. It is also conceivable that the same holds true for multiracial men. (3) “While doctors have said Nmachi is not an outright albino, or lacking in all pigment, they added that the child may have some kind of mutated version of the genetic condition — and that her skin could darken over time.”…

Read the entire article here.

From Eugenics to Genomics: A History of the Race Concept and Its Impact on Contemporary Health Disparities

American Public Health Association Annual Meeting
San Diego, California
2008

Michael Yudell, PhD, MPH, Assistant Professor, Department of Community Health and Prevention
Drexel University

At the dawn of the 21st century, the idea of race—the belief that the peoples of the world can be organized into biologically distinctive groups, each with their own physical, social, and intellectual characteristics—is understood by most natural and social scientists to be an unsound concept. The way scientists think about race today, after all, is different than it was in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement when some promoted black genetic inferiority as an argument against egalitarian social and economic policy, and certainly different than one or two centuries ago as scientific justifications for slavery and later Jim Crow were articulated. In other words, race, its scientific meaning seemingly drawn from the visual and genetic cues of human diversity, is an idea with a measurable past, identifiable present, and uncertain future. These changes are influenced by a range of variables including geography, politics, culture, science, and economics.

Today, despite the growing consensus among scientists that race is not, in fact, a useful classificatory tool, an understanding of human difference and diversity remains a hallmark of contemporary scientific practice, and thus presents a seeming contradiction—how can one study human difference without talking about race? On the one hand, beginning in the 1930s, advances in population genetics and evolutionary biology led many to conclude that the race concept was not a particularly useful or accurate marker of biological difference. By the 1970s, many prominent biologists, including the geneticists Richard Lewontin and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, came to see the race concept as a deeply flawed way to organize human genetic diversity that is inseparable from the social prejudices about human difference that spawned the concept in the 18th century and have accompanied its meaning since. Historians and social scientists believe that race is socially constructed, meaning that the biological meaning of race has been constrained by the social context in which racial research has taken place…

…During the first three decades of the 20th century, eugenicists and many geneticists fiercely advocated “the belief that human races differed hereditarily by important mental as well as physical traits, and that crosses between widely different races were biologically harmful.” American eugenicists dedicated considerable resources to the study of black-white differences during the first three decades of the 20th century, and sought to apply these ideas to the public sphere. Well-respected geneticists wrote openly that “miscegenation can only lead to unhappiness under present social conditions and must, we believe, under any social conditions be biologically wrong.” In his seminal work on race and intelligence, Race Crossing in Jamaica (1929), Charles Davenport, a Harvard trained biologist and the titular head of the American eugenics movements from the outset of the 20th century until the 1930s, wrote “we are driven to the conclusion that there is a constitutional, hereditary, genetical basis for the difference between the two races [whites and blacks] in mental tests. We have to conclude that there are racial differences in mental capacity.” In their influential text Applied Eugenics (1933), eugenicists Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson, who endorsed segregation as a “social adaptation,” wrote “that the Negro race differs greatly from the white race, mentally as well as physically, and that in many respects it may be said to be inferior when tested by the requirements of modern civilization and progress.” Moreover, they suggested “negroes, both children and adults, have been found markedly inferior to white in vital capacity… Differences in temperament and emotional reaction also exist, and may be more important than the purely intellectual differences.” It must be stated that the genetic claims of racial difference advocated by eugenicists—from differences in intelligence to disease rates to musicality—have all been shown to be false.

Eugenic propagandists gave race an unalterable permanence; neither education, nor change in environment or climate, nor the eradication of racism itself could alter the fate of non-whites. In the United States, the impact of eugenics on matters of human difference was felt widely. In Virginia, as head of the State’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, eugenicist and white supremacist Walter Plecker helped to shape the State’s segregation policies. For example, Plecker helped push Virginia’s anti-miscegenation Racial Integrity Act of 1924, and used that law to expose individuals he believed were passing as white in an attempt to stop what he feared to be the mongrelization of the races…

Read the entire paper here.

Ancestry Testing and DNA: Uses, Limits – and Caveat Emptor

GeneWatch
Council for Responsible Genetics
Volume 22, Issue 3-4 (July-August 2009)
2009-07-30
Pages 16-18

Troy Duster, Professor of Sociology
New York University

Direct consumer use of DNA  tests for ancestry tracing has taken off in the last five years, and we are not just talking about probes for first-generation genetic lineage as in the “Who’s your daddy?” tests popularized on daytime television.  Since 2002, nearly a half-million people have purchased tests from at least two dozen companies marketing direct-to-consumer kits.  The motives for testing range from the desire for ancestral links to those who lived on other continents five-hundred plus years ago to a more modest interest in reconstructing family histories.  For many African-Americans, the quest to find a link to regions and peoples of sub-Saharan Africa can take on a spiritual or even messianic quest, at least partially explained by the fact that the Middle Passage across the Atlantic during the slave trade explicitly and purposefully obliterated linguistic, cultural, religious, political and kinship ties.  The 2006 PBS television series, African American Lives, brought this quest into sharp relief.  First celebrity and later ordinary Blacks were mesmerized by stories of DNA matches that claimed to reveal or refute specific ancestral links to Africa, to Native American heritage, and surprising to some, East Asian or European populations.

In sharp contrast, CBS’ 60 minutes aired a dramatic segment in the fall of 2007 (October 7) that portrayed a direct and sharp challenge to the claims-making about such ancestry testing.  The segment began with Vy Higgensen, an African-American woman from New York’s Harlem triumphantly affirming her connection to “new kin” (one of whom was a white male cattle rancher from Missouri).  But as the program unfolds, we see a disturbing cloud of doubt drift over the last part of the segment that ends with a less than subtle hint at specious claims.  A first test from the company African Ancestry, claims that Higgensen is linked to ancestors in the Sierra Leone, the Mende people.  She rejoices. “I am thrilled!  It puts a name, a place, a location, a people!”  But then she is shown the results of a second test, from another company, Relative Genetics, which claims that she instead has a genetic match to the Wobe tribe of the Ivory Coast.  She seems unruffled.  Yet a third test, from Trace Genetics, claims that her ancestors are from Senegal, the Mendenka.  Now she seems agitated, visibly concerned, confused – and most certainly disappointed that what began as a definitive match to a particular group or region of Africa has now turned into a “you pick which one you want to believe” game.

What can DNA tell us about our genetic lineage, and where does it fall short? What explains Vy Higgensen’s multiple results from different testing sites? Flawed methodology? Partial truths hyped as definitive findings? Did the testing companies use different methods or deploy different reference populations – or both?…

…There is a yet more ominous and troubling element of the reliance upon DNA analysis to determine who we are in terms of lineage, identity, and identification. The very technology that tells us what proportion of our ancestry can be linked, proportionately, to sub-Saharan Africa (ancestry-informative markers) is the same being offered to police stations around the country to “predict” or “estimate” whether the DNA left at a crime scene belongs to a white or black person. This “ethnic estimation” using DNA relies on a social definition of the phenotype (the observable physical or biochemical characteristics of an organism, determined by both genetic makeup and environmental influences). That is, in order to say that someone is 85 percent African, we must know who is 100 percent African. Any molecular, population, or behavioral geneticist who uses the term “percent European” or “percent Native American” is obliged to disclose that the measuring point of this “purity” (100 percent) is a statistical artifact that begins not with the DNA, but with a researcher adopting the folk categories of race and ethnicity…

Read the entire article here.

Essentialist theory of ‘hybrids’: from animal kinds to ethnic categories and race

Asian Journal of Social Psychology
Early View (Articles online in advance of print)
Published Online: 2010-07-20
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-839X.2010.01315.x

Wolfgang Wagner
Department of Social and Economic Psychology, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria
Department of Social Psychology and Methodology, University of the Basque Country, San Sebastian, Spain

Nicole Kronberger
Department of Social and Economic Psychology, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

Motohiko Nagata
Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

Ragini Sen
Institute of Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution, Mumbai, India

Peter Holtz
Department of Social and Economic Psychology, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

Fátima Flores Palacios, Faculty of Psychology
National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico

This article presents a theory of the perception of hybrids, resulting from cross-breeding natural animals that pertain to different species and of children parented by couples with a mixed ethnic or racial background. The theory states that natural living beings, including humans, are perceived as possessing a deeply ingrained characteristic that is called ‘essence’ or ‘blood’ or ‘genes’ in everyday discourse and that uniquely determines their category membership. If, by whatever means, the genes or essences of two animals of different species are combined in a hybrid, the two incompatible essences collapse, leaving the hybrid in a state of non-identity and non-belonging. People despise this state and reject the hybrid (Study 1). This devaluation effect holds with cross-kind hybrids and with hybrids that arise from genetically combining animals from incompatible habitats across three cultures: Austria, India and Japan (Study 2). In the social world, groups and ethnic or racial categories frequently are essentialized in an analogue way. When people with an essentialist mindset judge ethnically or racially mixed offspring, they perceive a collapse of ethnic or racial essence and, consequently, denigrate these children, as compared to children from ‘pure’ in-group or out-group parents (Study 3). The findings are discussed in terms of the widespread ‘yuck factor’ against genetically modified animals, in terms of the cultural concepts of monstrosity and of racism and prejudice.

Read or purchase the article here.