Mixed Race Studies

The controversial connection between race, genetics and medicine

Minnesota Public Radio News
Midmorning Broadcast: 2010-02-03, 09:06 CST

Kerri Miller, Host

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

David Goldstein, Professor of Genetics and Director of the Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy Center for Human Genome Variation
Duke University

[From Steven F. Riley: This is an excellent “must listen to” discussion!]

As scientists explore the human genome and medicines tailored to particular genes, a provocative question emerges about whether there is a genetic marker that could explain why some treatments work better for different racial groups. And some say the narrow focus on race misses the point of social disparities and what we now know about genetics. (00:54:12)

(Interview suspends at 00:26:40 for a short news update, then restarts at 00:30:23.)

Download the interview (00:54:12) here.

Blood, Race, and National Identity: Scientific and Popular Discourses

Journal of Medical Humanities
Volume 23, Numbers 3-4 (December, 2002)
Pages 171-186
Print ISSN: 1041-3545; Online ISSN: 1573-3645
DOI: 10.1023/A:1016890117447

Allyson Polsky McCabe, Lecturer in English
Yale University

This essay examines the symbolic significance of blood in the twentieth century and its role in determining the composition of a national community along racial lines. By drawing parallels between Nazi notions of blood and racial purity and historically contemporaneous U.S. policies regarding blood and blood products, Polsky reveals a disturbing proximity in discourse and policy. While the Nazis attempted to locate Jewish racial essence and inferiority in blood and instituted eugenic measures and laws forbidding racial admixture, similar policies existed in the U.S. based on the so-called one drop rule that systematically discriminated against African Americans.

Read or purchase the article here.

A Clearer Picture of Multiracial Substance Use: Rates and Correlates of Alcohol and Tobacco Use in Multiracial Adolescents and Adults

Race and Social Problems
Volume 2, Number 1 (March 2010)
Published online: 2010-03-12
18 pages
Print ISSN: 1867-1748, Online ISSN: 1867-1756 (Online)
DOI: 10.1007/s12552-010-9023-1

George G. Chavez
Rutgers University

Diana T. Sanchez, Assistant Professor of Social Psychology
Rutgers University

Existing studies indicate that multiracial adolescents face greater substance use rates than monoracial adolescents. However, it is unclear whether the risk identified in adolescence persists into adulthood. The current study uses data from the 2001 California Health Interview Survey to analyze the alcohol and tobacco use of multiracial adolescents and adults compared to European American, African American, Native American, Asian/Pacific Islander American, and Latino American individuals. Results generally support the hypothesis that multiracial adolescents and adults face higher rates of substance use than African American and Asian/Pacific Islander American individuals, though this pattern of results was reversed in comparison with Native Americans and European Americans, and less consistent compared to Latino Americans. We further establish and discuss the correlates of drinking and smoking behavior for mixed-race individuals—comparing them to other racial groups. We review the limitations of our design and the implications for future research on multiracial substance use.

Read the entire article here.

Race and Genetics: Attempts to Define the Relationship

BioSocieties
Volume 2, Issue 2 (June 2007)
pages 221-237
DOI: 10.1017/S1745855207005625

Duana Fullwiley, Associate Professor Anthropology
Stanford University

Many researchers working in the field of human genetics in the United States have been caught between two seemingly competing messages with regard to racial categories and genetic difference. As the human genome was mapped in 2000, Francis Collins, the head of the publicly funded project, together with his privately funded rival, announced that humans were 99.9 percent the same at the level of their genome. That same year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began a research program on pharmacogenetics that would exploit the .01 percent of human genetic difference, increasingly understood in racial terms, to advance the field of pharmacy. First, this article addresses Collins’ summary of what he called the ‘vigorous debate’ on the relationship between race and genetics in the open-access special issue of Nature Genetics entitled ‘Genetics for the Human Race’ in 2004. Second, it examines the most vexed (if not always openly stated) issue at stake in the debate: that many geneticists today work with the assumption that human biology differs by race as it is conceived through American census categories. It then presents interviews with researchers in two collaborating US laboratories who collect and organize DNA by American notions of ‘race/ethnicity’ and assume that US race categories of classification largely traduce human biogenetic difference.  It concludes that race is a practical and conceptual tool whose utility and function is often taken for granted rather than rigorously assessed and that ‘rational medicine’ cannot precede a rational approach to addressing the nature of racial disparities, difference and inequality in health and society more broadly.

…Race and nominalism
Race is a thing of our world like no other. Americans in general often use the word without much reflection. It might indeed occupy a tiny portion of what philosopher Martin Heidegger amorphously termed ‘the background’, that which just is and does not warrant our reflection until its unity ‘breaks down’. Even when the breakdown of race occurs in many areas of American social life, it is often reconstructed and made ‘whole’ again. One recent example of this was in the 2000 US census race classification that allowed respondents to report themselves as ‘mixed race’. Many African-Americans with mixed ancestry did not choose this option, but simply marked the category that best represented descriptions that they had been raised to understand themselves ‘to be’ in North America—that is ‘monoracially’ black (Lee and Bean, 2004: 233). The decision to mark oneself or not mark oneself as mixed-race differed according to where respondents lived—notably between those who lived in the deep South and those who lived in the ten states where 64 percent of all multiracial identification took place (New York and California among them, as well as Hawaii). In general, those in cosmopolitan centers, with high rates of immigration, diversity, and more demonstrated tolerance of others, were more likely to report racial mixing (Lee and Bean, 2004: 235). Perhaps more telling, when Americans acted on the liberty of marking more than one category, the National Center for Health Statistics created a formula that, in effect, ‘reallocated’ the multiracial population back into a single race group (Wellner, 2003: 2). This move, and the technology permitting it, was presented as an aid to market researchers who were vexed by the 2000 census data, which complicated their traditional formulas of ‘niche’ advertising to racial groups (Wellner, 2003: 2)…

Read the entire article here.

Race and Reification in Science

Science Magazine
Volume 307
2005-02-18
pages 1050-1051

Troy Duster, Professor of Sociology
New York University

Alfred North Whitehead warned many years ago about “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (1), by which he meant the tendency to assume that categories of thought coincide with the obdurate character of the empirical world. If we think of a shoe as “really a shoe,” then we are not likely to use it as a hammer (when no hammer is around). Whitehead’s insight about misplaced concreteness is also known as the fallacy of reification. Recent research in medicine and genetics makes it even more crucial to resist actively the temptation to deploy racial categories as if immutable in nature and society…

Read the entire article here.

Race in a Genetic World

Harvard Magazine
Volume 110, Number 5
May-June 2008

Duana Fullwiley
Photograph by Stu Rosner

“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.”

Is race, then, purely a social construct? The fact that racial categories change from one society to another might suggest it is. But now, says Fullwiley, assistant professor of anthropology and of African and African American studies, genetic methods, with their precision and implied accuracy, are being used in the same way that physical appearance has historically been used: “to build—to literally construct—certain ideas about why race matters.”

Genetic science has revolutionized biology and medicine, and even rewritten our understanding of human history. But the fact that human beings are 99.9 percent identical genetically, as Francis Collins and Craig Venter jointly announced at the White House on June 26, 2000, when the rough draft of the human genome was released, risks being lost, some scholars fear, in an emphasis on human genetic difference. Both in federally funded scientific research and in increasingly popular practice—such as ancestry testing, which often purports to prove or disprove membership in a particular race, group, or tribe—genetic testing has appeared to lend scientific credence to the idea that there is a biological basis for racial categories.

In fact, “There is no genetic basis for race,” says Fullwiley, who has studied the ethical, legal, and social implications of the human genome project with sociologist Troy Duster at UC [University of California], Berkeley. She sometimes quotes Richard Lewontin, now professor of biology and Agassiz professor of zoology emeritus, who said much the same thing in 1972, when he discovered that of all human genetic variation (which we now know to be just 0.1 percent of all genetic material), 85 percent occurs within geographically distinct groups, while 15 percent or less occurs between them. The issue today, Fullwiley says, is that many scientists are mining that 15 percent in search of human differences by continent…

Read the entire article here.

Stem Cell Donor Matching for Patients of Mixed Race

2011-04-04
21 pages

Ted Bergstrom, Aaron and Cherie Raznick Chair of Economics
University of California, Santa Barbara

Rod Garratt, Professor of Econommics
University of California, Santa Barbara

Damien Sheehan-Connor, Assistant Professor of Economics
Wesleyan University

The plight of multiracial leukemia patients who are unable to find matching stem cell donors has received much media attention. These news stories, while dramatic, are short on statistical information and long on misconceptions. We apply simple probability theory, the genetics of sexual diploid reproduction, and the theory of public goods to produce estimates of the probabilities that multiracial patients will find matching donors in the existing registry. We then compute the benefits and costs of registering more potential donors of single and mixed races.

…4.1 The concept of race

The racial categories, white, African-American, Asian-American, and Hispanic into which NMDP registrants are sorted is coarse and somewhat arbitrary. Since the recorded race of a registrant is self-declared, it indicates a social construction that does not necessarily correspond to genetic inheritance. Statistics show, however that the distribution of HLA types differs markedly between races.  For example, the probability that a randomly selected white American will match another randomly selected white is 34 times that of matching a random Asian-American, 16 times that of matching a random African-American, and 6 times that of matching a random Hispanic. These distributional differences have important implications for recruitment of registrants from racial minorities.

Our statistical measurements are built on the Kollman et al [11] estimates of haploid distributions within each race. Kollman’s estimates, like those in the earlier study by Mori et al [13], are founded on a model that makes two critical assumptions about marriage patterns.  The first assumption is that each racial group is endogamous, that is marriage occurs almost entirely within races. The second assumption is that conditional on marrying within group, the probability that two people marry is independent of their HLA types.

Since the social construct of race is more likely to influence marriage patterns than genetic classification, the use of self-declared race to determine categories seems appropriate for the model that is being estimated. Jacobs and Labov [6] collected data on all married heads of households and their spouses from a 1 percent sample of the 1990 U.S. Census. They determined the self-declared race or national origin of each member of each couple. They found that almost 98 percent of marriages of whites and 96 percent of marriages of African-Americans were endogamous. The Jacobs-Labov study shows that approximately 85 percent of Asian-Americans are married to other Asian-Americans and 77 percent of Hispanics are married to other Hispanics.67  The genetic composition of the current population depends, of course, on the marriage patterns of their parents’ generation, not on current marriage patterns. There is good reason to believe that the current population of Asian-Americans and of Hispanics are children of more endogamous populations than is indicated by current marriages. About 2/3 of the existing population of Asian-Americans were born in Asia and their ancestors for many generations would have had little exposure to non-Asians. About 1/3 of the existing population of Hispanics are immigrants from regions where the population is almost entirely Hispanic…

…A similar diffculty is found with “Hispanic” as a racial category. The Hispanic population of the United States includes significant subpopulations that differ in ethnic makeup and have had little contact with each other for many generations. About 66 percent of the Hispanic population of the United States is of Mexican extraction, 13 percent come from Central and South America, 9 percent are Puerto Rican, and 4 percent are of Cuban extraction. Genetic admixture studies of Hispanics in the U.S. reveal that Mexican-Americans on average have 30-40 percent Native American ancestry, while immigrants from the Spanish Caribbean have African genetic contributions that range from 20-40 percent and contributions of about 18 percent from the native American Arawaks and Caribs…

…Although current rates of intermarriage between African-Americans and whites are low, African-Americans carry a significant amount of genetic material obtained from white ancestors. As Kittles et al [8] observes, “The vast majority of contemporary African Americans are descendants of enslaved Africans kidnapped and transported to America during the transatlantic slave trade from 1619 to 1850.” During the period of slavery, there was substantial mixing of the white and African-American gene pool. Kittles et al reports that it is estimated that in 1860, “there were 4.5 million people of African descent in the U.S., of which 600,000 were of mixed ancestry or “mulattos”.

Geneticists have developed methods for using genetic markers to estimate admixture proportions, that is the proportions of genetic material in a single population that is inherited from members of two or more distinct ancestral populations. Several studies have estimated admixture proportions from samples of African-Americans. These studies indicate that the percentage of European admixture in the African-American population differs substantially by region, ranging from 3.5 percent in the Gullah sea island community of South Carolina, 10 percent in the rural South, about 20 percent in the industrial North, and 22-35 percent on the West Coast. [8](Figure 2), [14] The admixture of African-American genetic material in the U.S. white population appears to be much smaller. The geographic differences in the genetic makeup of the African-American population suggests that the accuracy of estimations of HLA-distributions for African Americans could be improved by disaggregating according to region of birth…

Read the entire paper here.

Mapping Race through Admixture

The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society
Volume 4, Issue 4 (2008)
pages 79-84

Catherine Bliss, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Race and Science Studies
Department of Africana Studies
Brown University

Mapping Admixture Linkage Disequilibrium (MALD) is a technology that separates genomic ancestral lineages to identify disease genes. In the U.S., where a significant segment of the population has unknown ancestral origins, researchers use MALD to tease out continental haplotypes and (re)assign ancestry to disease samples. While MALD is fast-becoming a primary medical genetic technology, its publicly known uses lie in the service fields of recreational DNA genealogy and forensic profiling. Here, private companies use MALD to tell clients where their ancestors likely came from or to advise law enforcement on what kind of racially-defined features to look for in a suspect. This paper looks at the practical assemblage of MALD applications and its effects in defining ancestry in terms of race. Through this assemblage, society produces the genome as racial and race as genetic. Moreover, identity is refashioned through a genomic knowledge of self.

Purchase the article here.

RACE: Are We So Different?

A Project of the American Anthropological Association
2007

We expect people to look different. And why not? Like a fingerprint, each person is unique. Every person represents a one-of-a-kind, combination of their parents’, grandparents’ and family’s ancestry. And every person experiences life somewhat differently than others.

Differences… they’re a cause for joy and sorrow. We celebrate differences in personal identity, family background, country and language. At the same time, differences among people have been the basis for discrimination and oppression.
 
Yet, are we so different? Current science tells us we share a common ancestry and the differences among people we see are natural variations, results of migration, marriage and adaptation to different environments. How does this fit with the idea of race?

Looking through the eyes of history, science and lived experience, the RACE Project explains differences among people and reveals the reality – and unreality – of race.  The story of race is complex and may challenge how we think about race and human variation, about the differences and similarities among people.

Visit the project website here.

A Question of Blood, Race, and Politics

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Volume 61, Number 4 (2006)
pages 456-491
DOI: 10.1093/jhmas/jrl003

Michael G. Kenny, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia

This article explores the political and intellectual context of a controversy arising from a proposal made at the 1959 meetings of the American Society of Blood Banks to divide the blood supply by race. The authors, a group of blood-bankers and surgeons in New York, outlined difficulties in finding compatible blood for transfusion during open-heart surgery, which they attributed to prior sensitization of their patient, a Caucasian, by a previous transfusion from an African American donor. Examining the statistical distribution of blood-group antigens among the various races, they concluded that risk of adverse hemolytic reactions and the cost of testing could be reduced by establishing separate donor pools. The media reported the suggestion, which, given the political climate of the day, rapidly became a public issue involving geneticists, blood-bankers, physical anthropologists, and the African American medical community. Liberals condemned it, whereas eugenically inclined segregationists used the finding to support their views concerning evolutionary distance between the races and the dangers of miscegenation. Here we examine the contribution of comparative racial serology to this affair, the arguments and background of the main players, and the relevance of the debate to discussions about the role of “race” in post-genomic medicine.

Read or purchase the article here.