Mixed Race Studies

While many commentators who supported the approval of BiDil for black patients state that “race” is not a scientifically precise term for identifying relevant genomic or physiological characteristics that differentiate population groups, nevertheless, they argue that “self-identified race” is a useful proxy for those characteristics. However, what is the evidence that the proxy “self-identified race” is a reliable surrogate? The best evidence derives from the fact that genetic variation conferring disease susceptibility is not equally distributed among ancestral populations. For example, sickle cell anaemia is more prevalent in populations whose ancestry can be traced to sub-Saharan Africa. However, “self-identified race” is a subjective term, influenced by cultural factors, and not even grounded in the ancestral genomics of, for example, the International HapMap Project. For the purpose of the clinical trials, “self-identified race” is interpreted as a dichotomous variable (black or non-black). If race were used as a proxy for ancestral African genomics it should be a continuous function (10%, 30%, 70%, etc). It makes no scientific sense to map a continuous function onto a dichotomous variable…

Sheldon Krimsky, “The short life of a race drug,” The Lancet, Volume 379, Issue 9811 (2012-01-14 through 2012-01-20): 114. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)60052-X/fulltext.

Author, Yaba Blay, to appear on CNN Newsroom with Don Lemon

CNN NewsRoom: Weekend Primetime
2012-01-14, 19:00-20:00 EST

Don Lemon, Host

Yaba Blay, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Lafayette College

(1)ne Drop author, Yaba Blay, will appear on the weekend edition of CNN Newsroom with Don Lemon on Sunday, January 15, 2012 during the 7:00 pm-8:00 pm hour (EST).

Barack Obama can call himself black, white magenta, green, or whatever he wants, it really does not matter socially. However, genes are genes and his genes are multiracial. Barack Obama has a white mother and a black father, and to categorize him as only one race medically is just wrong, inaccurate, and likely to cost multiracial people their lives.

Susan Graham, “The Obama Racial Identity Factor and Saving Multiracial Lives,” Project Race: From the Director, June 2008.

The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White

Harvard University Press
January 1996
560 pages
6-3/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674372627

George Hutchinson, Booth Tarkington Professor of Literary Studies; Adjunct Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies;  Adjunct Professor of American Studies
Indiana University, Bloomington

It wasn’t all black or white. It wasn’t a vogue. It wasn’t a failure. By restoring interracial dimensions left out of accounts of the Harlem Renaissance—or blamed for corrupting it—George Hutchinson transforms our understanding of black (and white) literary modernism, interracial literary relations, and twentieth-century cultural nationalism in the United States. What has been missing from literary histories of the time is a broader sense of the intellectual context of the Harlem Renaissance, and Hutchinson supplies that here: Boas’s anthropology, Park’s sociology, various strands of pragmatism and cultural nationalism—ideas that shaped the New Negro movement and the literary field, where the movement flourished. Hutchinson tracks the resulting transformation of literary institutions and organizations in the 1920s, offering a detailed account of the journals and presses, black and white, that published the work of the “New Negroes.” This cultural excavation discredits bedrock assumptions about the motives of white interest in the renaissance, and about black relationships to white intellectuals of the period. It also allows a more careful investigation than ever before of the tensions among black intellectuals of the 1920s. Hutchinson’s analysis shows that the general expansion of literature and the vogue of writing cannot be divorced from the explosion of black literature often attributed to the vogue of the New Negro—any more than the growing sense of “Negro” national consciousness can be divorced from expanding articulations and permutations of American nationality. The book concludes with the first full-scale interpretation of the landmark anthology The New Negro.
 
A courageous work that exposes the oversimplifications and misrepresentations of popular readings of the Harlem Renaissance, this book reveals the truly composite nature of American literary culture.

An Overview of the Event: Jean Toomer and Politics at the 2012 MLA

Gino Michael Pellegrini: Education, Amalgamation, Race, Class & Solidarity
2012-01-12

Gino Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

This is my general overview of the “Jean Toomer and Politics” special session roundtable at the 2012 MLA Annual Convention. First, I want to thank Professors Barbara Foley, Charles Scruggs, and Belinda Wheeler for their excellent presentations, and a special thanks to Professor George Hutchinson for starting the Q & A. I am very much looking forward to continuing this conversation!

In her presentation, Belinda Wheeler focused on the “documents” (census, marriage, and draft) that Byrd and Gates include in the second Norton Critical Edition of Cane to support their claim that Toomer was a Negro who passed as white. Wheeler discussed how the documents, when examined carefully and in aggregate, weaken their claim. The documents show (and this is a point that Barbara Foley also made) that Toomer sometimes identified as black and sometimes as white at different junctures in his life, and this assumes that it was Toomer who actually authored the documents. In countering their claim, Wheeler also drew upon interviews that she had conducted with Susan Sandberg, the daughter of Marjorie Content, Toomer’s second wife, as well as with Jill Quasha, a friend of Sandberg and Content who knew the family well and authored a book on Content’s photography. Toomer was married to Content from 1934 until his death in 1967, and Wheeler’s important bibliographic research sheds light on how Toomer, post-Cane, identified and lived. Her interviews suggest that Toomer did not waver from his basic position that he was an American, neither black nor white, and that he tried to live his life free from the influence of racial categories and standards…

Read the entire overview here.