Mixed Race Studies

Diversity and cohesion in Britain’s most mixed community

Financial Times
2015-10-14

John McDermott

At the Barking Road Community Centre in Plaistow, dancers sway and twirl to calypso beats. If the music hints at the centre’s past as an Afro-Caribbean club, the mix of elderly boppers suggest how the composition of this pocket of east London is changing. As well as women with Nigerian and Jamaican heritage, there are those with roots in India, Pakistan, Colombia, Poland and the Philippines. They show why Plaistow is the clearest example of what researchers describe as London’s “super-diversity”.

“If London is the most diverse city in the world, and Plaistow is the most diverse part of the city, Plaistow might be the most diverse place in the world,” says Forhad Hussain, a local councillor. When Hussain came to the area in 1983 with his Bangladeshi-born parents, this part of the city was mostly white and working-class, home to dockers and their families who had stayed put as Plaistow was rebuilt after the devastation wrought by the Blitz…

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Race Correction and Inequalities in Medicine

ANTH 1310 S01: International Health: Anthropological Perspectives
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
2015-10-02

Methma Udawatta

The history of medicine is fraught with unnecessary racialization. In “The Diseased Heart of Africa: Medicine, Colonialism, and the Black Body,” Comaroff writes about how the black body became “associated with degradation, disease, and contagion” and how colonial medicine “link[ed] racial intercourse with the origin of sickness.” These overtly racist ideas have decreased in influence over time. However, even today, the remainders of these ideas still manifest themselves in racial inequalities in treatment and access to medical resources, and in the general racialization of medicine, both in the U.S. and around the world.

Smedley and Smedley write about the consistent racial and ethnic disparities in health care in their paper, “Race as Biology is Fiction, Racism as a Social Problem is Real.” They report a series of shocking statistics, which include that Africans Americans and Hispanics in the U.S. tend to receive lower quality health care across many different disease areas, African Americans are more likely than whites to “receive less desirable services, such as amputation,” and that these disparities are “found across a wide range of clinical settings including public and private hospitals, teaching and nonteaching hospitals.…” Similarly, Livingston details a scenario where a patient O (a black man) is expected to endure an incredible amount of pain during a bone-marrow biopsy without making any sounds of pain. When Mr. J (a white man) undergoes a similar bone marrow aspiration, Dr. A holds his hand and the Motswana nurse comforts him. Livingston writes that “his whiteness apparently creates different expectations around his stoicism.” Smedley and Smedley write that racialized science (and any science that looks for differences between racial groups) can only maintain and reinforce existing inequalities. Although many racial disparities in health are also the product of socioeconomic differences, Smedley and Smedley argue that when we accept this concept, there is the implicit idea that these socioeconomic differences are acceptable…

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What I am learning from my white grandchildren — truths about race

TEDxAntioch
2014-11-04

Anthony Peterson

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Are we in a post-racial society? Do we want to be? Anthony Peterson, an African American, draws from current research and from conversations with his Anglo American grandchildren to address truths about race in 21st century America.

Anthony Peterson is an African American Army brat who calls Hawaii home. He has lived, studied, written about, and taught about cultural and racial realities. He has developed and facilitated diversity training for corporate and church leaders. His degrees in psychology and religious education add to his perspective. Anthony continues work as an educator, writer and editor in Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife, Laura. They count six children and nine grandchildren.

Identity as Proxy

Columbia Law Review
Volume 115, Number 6 (October 2015)
pages 1605-1674

Lauren Sudeall Lucas, Assistant Professor of Law
Georgia State University

As presently constructed, equal protection doctrine is an identity-based jurisprudence, meaning that the level of scrutiny applied to an alleged act of discrimination turns on the identity category at issue. In that sense, equal protection relies on identity as a proxy, standing in to signify the types of discrimination we find most troubling.

Equal protection’s current use of identity as proxy leads to a number of problems, including difficulties in defining identity categories; the tendency to privilege a dominant-identity narrative; failure to distinguish among the experiences of subgroups within larger identity categories; and psychological and emotional harm that can result from being forced to identify in a particular way to lay claim to legal protection. Moreover, because the Court’s identity-as-proxy jurisprudence relies on superficial notions of identity to fulfill a substantive commitment to equality, it is susceptible to co-option by majority groups.

This Essay aims to engage readers in a thought experiment, to envision what equal protection doctrine might look like if it were structured to reflect the values identity is intended to serve without explicitly invoking identity categories as a way to delineate permissible and impermissible forms of discrimination. In doing so, it aims to incorporate directly into equal protection jurisprudence the notion that identities like race and gender are not merely a collection of individual traits, but the product of structural forces that create and maintain subordination. Under the “value-based” approach proposed herein, the primary concern of equal protection is not to eliminate differential treatment, but instead to deconstruct status hierarchies. Therefore, rather than applying heightened scrutiny to government actions based on race or gender, it applies heightened scrutiny to government actions that have the effect of perpetuating or exacerbating a history of discrimination or that frustrate access to the political process.

The clearest impact of such a model would be in the context of affirmative action, where a majority plaintiff could no longer simply claim discrimination on the basis of race. Yet, the potential of a value-based model extends to other contexts as well—for example, challenges to voter identification laws, in which political exclusion would displace discriminatory intent and disparate impact as the relevant measure for analysis; and the treatment of pregnant women, in which discrimination on the basis of pregnancy would no longer have to align with gender to receive heightened scrutiny.

This shift has several advantages: It allows the law to make important distinctions between groups and within groups; it alleviates the need for comparative treatment and solutions that favor taking from all over giving to some; it is less likely to generate identity-based harms; it is fact-driven rather than identity-driven and thus better suited to the judicial function; and it serves an important rhetorical function by changing the nature of rights discourse.

Read the entire essay here.