Mixed Race Studies

Meet Haley Pilgrim: Penn’s first black woman president of GAPSA

The Daily Pennsylvanian
2018-04-11

Naomi Elegant

Photo from Haley Pilgrim

Sociology Ph.D. candidate Haley Pilgrim was elected to be the president of the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly on April 4, marking the group’s first black female president in its 70-year history.

Pilgrim, who will take up the post on May 1, is the current co-president of the Black Graduate and Professional School Assembly and chair of the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Access and Leadership Council. Pilgrim is also the first IDEAL Council representative to be elected president of GAPSA.

Pilgrim said that “the most exciting thing” after winning the election was being able to celebrate with the BGAPSA community…

Read the entire article here.

Carlos Arias Vivas | DNA tests don’t define your identity

The Daily Pennsylvanian
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2018-03-14

Carlos Arias Vivas

CC0

Convos with Carlos | 23andMe results can’t change your upbringing

During one late night bonding session with my hallmates, one of them revealed to the group that they took a DNA test and discovered more about their background. Intrigued, I sought out to buy one of the kits for myself. The major players in this industry are Ancestry.com and 23andMe; both offer DNA tests that can shed light on your lineage as well as an optional health risks assessment.

Now, I knew that these tests are very expensive. For 23andMe, the basic ancestry service costs $99 and the Health + Ancestry service costs $199. I ended up choosing to go with 23andMe based on positive online reviews. Also, this was the brand my hallmate had used. Luckily, for me, there was a special Black Friday sale, so I snatched up the kit and waited for it to arrive at Amazon@Penn.

Before doing the spit-test that is required, I knew that I was going to be Latino. My parents are from Ecuador, and I imagined that my ancestry composition would show a high concentration of Latino ancestry. I never questioned my background because that was never a conversation I had with my family. After countless times of spitting in my tube, I entered my registration code to track my kit, sealed up the test tube in the box, and dropped off my sample at the post office.

This “waiting game” was an agonizing process. But even though I was excited to receive my results, I knew that the outcome wouldn’t dramatically change who I was. Whatever 23andMe had in store, my upbringing is already set in stone…

Read the enetire article here.

Mixed-race students struggle to find their identity

The Daily Pennsylvanian
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2015-09-28

Elizabeth Winston

Many students seem to effortlessly fit into cultural groups at Penn [University of Pennsylvania], but for some, it’s more complicated than simply choosing one.

For mixed-race students, finding racial or cultural groups to identify with can be more of a challenge. Being from a mixed cultural background comes with unique experiences that are more complex than simply combining the two — or more.

College sophomore Emily Marucci is Chinese, but was adopted into a white family at a very young age. She said people “are always confused [why] my last name is Italian. It’s too long to be Asian.”

“I feel like sometimes I’m expected to be in different circles than I am,” Marucci added. “Racially, I’m supposed to be Asian-American, but I identify more as white. No one ever thinks that when they look at me.”

Wharton sophomore Deena Char also identifies with this frustration. With a mix of Japanese, French and Native-American backgrounds, she finds it insulting when people pigeonhole her into one identity.

“Just because I’m Asian, it doesn’t mean that I want to be in an Asian organization,” Char said.

One of the struggles mixed-race people face is formally identifying their ethnicities on demographic forms. Often they must fill in a bubble marked “other,” choose one identity over the other or occasionally have the option to choose a “multiracial” or “mixed” bubble.

“To lump us all into one ‘none of the above’ category just doesn’t feel right,” Wharton sophomore Avery Stephenson, who identifies as Filipino and black, said…

Read the entire article here.

Approaching race as a social rather than biological construct

The Daily Pennsylvanian
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2014-04-08

Laura Anthony

The Program on Race, Science and Society will examine the role of race in scientific research at upcoming symposium

In 1851, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine graduate Samuel Cartwright delivered a report to the Medical Association of Louisiana claiming that blacks’ health was improved by slavery.

He theorized that forced physical labor improved blacks’ inferior lung capacity, so slavery was actually a necessity to bettering their health.

Penn Law School professor Dorothy Roberts first heard this anecdote from a talk by Brown University professor Lundy Braun detailing the history of the spirometer, a medical device used to measure lung capacity.

Some spirometers historically, and even in modern medicine, adjust the measurements according to the race of the patient. Cartwright used the device to justify the need for continued slavery to protect blacks’ health. Braun’s presentation included a picture of a modern spirometer with a button labeled “race,” and through numerous conversations with medical students, Roberts has found that some medical students are still trained to use spirometers based on patients’ race.

For Roberts, this is a major problem. “My definition of race is that it is a political system to govern people based on invented biological demarcation, and it is not a natural division of human beings,” she said. “So it is much more plausible that inequities in health that fall along racial lines are caused by social determinants.”

Braun’s talk sparked an idea for a future project in the new program she developed at Penn this year called the Program on Race, Science and Society…

Read the entire article here.

Penn mutliheritage organization experiences re-birth

The Daily Pennsylvanian
2012-04-06

Diana Gonimah

Mixed ethnicity students met to discuss their experiences and Check One’s future

Last night, Penn students came together over their ability to check more than one box under “Ethnicity” on their college applications.

College junior Chris Cruz and Engineering sophomore Ibrahim Ayub hosted a general body meeting to relaunch Check One, a multiracial and multicultural organization that has not met for about a decade on Penn’s campus after being founded in 1995.

Cruz, who served as chair of the United Minorities Council on its previous board, said the purpose of relaunching Check One was to meet a “pressing demand for a space to be created for the multicultural and multiracial community as a great number of Americans identify as multiracial.”

The meeting — which was dubbed “So …What are You?” — attracted a diverse group of Penn students who identified themselves as belonging to more than one ethnicity or culture…

Read the entire article here.