Mixed Race Studies

Populations, individuals, and biological race

Biology and Philosophy
Volume 39, article number 10, (2024)
24 pages
DOI: 10.1007/s10539-024-09946-0

M.A. Diamond-Hunter, Teaching Associate
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Research Associate, Sidney Sussex College
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

In this paper, I plan to show that the use of a specific population concept—Millstein’s Causal Interactionist Population Concept (CIPC)—has interesting and counter-intuitive ramifications for discussions of the reality of biological race in human beings. These peculiar ramifications apply to human beings writ large and to individuals. While this in and of itself may not be problematic, I plan to show that the ramifications that follow from applying Millstein’s CIPC to human beings complicates specific biological racial realist accounts—naïve or otherwise. I conclude with the notion that even if biological races do exist—by fulfilling all of the criteria needed for Millstein’s population concept (which, given particular worries raised by Gannett (Synthese 177:363–385, 2010), and Winther and Kaplan (Theoria 60:54–80, 2013) may not)—the lower-bound limit for the scope of biological racial realism is at the level of populations, and as such they cannot say anything about whether or not individual organisms themselves have races.

Read the entire article here.

RESEARCH STUDY: Multiracial Individual’s Perspectives of Genetics Research

Jennifer L. Young, PhD, MS, MA, Assistant Professor of Medical Social Sciences (Implementation Science)
Center for Genetic Medicine
Department of Medical Social Science; Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science
Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois

2024-01-10

Eligible individuals are invited to participate in a focus group exploring preferences in engaging with genetics research.

Who is eligible?

• 18 years of age or older
• Identify as Multiracial, Mixed Race, or as being more than one race
• Fluent in English
• Reside in the United States
• Access to an internet-connected device with a camera & microphone

What will you be asked to do?

• Join a 90 minute virtual focus group session
• Share your experience identifying as Multiracial
• Briefly learn about the research process and share your opinions

No prior knowledge or experience with research is needed to participate!

Participants will be compensated $40 USD for their time^*

Questions?

Contact graduate student, Emilia Chiriboga, at emilia.chiriboga@northwestern.edu.

To participate in the study, click here.

Northwestern University Graduate Program in Genetic Counseling

Study Title: A Qualitative Investigation of Multiracial Individuals’ Involvement in Genetics Research
Principal Investigator: Jennifer Young, PhD, MS, MA
IRB Number: STU00220221

^*We anticipate that sessions will take 60-90 minutes; a minimum of 45 minutes is required to receive compensation.

Race Is Often Used as Medical Shorthand for How Bodies Work. Some Doctors Want to Change That.

KHN (Kaiser Health News)
2022-06-13

Rae Ellen Bichell, Colorado Correspondent

Cara Anthony, Midwest Correspondent

Several months ago, a lab technologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital mixed the blood components of two people: Alphonso Harried, who needed a kidney, and Pat Holterman-Hommes, who hoped to give him one.

The goal was to see whether Harried’s body would instantly see Holterman-Hommes’ organ as a major threat and attack it before surgeons could finish a transplant. To do that, the technologist mixed in fluorescent tags that would glow if Harried’s immune defense forces would latch onto the donor’s cells in preparation for an attack. If, after a few hours, the machine found lots of glowing, it meant the kidney transplant would be doomed. It stayed dark: They were a match.

“I was floored,” said Harried…

Read the entire article here.

Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions

Columbia University Press
December 2021
320 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780231200660
Paperback ISBN: 9780231200677
E-book ISBN: 9780231553735

Joseph L. Graves Jr., is a professor in the Department of Biology at
North Carolina A&T State University

Alan H. Goodman, Professor of Biological Anthropology
Hampshire College

The science on race is clear. Common categories like “Black,” “white,” and “Asian” do not represent genetic differences among groups. But if race is a pernicious fiction according to natural science, it is all too significant in the day-to-day lives of racialized people across the globe. Inequities in health, wealth, and an array of other life outcomes cannot be explained without referring to “race”—but their true source is racism. What do we need to know about the pseudoscience of race in order to fight racism and fulfill human potential?

In this book, two distinguished scientists tackle common misconceptions about race, human biology, and racism. Using an accessible question-and-answer format, Joseph L. Graves Jr. and Alan H. Goodman explain the differences between social and biological notions of race. Although there are many meaningful human genetic variations, they do not map onto socially constructed racial categories. Drawing on evidence from both natural and social science, Graves and Goodman dismantle the malignant myth of gene-based racial difference. They demonstrate that the ideology of racism created races and show why the inequalities ascribed to race are in fact caused by racism.

Graves and Goodman provide persuasive and timely answers to key questions about race and racism for a moment when people of all backgrounds are striving for social justice. Racism, Not Race shows readers why antiracist principles are both just and backed by sound science.

Contents

• List of Questions
• Preface
• Introduction: What Are Race, Racism, and Human Variation?
• 1. How Did Race Become Biological?
• 2. Everything You Wanted to Know About Genetics and Race
• 3. Everything You Wanted to Know About Racism
• 4. Why Do Races Differ in Disease Incidence?
• 5. Life History, Aging, and Mortality
• 6. Athletics, Bodies, and Abilities
• 7. Intelligence, Brains, and Behaviors
• 8. Driving While Black and Other Deadly Realities of Institutional and Systemic Racism
• 9. DNA and Ancestry Testing
• 10. Race Names and “Race Mixing”
• 11. A World Without Racism?
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Index

Substituting genetic ancestry for race in research? Not so fast

STAT: Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine
2022-05-02

Anna C. F. Lewis, Research Associate
Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Race, widely used as a variable across biomedical research and medicine, is an appropriate proxy for racism — but not for anything biological. Proposals to use genetic ancestry instead of race are at risk of perpetuating the same problems.

Dozens of algorithms widely used in clinical care contain an adjustment factor for a patient’s race. When estimating kidney function, for example, different results are returned depending on whether the patient’s race is entered as “Black” or “non-Black,” though at least for kidney function the use of race is being challenged. Some medications have been approved only for those of certain self-identified racial groups. Meanwhile in research, the race of participants is routinely considered at almost every step of the research process — from recruitment to analysis to the interpretation of findings.

Race-based health disparities have reinvigorated the debate about whether these uses of race are appropriate, and their potential connection to racism…

Read the entire article here.

Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You, Second Edition: Busting Myths about Human Nature

University of California Press
May 2022
352 pages
Illustrations: 10 b/w illustrations
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 9780520379602
eBook ISBN: 9780520976818

Agustín Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

A compelling takedown of prevailing myths about human behavior, updated and expanded to meet the current moment.

There are three major myths of human nature: humans are divided into biological races; humans are naturally aggressive; and men and women are wholly different in behavior, desires, and wiring. Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You counters these pervasive and pernicious myths about human behavior. Agustín Fuentes tackles misconceptions about what race, aggression, and sex really mean for humans, and incorporates an accessible understanding of culture, genetics, and evolution that requires us to dispose of notions of “nature or nurture.”

Presenting scientific evidence from diverse fields, including anthropology, biology, and psychology, Fuentes devises a myth-busting toolkit to dismantle persistent fallacies about the validity of biological races, the innateness of aggression and violence, and the nature of monogamy, sex, and gender. This revised and expanded edition provides up-to-date references, data, and analyses, and addresses new topics, including the popularity of home DNA testing kits and the rise of ‘”incel” culture; the resurgence of racist, nativist thinking and the internet’s influence in promoting bad science; and a broader understanding of the diversity of sex and gender.

Genetic ancestry in precision medicine is reshaping the race debate

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Volume 119, Number 12, Article e2203033119
4 pages
2022-03-16
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2203033119

Talia Krainc
Department of Anthropology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Agustín Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Precision medicine is an emerging field with immense potential for better understanding of diseases and improved treatment outcomes (1). Its focus: patterns of human genetic variation in populations and individuals—and how such patterns influence disease pathology and treatment. The field rejects the “one size fits all” approach to understanding disease, aspiring to develop tailored therapies that optimize treatment efficacy. It’s a promising but fledgling field that faces numerous challenges, both scientific and practical. But one challenge has not been fully appreciated: the lack of genetic diversity in research and clinical studies (2, 3)…

Read the entire article here.

The dream of creating a mixed super-race

Spiritual Eugenics: Exploring the overlap between eugenics and New Age spirituality, from 1880 to the present day
2022-03-19

Jules Evans, Honorary Research Fellow
Centre for the History of Emotions
Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom

Eugenics often overlapped (and still overlaps) with scientific racism and white supremacy, leading many people to confuse the two. It’s true that in the United States and Germany, the two countries which most enthusiastically embraced eugenics in the 1920s-1940s, eugenics did very often overlap with an ideology of white supremacy and scientific racism. However, as I’ve explored throughout this project, there were several different varieties of eugenics, including versions which promoted using selective breeding to encourage inter-racial mingling, thereby creating a spiritual master-race.

In this chapter, we’re going to examine four figures who promoted inter-racial forms of spiritual eugenics — ie they explored the idea that inter-racial breeding can help to create spiritually gifted individuals or even a new race of superbeings. They didn’t all necessarily believe in the state saying who can and can’t reproduce — but they did explore ideas of selective inter-racial breeding towards the goal of creating more spiritually advanced humans…

Read the entire article here.

The Galton Society for the Study of the Origin and Evolution of Man (1918–1935)

The Embryo Project Encyclopedia
2021-06-03

Aliya R. Hoff, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology
Arizona State University

Charles Benedict Davenport, Madison Grant, and Henry Fairfield Osborn founded the Galton Society for the Study of the Origin and Evolution of Man, or the Galton Society, in New York City, New York, in 1918. The Galton Society was a scientific society that promoted the study of humans in terms of race in service to the US eugenics movement. The Galton Society was named in honor of Francis Galton who first coined the term eugenics in 1883. Galton and other eugenics proponents claimed that the human species could improve through selective breeding that restricted who could have children. Some of the society members were scientists from a wide range of disciplines who supported the now disproven notion that fundamental biological differences exist between races that may justify the control of human reproduction. The Galton Society drew on the scientific credibility and influence of its members to advocate for eugenics programs, such as immigration restriction laws, in the US…

Read the entire article here.

Is there evidence for the racialization of pharmaceutical regulation? Systematic comparison of new drugs approved over five years in the USA and the EU

Social Science & Medicine
Volume 280, July 2021, 114049
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114049

Shai Mulinari, Senior Lecturer
Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences
Lund University, Sweden

Andreas Vilhelmsson, Associate Researcher
Division of Social Medicine and Global Health, Department of Clinical Sciences Malmö
Lund University, Malmö, Sweden

Piotr Ozieranski, Senior Lecturer
Department of Social and Policy Sciences
University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom

Anna Bredström, Senior Lecturer, Docent; Associate Professor of Ethnicity and Migration
Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO)
Linköping University, Sweden

Highlights

• We compare race/ethnicity labeling of hundreds of new drugs in the USA and the EU.
• Many labels report race/ethnicity demographics of trials, more often in the USA.
• Fewer labels report race/ethnicity differences in response, more often in the EU.
• Racial/ethnic taxonomy used in labels is variable and inconsistent.
• The racialization of pharmaceutical regulation differs between the USA and the EU.

Recent decades have seen much interest in racial and ethnic differences in drug response. The most emblematic example is the heart drug BiDil, approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2005 for “self-identified blacks.” Previous social science research has explored this “racialization of pharmaceutical regulation” in the USA, and discussed its implications for the “pharmaceuticalization of race” in terms of reinforcing certain taxonomic schemes and conceptualizations. Yet, little is known about the racialization of pharmaceutical regulation in the USA after BiDil, and how it compares with the situation in the EU, where political and regulatory commitment to race and ethnicity in pharmaceutical medicine is weak. We have addressed these gaps by investigating 397 product labels of all novel drugs approved in the USA (n = 213) and the EU (n = 184) between 2014 and 2018. Our analysis considered statements in labeling and the racial/ethnic categories used. Overall, it revealed that many labels report race/ethnicity demographics and subgroup analyses, but that there are important differences between the USA and the EU. Significantly more US labels specified race/ethnicity demographics, as expected given the USA’s greater commitment to race and ethnicity in pharmaceutical medicine. Moreover, we found evidence that reporting of race/ethnicity demographics in EU labels was driven, in part, by statements in US labels, suggesting the spillover of US regulatory standards to the EU. Unexpectedly, significantly more EU labels reported differences in drug response, although no drug was restricted to a racial/ethnic population in a manner similar to BiDil. Our analysis also noted variability and inconsistency in the racial/ethnic taxonomy used in labels. We discuss implications for the racialization of pharmaceutical regulation and the pharmaceuticalization of race in the USA and EU.

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