Mixed Race Studies

I Can’t Breathe

Boston Review
2016-03-21

Anne Fausto-Sterling, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor Emerita of Biology and Gender Studies
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Race in Medical School Curricula

In the fall of 2015, U.S. college students ignited in protest about campus and national racism. Chanting “I Can’t Breathe” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”—recalling the final cries and acts of unarmed African Americans who died at the hands of police—the scholar-activists joined the Black Lives Matter movement that has burgeoned since the shootings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and many others. At my home base, Brown University, school officials responded by drafting a detailed action plan and inviting community comment, a process that is ongoing. While the plan pays attention to student demands for more diversity in the faculty and the student body, as well as improvements in campus climate, it fails to address the need to reevaluate and revise the curriculum in both undergraduate and professional schools—particularly with regard to what we do and do not teach about race, to how both silence and subtly coded messages continue to transmit racial bias.

Integrating studies of race, ethnicity, class, and gender into the curriculum is not easy. And it does not suffice to develop specialized elective courses, such as the one I offered more than twenty-five years ago—Women and Minorities in Science. Such courses exemplify what we, in the early days of women’s studies, used to refer to derisively as “just add women and stir.” The “stir” approach addresses problems of representation but does not challenge underlying theories of disciplinary knowledge.

Biology courses should not be able to get by, for example, with only mentioning a few famous scientists of color and then returning to business as usual. To properly address race, courses need to present the still-disputed science behind concepts of race and genetics, or examine how Darwin’s racial views led him to develop the idea of sexual selection, or teach about the genetics of skin pigmentation and convergent evolution of human phenotypes. Change that matters can only come from altering the content and pedagogy of mainstream courses for generations to come…

Read the entire article here.

“Whitening” and Whitewashing: Postcolonial Brazil is not an Egalitarian “Rainbow Nation”

The Postcolonialist
2014-03-04

Sarah Lempp

To commemorate the 500th anniversary of its “discovery” by Portuguese sailor Alvares de Cabral in 2000, Brazil officially presented itself as a “rainbow nation” without discrimination or racism; a place where people from various ethnicities live peacefully together. That the “discovery” caused slavery and death for millions of Indigenes and Africans was overlooked. The Portuguese colonization was seen as a “non-imperial act, an exercise of fraternity and intercultural and interethnic democracy”, says Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos.[1]

The German author Stefan Zweig, who fled to Brazil from Nazi Germany, already considered Brazil a paradise characterized by hybridity and said in 1941 that Brazil “has taken the racial problem, that unsettles our European world ad absurdum in the simplest manner: in plainly ignoring its validity.” (translation S.L.)[2] According to Zweig, “for hundreds of years the Brazilian nation relies on the sole principle of free and unrestrained mixing, perfect equality of black and white, brown and yellow. (…) There are no limits to colours, no boundaries, no supercilious hierarchies…”[3]

Hence the image of Brazil as a tolerant, peaceful, “mestiço” nation is not at all new. But it ignores then and still today the multifaceted forms of discrimination and specifically Brazilian shapes of racism…

Read the entire article here.

Should biologists stop grouping us by race?

STAT: Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine
2016-02-04

Sharon Begley

More than a decade after leading geneticists argued that race is not a true biological category, many studies continue to use it, harming scientific understanding and possibly patients, researchers argued in a provocative essay in Science on Thursday.

“We thought that after the Human Genome Project, with [its leaders] saying it’s time to move beyond race as a biological marker, we would have done that,” said Michael Yudell, a professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University and coauthor of the Science paper calling on journals and researchers to stop using race as a category in genetics studies. “Yet here we are, and there is evidence things have actually gotten worse in the genomic age.”…

Read the entire article here.

Teaching medical students to challenge ‘unscientific’ racial categories

STAT: Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine
2016-03-10

Ike Swetlitz

Dr. Brooke Cunningham talks about race to medical students at the University of Minnesota. Jenn Ackerman for Stat

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. — Medical students looking to score high on their board exams sometimes get a bit of uncomfortable advice: Embrace racial stereotypes.

“You see ‘African American,’ automatically just circle ‘sickle cell,’” said Nermine Abdelwahab, a first-year student at the University of Minnesota Medical School, recounting tips she’s heard from older classmates describing the “sad reality” of the tests.

Medical school curricula traditionally leave little room for nuanced discussions about the impact of race and racism on health, physicians and sociologists say. Instead, students learn to see race as a diagnostic shortcut, as lectures, textbooks, and scientific journal articles divide patients by racial categories, reinforcing the idea that race is biological. That mind-set can lead to misdiagnoses, such as treating sickle cell anemia as a largely “black” disease.

“Right now, students are learning an inaccurate and unscientific definition of race,” said Dorothy Roberts, a law and sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who coauthored a recent paper in Science arguing for an end to the use of biological concepts of race in human genetics research.

“It’s simply not true that human beings are naturally divided into genetically distinct races,” Roberts said. “So it is not good medical practice to treat patients that way.”

Change is starting to come, but slowly…

……Cunningham also traced racial stereotypes through centuries of medical science, from an 1850s medical definition of drapetomania — “the disease causing Negroes to run away” — to the modern day, when a mainstream formula to measure kidney function and a common test of lung capacity differ for “whites” and “blacks.”

“I think it’s revolutionary to be teaching that way to first-year medical students,” said Dr. Helena Hansen, a professor with dual appointments in both New York University’s anthropology department and the medical school’s psychiatry department. She said Cunningham is one of a small but growing number of faculty members challenging the status quo.

Hansen said Cunningham’s lecture “fundamentally challenges” a central premise in clinical medicine: that racial categories are well-defined and universally applicable…

Read the entire article here.

Hew To The Line And Let The Chips Fall Where They May.

The Broad Ax
Salt Lake City, Utah
1903-09-05 (Volume VIII, Number 45)
page 1, columns 5-6
Source: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. United States Library of Congress.

(For “The Broad Ax”)

1, 2, 3, 4, 5,—8. The reader will observe the figures at the beginning of this paragraph; but, until he finishes this article, he is not likely to bestow upon them the significance to which they are justly entitled.

A farmer had in his fruit orchard a robust hardy apple tree. It was what fruit raisers denominate “a standard tree;” that is, it was a tree grown from the seed of the tree from which its predecessors had grown; and so on, backward and backward. There had been no admixture with apple trees of a different variety. The farmer, wishing to improve the flavor of the fruit this standard tree yielded, he grafted into its trunk, or bole, theyoung shoot of a pear tree; and true enough, the next year’s apples had a sort of pear flavor. Experimenter, as he was, he then grafted into it the sion of the plum tree. The apples of the year that followed were of still better flavor than those that had preceded them. A third grafting of a quince followed; then peach and apricot making a fourth and a fifth. A sixth and seventh unsuccessful attempt was made; and, although the standard tree still lived, its owner discovered that at each succeeding grafting, it looked less robust, and there were not so many apples. In time, there was but half a crop after the first grafting! but a quarter of a crop after the second grafting; but an eighth of a crop after the third grafting; and but a sixteenth after the fourth grafting. The fifth grafting lessened the supply to a thirty-second; the sixth to a sixty-fourth; the seventh to a 128th, and after the 8th grafting, there was no fruit at all.

The farmer was puzzled; and, on reviewing the matter, he then remembered that with the fruit of each grafting there was a corresponding quick ness in the decay of the fruit yield. And he noticed, also, that although the hardy standard tree, had lived and yielded fruit, the supply of the fruit lessened with each grafting.

Poor man! He was puzzled exceedingly. Why? Because he did not comprehend that great law of nature which says–“Thus far mayst go, but no farther!”

The great law, under which, we are born, live and grow, is a fixed, unalterable law. To a certain extent we can and do violate it; but we cannot violate it beyond a certain limit.

The black race (African), the pure black blooded, is one of the five races of mankind that have reached the plane of memory, foresight, refection. The other four races are the white (Caucasian), red (the Indian), the brown (the Malay), and the yellow (Chinese). The cultivation of the mind will put either of these five races on its own plane; and the plane of one race is no higher than another; but no race can reach, its own plane or the, plane of another by mixing. Mongrels have no plane—no race—because their blood is a compound of various degrees of other bloods. Therefore if a race of people wish to become elevated, if they desire to stand upon a mental and physical platform as high as tat upon which another race occupies, they must propagate exclusively among themselves. A pure-blood man or woman must marry a pure-blooded woman or man. If a pure blooded offspring is expected. A race of people, no matter whether black, brown, red, yellow or white, cannot reach its true plane by mixture. It is against Nature’s fixed law—a crime which Nature punishes, and how? Why? By extinction.

The figures show—what? Why, the gradual deterioration of a race, that indulges in mixing with other races. Each mixture lessens the number of offspring; and there is a proportional shortening of the life period. When an eighth mixture Is reached, there is no further offspring! There are many pretty octoroon girls and some fine looking octoroon boys; but there are no octoroon mothers or fathers. Many quinteroons (five eighths white) pass for octoroons, but they are not such.

Let the pure black man and the pure black woman unite. Let them teach their children the importance of race purity and in time their offspring will rise to a plane as high as is the plane upon which stands any other race. Let the black race arouse its racial pride; its ambition; let it cultivate the faculty of reason and cram into its brain everything that is educational. By so doing it will become elevated.

Respectfully,
“THE DOCTOR”

Racialization, between power and knowledge: a postcolonial reading of public health as a discursive practice

Journal of Critical Race Inquiry
Volume 1, Number 2 (2011)

Patrick Cloos
University of Montréal

This paper presents and discusses the interdisciplinary theoretical perspective that has been built from a doctoral research on contemporary notions of ̒ race ̓ in the field of public health in the United States. In this context, ̒ race ̓ was seen as an object that emerged from the discourse, lying between power and knowledge as suggested by Foucault, while public health is an apparatus that put the discourse and the formation of the object into operation. Some authors in the field of postcolonial studies emphasize the representational power associated with the discourse that corresponds to a system of opposition and difference creating a dichotomy and ensuring the domination of some over others. This article argues that ̒ race ̓, as an idea of difference, will persist as long as historical conditions and people allow it.

Read the entire article here.

2016 Duke Global Brazil Conference

Duke University
Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall (FHI Garage)
C105, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse
Durham, North Carolina
2016-03-04, 09:00-17:30 EST (Local Time)

Co-sponsored by FHI Global Brazil Lab and the Duke Brazil Initiative

Invited guests include:

• Keynote: Dr. Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman (USF) – The Color of Love in Bahia
• Dr. John Collins (CUNY) – Race, Violence, and the State in Bahia
• Dr. William Pan (Duke) – Environment and Health in the Amazon
• Dr. Bryan Pitts (U.Ga) – Sound and Politics
• Guilherme Andreas (JMU) – Flute recital with piano by Gianne Ge Zhu

For more information, click here.

DNA ancestry tests branded ‘meaningless’

The Telegraph
2013-03-07

Nick Collins, Science Correspondent

Customers are being charged up to £300 to learn whether they have links to famous people or societies despite the fact many of the tests are not backed up by scientific evidence, experts said.

The amount of DNA any individual inherits from relatives just a few steps up their family tree is negligible compared with the vast amount we all share from common ancestors.

It means any ancestral “history” identified by a simple genetic test is just one of dozens of possible interpretations, and to try to trace our lineage directly through our genes is “absurd”, they claimed…

… The warning was backed by a number of leading genetics experts. Steve Jones, Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics at UCL said: “On a long trudge through history – two parents, four great-grandparents, and so on – very soon everyone runs out of ancestors and has to share them.

“As a result, almost every Briton is a descendant of Viking hordes, Roman legions, African migrants, Indian Brahmins, or anyone else they fancy.”…

Read the entire article here.

Dorothy Roberts: The problem with race-based medicine

TEDMED 2015
November 2015

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

Social justice advocate and law scholar Dorothy Roberts has a precise and powerful message: Race-based medicine is bad medicine. Even today, many doctors still use race as a medical shortcut; they make important decisions about things like pain tolerance based on a patient’s skin color instead of medical observation and measurement. In this searing talk, Roberts lays out the lingering traces of race-based medicine — and invites us to be a part of ending it. “It is more urgent than ever to finally abandon this backward legacy,” she says, “and to affirm our common humanity by ending the social inequalities that truly divide us.”

Watch the video presentation (00:14:41) here. Download the video presentation here.

Is It Time To Stop Using Race In Medical Research?

Shots: Health News from NPR
National Public Radio
2016-02-05

Angus Chen

Genetics researchers often discover certain snips and pieces of the human genome that are important for health and development, such as the genetic mutations that cause cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia. And scientists noticed that genetic variants are more common in some races, which makes it seem like race is important in genetics research.

But some researchers say that we’ve taken the concept too far. To find out what that means, we’ve talked to two of the authors of an article published Thursday in the journal Science. Sarah Tishkoff is a human population geneticist and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar, sociologist and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Africana Studies department. This interview has been edited for length and clarity…

Read entire interview here.