Mixed Race Studies

Tell Me a Story: Genomics vs. Indigenous Origin Narratives

GeneWatch
Council for Responsible Genetics
Volume 26, Number 4, Religion & Genetics (Aug-Oct 2013)
pages 11-13

Kim TallBear, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Texas, Austin

On April 13, 2005 the Indigenous Peoples’ Council on Biocolonialism issued a press release opposing the Genographic Project, which aimed to sample 100,000 indigenous and other traditional peoples to “trace the migratory history of the human species” and “map how the Earth was populated.” IPCB critiques Genographic, and the Human Genome Diversity Project before it, as the contemporary continuation of colonial, extractive research. The analysis is also a fundamental historical examination of Western science. IPCB foregrounds the intellectual and institutional authority that science, a powerful tool of colonizing states, has to appropriate indigenous bodies – both dead and living – material cultural artifacts, and indigenous cultural narratives in the service of academic knowledge production.

Critics point out that such knowledge rarely serves indigenous peoples’ interests and can actively harm them. In the 19th and early 20th centuries massacre sites and graves were plundered for body parts to be used in scientific investigations that inform today’s anthropological and biological research on Native Americans. Throughout the 20th century, indigenous peoples around the world witnessed the too common practice of “helicopter research” – quick sampling without return of results or benefit to subjects. Indigenous DNA samples and data taken in earlier decades when ethics standards were lax continue to be used and cited in contemporary investigations, bringing those injustices into the 21st century. And new, more ethical research still takes time from other pressing projects and needs. Informed community review and collaboration with researchers will increase community benefit, but informed participation has costs. It takes resources to build capacity to sit at the table as equals instead of as vulnerable subjects – as simply the raw materials for science…

Read the entire article here.

New recognition for first black U.S. doctor with medical degree

American Medical News
2010-11-08

Kevin B. O’Reilly

Dr. James McCune Smith’s descendants unveiled a new headstone in a ceremony to commemorate his achievements as a physician, essayist and abolitionist.

The New York City burial site of the nation’s first black medical degree-holder received a new headstone—one provided by his white descendants in a recent public ceremony.

Dr. James McCune Smith received his medical degree at the University of Glasgow in Scotland in 1837, forced to go overseas for his education due to U.S. colleges’ racist admissions policies. Historians say the training provided at European medical schools at that time was, ironically, superior to that offered in the U.S.

Greta Blau, Dr. Smith’s great-great-great-granddaughter, learned that she was descended from the doctor after finding his name inscribed in a family Bible. She recognized the name from a history paper she had written years earlier in college.

After confirming the family connection through genealogical research, Blau learned that Dr. Smith’s five surviving children passed, lived and identified as white in society after he died in 1865.

Dr. Smith treated both black and white patients in New York City. He was the first black doctor to write a medical case report—presented to the New York Medical and Surgical Society in 1840.

He also was the first black physician to have a medical scientific paper published, in the New York Journal of Medicine in 1844, and was a prominent essayist who attacked slavery and racial theories positing blacks’ inferiority. He was a friend of Frederick Douglass and wrote the introduction to his 1855 autobiography…

Read the entire article here.

Is race erased? Decoding race from patterns of neural activity when skin color is not diagnostic of group boundaries

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
Volume 8, Issue 7 (October 2013)
pages 750-755
DOI: 10.1093/scan/nss063

Kyle G. Ratner
Department of Psychology
New York University

Christian Kaul
Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science
New York University

Jay J. Van Bavel, Assistant Professor of Social Psychology
New York University

Several theories suggest that people do not represent race when it does not signify group boundaries. However, race is a visually salient social category associated with skin tone and facial features. In the current study, we investigated whether race could be decoded from distributed patterns of neural activity in the fusiform gyri and early visual cortex when visual features that often co-vary with race were orthogonal to group membership. To this end, we used multivariate pattern analysis to examine an fMRI dataset that was collected while participants assigned to mixed-race groups categorized own-race and other-race faces as belonging to their newly assigned group. Whereas conventional univariate analyses provided no evidence of biased race-based responses in the fusiform gyri or early visual cortex, multivariate pattern analysis suggested that race was represented within these regions. Moreover, race was represented in the fusiform gyri to a greater extent than early visual cortex, suggesting that the fusiform gyri results do not merely reflect low-level perceptual information (e.g., color, contrast) from early visual cortex. The findings indicate that patterns of activation within specific regions of the visual cortex may represent race even when overall activation in these regions is not driven by racial information.

Read the entire article here.

What’s Wrong with Race-Based Medicine?: Genes, Drugs, and Health Disparities

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology
Volume 12, Issue 1 (Winter 2011)
pages 1-21

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

In June 2005, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a historic decision: it approved the first pharmaceutical indicated for a specific race. BiDil, a combination drug that relaxes the blood vessels, was authorized to treat heart failure in self-identified black patients. BiDil had been tested in the African-American Heart Failure Trial (A-HeFT) launched in 2001. A-HeFT enrolled 1,050 subjects suffering from advanced heart failure, all self-identified African Americans. A-HeFT showed that BiDil worked; in fact, it worked so spectacularly that the trial was stopped ahead of schedule. BiDil in-creased survival by an astonishing 43 percent. Hospitalizations were reduced by 39 percent. It was a momentous accomplishment for Jay Cohn, the University of Minnesota cardiologist who invented BiDil and had pioneered vasodilators as an important treatment for heart failure.

Given evidence of BiDil’s efficacy, but little evidence that race mattered to its efficacy, the FDA should have made one of two decisions: reject the request for race-specific approval or approve BiDil for all heart failure patients, regardless of race. Instead, the FDA put race at the center of its decision, sparking controversy and paving the way for a new generation of racial medicines.

No one is complaining that BiDil is available to people who will benefit from it. The problem is that BiDil was made available on the basis of race. Its racial label elicited three types of criticism: scientific, commercial, and political. I will discuss the first two controversies en route to what I consider the main problem with race-based medicine, its political implications. By claiming that race, a political grouping, is important to the marketing of drugs and that race-based drugs can reduce health disparities, which are caused primarily by social inequality, those who promote racialized medicine have made it a political issue. Yet, having made these political claims, these very advocates answer criticism by saying that we must put aside social justice concerns in order to improve minority health. This article explains why marketing pharmaceuticals on the basis of race is more likely to worsen racial inequities than cure them…

Read the entire article here.

Discrimination Down to a Science

Hyphen Magazine
Issue 26, Spring 2013 (The South)

Dharushana Muthulingam, Health Editor and a resident physician at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland

How genetic data shapes science and medicine and what is being done to change it.

In the 1997 science fiction movie Gattaca, set in a future of genetically engineered humans, Vincent Freeman — the unfortunate product of “natural conception” — declared: “I belonged to a new underclass, no longer determined by social status or the color of your skin. No, we now have discrimination down to a science.” It is a touching picture of dystopia, where we have moved beyond our current social myopias, only to find new, more elaborate ones.

In 1997, the race to map the human genome — the entire hereditary information of humans — was in full force. It held the promise of better medicine, better technology and a better idea of where we come from. But a long history of discrimination by social status and skin color still had an unwitting effect in shaping science.

Genetics has only recently had concrete applications in medicine and everyday life. By the mid-2000s, the price of genetic testing decreased steeply enough to make it usable outside of research. Now, we can identify which specific breast cancer variant will respond to a certain treatment or predict if an HIV medication will cause a bad reaction.

The potential for Personalized Medicine was born on these few successes, with slick promises of customized treatment for what ails you. This has also improved the well-being of a handful of stockholders, with the nascent industry estimated to be worth $232 billion and growing 11 percent annually…

…To its credit, the National Institute of Health has repeatedly tried to tie funding to increasing diversity in research subjects since the 1970s, with mixed results. This long shadow of history and the general societal conversation of race still shape the culture of how scientists approach race and which people are willing to sign up as subjects.

This caution may have been the prudent thing, but it may have also slowed down investigations that are biologically valid and in fact, facilitate a more just and accessible science. The last 10 years have seen an astonishing rise in the health research of minority populations and disparities due to social class, and the genetic database is only just starting to catch up.

Another barrier is having a misleading taxonomy: the trouble with getting your racial categories right. While there is some relation between your geographical lineage and your collection of genes, the traditional American racial categories like “white” and “Hispanic” are historical artifacts that do not map rigorously to anything in the natural world, even as they shape our society.

This was suspected by famed evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin in 1972 and confirmed in a 2004 analysis that found that there is more genetic variation within each of those categories than there are differences between any two categories. Of course, people mix across categories, which complicates genetic profiles…

…For all these important reasons for having a diverse genetic database — accuracy in research, finding unique mutations and, yes, a more marketable consumer genetic industry — there is also the sense that race is only one tiny lens among many to view the data. Since the Human Genome project was completed, they found that over 99.5 percent of genes are identical across human kind.

“Yet, almost as soon as researchers announced this result, several research projects began to focus on mapping the less than one percent of human genetic variation onto social categories of race,” Osagie Obasogie, a professor of law at UC Hastings, noted in GeneWatch Magazine in 2009.

Despite the fact that social categories of race do not match genetic categories, and despite the existence of far more similarity than difference among these social categories, a lot of effort has gone into trying to dig up what minuscule matching does exist.

Not only are the old categories of race too rough and misleading for modern biological work, there is a risk for what sociologist Troy Duster calls the “reification of race” — a circular process of using a popular understanding of race (shaped by hundreds of years of custom, biases and so on) to shape the scientific questions and research funding, which then gives an aura of legitimacy to that pile of unexamined biases…

Read the entire article here.

Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science

University of Minnesota Press
September 2013
256 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-6586-0
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-6585-3

Kim TallBear, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Texas, Austin

Who is a Native American? And who gets to decide? From genealogists searching online for their ancestors to fortune hunters hoping for a slice of casino profits from wealthy tribes, the answers to these seemingly straightforward questions have profound ramifications. The rise of DNA testing has further complicated the issues and raised the stakes.

In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how DNA testing is a powerful—and problematic—scientific process that is useful in determining close biological relatives. But tribal membership is a legal category that has developed in dependence on certain social understandings and historical contexts, a set of concepts that entangles genetic information in a web of family relations, reservation histories, tribal rules, and government regulations. At a larger level, TallBear asserts, the “markers” that are identified and applied to specific groups such as Native American tribes bear the imprints of the cultural, racial, ethnic, national, and even tribal misinterpretations of the humans who study them.

TallBear notes that ideas about racial science, which informed white definitions of tribes in the nineteenth century, are unfortunately being revived in twenty-first-century laboratories. Because today’s science seems so compelling, increasing numbers of Native Americans have begun to believe their own metaphors: “in our blood” is giving way to “in our DNA.” This rhetorical drift, she argues, has significant consequences, and ultimately she shows how Native American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that have taken generations to ratify may be seriously—and permanently—undermined.

Table of Contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: An Indigenous, Feminist Approach to DNA Politics
• 1. Racial Science, Blood, and DNA
• 2. The DNA Dot-com: Selling Ancestry
• 3. Genetic Genealogy Online
• 4. The Genographic Project: The Business of Research and Representation
• Conclusion: Indigenous and Genetic Governance and Knowledge
• Notes
• Index

Law, Race, and Biotechnology: Toward a Biopolitical and Transdisciplinary Paradigm

Annual Review of Law and Social Science
Volume 9, Issue 1 (November 2013)
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-102612-134009

Dorothy E. 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

Law influences and is shaped by the emergence of race-based biotechnologies in the genomic age. This review examines how law and social science scholars have approached the role of legal regulation, theories, and norms in governing the definition and utility of race in gene-based technological innovation. I structure my discussion around four main themes: the institutional regulation of biotechnology research, commercial incentives for race-specific products, the paradoxes of inclusion and difference, and racial equality jurisprudence. My attention then turns to future directions for research in this field needed to attend to the serious political implications of increasing race consciousness in genomic research and technology at a time when color blindness and postracialism are gaining popularity. I argue for a biopolitical and transdisciplinary paradigm that is committed to our common humanity and to the need for social change.

Read or purchase the article here.

Latina/o Healing Practices: Mestizo and Indigenous Perspectives

Routledge
2008-05-19
360 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-95420-4

Edited by:

Brian McNeill, Professor and director of training for the Counseling Psychology Program
Washington State University

Joseph M. Cervantes, Professor in the Department of Counseling
California State University, Fullerton

This edited volume focuses on the role of traditional or indigenous healers, as well as the application of traditional healing practices in contemporary counseling and therapeutic modalities with Latina/o people. The book offers a broad coverage of important topics, such as traditional healer’s views of mental/psychological health and well-being, the use of traditional healing techniques in contemporary psychotherapy, and herbal remedies in psychiatric practice. It also discusses common factors across traditional healing methods and contemporary psychotherapies, the importance of spirituality in counseling and everyday life, the application of indigenous healing practices with Latina/o undergraduates, indigenous techniques in working with perpetrators of domestic violence, and religious healing systems and biomedical models. The book is an important reference for anyone working within the general field of mental health practice and those seeking to understand culturally relevant practice with Latina/o populations.

Contents

• An Appreciation of Dr. Michael W. Smith (1960-2006) Lorraine Garcia-Teague
• Contributors
• Introduction: Counselors and Curanderas/os—Parallels in the Healing Process Brian W. McNeill and Joseph M. Cervantes
• Part One: Mestiza/o and Indigenous Perspectives
  • Chapter 1: What Is Indigenous About Being Indigenous? The Mestiza/o Experience Joseph M. Cervantes
  • Chapter 2: Latina/o Folk Saints and Marian Devotions: Popular Religiosity and Healing Fernando A. Ortiz and Kenneth G. Davis
  • Chapter 3: Santeria and the Healing Process in Cuba and the United States Brian W. McNeill, Eileen Esquivel, Arlene Carkasco, and Rosalilia Mendoza
• Part Two: Indigenous and Mestiza/o Healing Practices
  • Chapter 4: The Use of Psychotropic Herbal and Natural Medicines in Latina/o and Mestiza/o Populations German Ascani and Michael W. Smith
  • Chapter 5: Brazil’s Ultimate Healing Resource: The Power of Spirit Sandra Nuñez
  • Chapter 6: La Limpia de San Lazaro as Individual and Collective Cleansing Rite Karen V. Holliday
  • Chapter 7: Resé un Ave María y Encendí una Velita: The Use of Spirituality and Religion as a Means of Coping with Educational Experiences for Latina/o College Students Jeanett Castellanos and Alberta M. Gloria
• Part Three: Contemporary Aspects of Mestiza/o and Indigenous Healing Practices: Reclamation and Integration
  • Chapter 8: Los Espiritus Siguen Hablando: Chicana Spiritualities Lara Medina
  • Chapter 9: Religious Healing and Biomedicine in Comparative Context Karen V. Holliday
  • Chapter 10: Curanderismo: Religious and Spiritual Worldviews and Indigenous Healing Traditions Fernando A. Ortiz, Kenneth G. Davis, and Brian W. McNeill
• Part Four: Epilogue
  • Epilogue: Summary and Future Research and Practice Agendas Joseph M. Cervantes and Brian W. McNeill
• Index

Colour Coded Health Care: The Impact of Race and Racism on Canadians’ Health

Wellesly Institute: advancing urban health
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
January 2012
30 pages

Sheryl Nestel, Ph.D.

Scope and Purpose of the Review

Canada is home to a much-admired system of universal health care, understood as a central pillar of this nation’s overall commitment to principles of social equity and social justice. Such an understanding makes it difficult to raise the issue of racial inequities within the context of the Canadian health-care system. Indeed, as a number of Canadian health scholars have argued, with the exception of the substantial data on First Nations health, very little research has been conducted in Canada on racial inequality in health and health care (Health Canada, 2001; Johnson, Bottorff, Hilton, & Grewell, 2002; O’Neill & O’Neill, 2007; Rodney & Copeland, 2009). This literature review attempts to bring together data published between 1990 and 2011 on racial inequities in the health of non-Aboriginal racialized people in Canada. The decision not to include data on Aboriginal people in this review is by no means intended to obscure or minimize the appalling health conditions among Aboriginal people and the central role of colonialism and racism in their creation and perpetuation. It is clear, as Kelm (2005) has argued, that “social and economic deprivation, physical, sexual, cultural and spiritual abuse” (p. 397) underlie inexcusable inequities in Aboriginal health. Aboriginal health inequities were not included in this review because we chose not to subsume under an umbrella of racial inequities in health the unique history and continuing injustice of Aboriginal health conditions.

We begin our review with a discussion of the concept of race and its relationship to health outcomes and then move to a discussion of the significance of racial inequities in health and the relationship of these inequities to other forms of social inequality. We also examine mortality and morbidity data for various racialized groups in Canada and explore evidence of the role of bias, discrimination, and stereotyping in health-care delivery. Unequal access to medical screening, lack of adequate resources such as translation services, and new and important research on the physiological impact of a racist environment are also explored. This review concludes with a discussion of the limitations of available data on racial inequities in health and health care in Canada. It also surveys the challenges faced by other jurisdictions, such as the United States and Great Britain, in collecting racial data to monitor the extent of such inequities, understand their causes, and address the consequences of unequal access to health care. Finally, it offers recommendations related to the collection of racial data…

Read the entire report here.

Addressing Racial/Ethnic Health Disparities Best Practices for Clinical Care and Medical Education in the 21st Century

University of Texas, Austin
2013-09-23 through 2013-09-24

One of the primary goals of the US Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and many public health programs is the reduction of health disparities in the United States. However, significant racial/ethnic disparities persist in the prevalence of disease, access to medical care, quality of care, and health outcomes for the most common causes of death (including cardiovascular and lung disease, infectious disease, cancer, diabetes, and accidents). At this conference, nationally-recognized speakers will discuss the causes of such disparities and describe new approaches in clinical care and medical education that improve care, achieve better health outcomes, and reduce racial/ethnic health disparities. We will also discuss how these best practices can be incorporated into medical training at the new Dell Medical School at The University of Texas and at other medical schools around the country. One key goal of this conference is to help design a cutting-edge curriculum that will better prepare medical students to meet the challenges and opportunities of 21st century medicine.

Conference registration is open to anyone interested in attending this event. See the Continuing Medical Education (CME) tab for information regarding continuing education for the September 23rd portion of the conference.

The second day of the conference (September 24) is open to invited participants only. Discussions and working groups on the second day will focus on developing new pedagogical approaches and innovative learning modules for the pre-clinical curriculum at the Dell Medical School, with the goal of more effectively integrating training on human genomic variation, race/ethnicity, health disparities, and social/environmental determinants of health into the medical curriculum.

Speakers

• Deborah Bolnick, PhD
• Vence Bonham, JD [Coauthor of article “Mixed Race: ”]
• Understanding Difference in the Genome Era
• Richard Garcia, MD
• Paul Godley, MD, PhD, MPP
• Ernesto Gonzalez, MD
• Clarence Gravlee, PhD [Author or article “How race becomes biology: Embodiment of social inequality”]
• Helena Hansen, MD, PhD
• John Hoberman, PhD [Author of Black and Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism]
• Seth Holmes, MD, PhD
• Jonathan Kahn, JD, PhD [Author of Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age]
• Jay Kaufman, PhD [Contributor to What’s the Use of Race? Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference]
• Diane Magrane, MD
• Kyriakos Markides, PhD
• Jamie McGuire, MD
• Jonathan Metzl, MD, PhD
• Michael Montoya, PhD
• Rayna Rapp, PhD
• Dorothy Roberts, JD [Author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century]
• Charles Rotimi, PhD [Author of article “Are medical and nonmedical uses of large-scale genomic markers conflating genetics and ‘race’?”]
• Karen-Sue Taussig, PhD

For more information, click here.