Mixed Race Studies

What I’ve learned from living with HIV

The Melissa Harris-Perry Blog
2012-07-01

Macalester College

Ed. note: This is a guest column by our guest today, Christopher MacDonald-Dennis, the Dean of Multicultural Life at Macalester College. Chris normally tweets this essay out every December 1 to commemorate World AIDS Day, but was kind enough to allow us to share it in this space.

My name is Chris, and I live with HIV.

I know some were here last year [on my Twitter timeline], so I’ll try not to bore you. I just want to remind us that we are here among you, living, thriving, sometimes barely surviving w HIV/AIDS. I’d like to tell my story: why I made choices I did and what I’ve learned-because I have learned a great deal about myself from this disease.

To start: I have been positive for 15 years. March 10, 2010 was  my anniversary. I am 41 years old. In fact, I was born exactly 1 week before Stonewall rebellion in NYC. I was born and raised in a working-class Boston neighborhood. I grew up in uber-dysfunctional family: brother diagnosed as sociopath in teens, dad an alcoholic, mom mentally ill. It was hell in that family, I was a little “sissy” who knew at early age he was gay. I was OK with it but knew others wouldn’t be. I was terrorized as kid-ass kicked a lot. My city didn’t like “femme” boys. Also, I am mixed: dad was white, mom Latina…long before mixed folks were cool. We just were odd. So I grew up alone, and lonely…

Read the entire essay here.

Race, Ethnicity, and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics

Berghahn Books
Winter 2007
210 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84545-355-8
Paperback ISBN:978-1-84545-681-8

Edited by

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

Race, ethnicity and nation are all intimately linked to family and kinship, yet these links deserve closer attention than they usually get in social science, above all when family and kinship are changing rapidly in the context of genomic and biotechnological revolutions. Drawing on data from assisted reproduction, transnational adoption, mixed race families, Basque identity politics and post-Soviet nation-building, this volume provides new and challenging ways to understand race, ethnicity and nation.

Contents

• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. Race, Ethnicity and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics / Peter Wade
• 2. Race, Genetics and Inheritance: Reflections upon the Birth of ‘Black’ Twins to a ‘White’ IVF Mother / Katharine Tyler
• 3. Race, Biology and Culture in Contemporary Norway: Identity and Belonging in Adoption, Donor Gametes and Immigration / Signe Howell and Marit Melhuus
• 4. ‘I want her to learn her language and maintain her culture’: Transnational Adoptive Families’ Views of ‘Cultural Origins’ / Diana Marre
• 5. Racialization, Genes and the Reinventions of Nation in Europe / Ben Campbell
• 6. Kinship Language and the Dynamics of Race: The Basque Case / Enric Porqueres i Gené
• 7. The Transmission of Ethnicity: Family and State – A Lithuanian Perspective / Darius Daukšas
• 8. Media Storylines of Culturally Hybrid Persons and Nation / Ben Campbell
• Notes on Contributors
• Glossary
• Index

What DNA Says About Human Ancestry—and Bigotry

The Village Voice
1997-10-28
pages 34-35

Mark Schoofs, Senior Editor
ProPublica

Race and genetics form their own double helix, twisting together through history. The Nazis, as everyone knows, justified the death camps on the grounds that Jews and Gypsies were genetically inferior—but what is less known is that the Nazis took their cue from eugenics legislation passed in the United States. Here, race is defined primarily by skin color. Since that’s a genetic trait, the logic goes, race itself must be genetic, and there must be differences that are more than skin deep.

But that’s not what modern genetics reveals. Quite the contrary, it shows that race is truly skin deep. Indeed, genetics undermines the whole concept that humanity is composed of ”races”—pure and static groups that are significantly different from one another. Genetics has proven otherwise by tracing human ancestry, as it is inscribed on DNA.

Demystifying race may be the most important accomplishment of this research, but it has also solved some of the most intriguing mysteries of human history…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed race: Fastest growing demographic in Canada

The Province
Vancouver, British Columbia
2012-06-24

Sam Cooper

…And the hardest in the world to find a match for blood cells; one in millions, literally

Brutal. Intensive. Without hope. Those are words that just don’t translate when you hear the voice of 14-year-old Lourdess Sumners, of Duncan.

She’s a happy teen who liberally sprinkles her speech with giggles and words like, “Gee . . . Woo-hoo! . . . No big whup.”

You’d never know she’s spent half her young life facing death, with survival chances many times lower than other children, because of her diverse genetic makeup.

She was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive cancer of the blood and bone marrow, in 2006. She endured eight months of chemotherapy, seemed to beat the fast-growing cancer, but relapsed.

The doctors at Children’s Hospital in Vancouver said her last hope was a life-saving bone marrow transplant.

The medical process is harrowing enough for any child. But with a Filipino and Caucasian background, doctors could not find Lourdess a bone marrow match, after several worldwide searches.

As a child of mixed race—the fastest growing demographic in Canada, and especially B.C.—she is representative of a demographic group that is disadvantaged, in terms of medical blood work…

Read the entire article here.

Bodies with Histories: The New Search for the Biology of Race

Boston Review
May/June 2012

Anne Fausto-Sterling
Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Biochemistry, Program in Women’s Studies, and Chair of the Faculty Committee on Science and Technology Studies
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Richard C. Francis, Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance. W. W. Norton, $25.95 (cloth)

Ann Morning, The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference. University of California Press, $26.95 (paper)

Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. New Press, $29.95 (cloth)

Have you heard this one? A sociologist, a lawyer, and a biologist walk into a bar, scoot their stools up to the counter, order drinks, and begin to chat. Suddenly, a booming voice (God, the bartender?) envelops them. “What is the meaning of race?” the voice asks.

While the question may seem straightforward on its face, it quickly spawns further questions, often vexing. Is race purely a political construct, or is it biologically encoded? Certainly there are aspects of human biology—skin color, hair color, the presence or absence of epicanthic folds, etc.—that are commonly associated with racial differences, but is race just the sum of these physical features, with all of the overlaps, exceptions, and ambiguities they involve? How do genes factor into the story? And what connection—if any—is there between biological markers of race and the social experiences of racial groups?

Each of the three drinking buddies has a lot to say to God or Sam Malone, and, by the way, their responses don’t end in laugh lines. The biologist, Richard Francis, engages other issues, though his concerns directly affect how we answer the loud voice. But the sociologist, Ann Morning, and the lawyer, Dorothy Roberts, are narrowly focused on the science of race and how medicine mediates racial experience. And with good reason: in the United States people of a darker hue (on average) die sooner than pink-skinned people. They are afflicted with higher rates of particular diseases, such as high blood pressure, strokes, and kidney failure. So the race you’re born with, or, rather, which race you are born into, might mean a healthier, longer life—or not.

These days large numbers of medical research dollars are devoted to finding genetic differences between races that might explain health disparities. But many students of biology and race, and at least some of our bar mates, think that is a bad idea. They are not against medical research per se but against bad research. Instead of looking for genes that cause race and attending health outcomes (the standard approach) they point to evidence strongly suggesting that everyday events alter our bodies, making them sicker or more resistant to disease—events that the political economy ensures are more or less common depending on which racial categories one is assigned to. Indeed, it may be that biology doesn’t create race but that racial marking creates new biological states via processes that all three of these thinkers discuss in new books…

Read the entire review here.

The Problem of Race in Medicine

Philosophy of the Social Sciences
Volume 31, Number 1 (March 2001)
pages 20-39
DOI: 10.1177/004839310103100102

Michael Root, Professor of Philosophy
University of Minnesota

The biomedical sciences employ race as a descriptive and analytic category. They use race to describe differences in rates of morbidity and mortality and to explain variations in drug sensitivity and metabolism. But there are problems with the use of race in medicine. This article identifies a number of the problems and assesses some solutions. The first three sections consider how race is defined and whether the racial data used in biomedical research are reliable and valid. The next three sections explain why racial variation in disease, including genetic disease, is not evidence that race is biological. The final section explains how a proper understanding of the role of race in medicine bears on public policy.

Read or purchase the article here.

Race Finished: Book Review

American Scientist
April-May, 2012

Jan Sapp, Professor of Biology and History
York University, Toronto

Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth. Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle. xviii + 226 pp. Texas A&M University Press, 2011.

Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture. Edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan. xiv + 296 pp. Columbia University Press, 2011. cloth.

Few concepts are as emotionally charged as that of race. The word conjures up a mixture of associations—culture, ethnicity, genetics, subjugation, exclusion and persecution. But is the tragic history of efforts to define groups of people by race really a matter of the misuse of science, the abuse of a valid biological concept? Is race nevertheless a fundamental reality of human nature? Or is the notion of human “races” in fact a folkloric myth? Although biologists and cultural anthropologists long supposed that human races—genetically distinct populations within the same species—have a true existence in nature, many social scientists and geneticists maintain today that there simply is no valid biological basis for the concept.

The consensus among Western researchers today is that human races are sociocultural constructs. Still, the concept of human race as an objective biological reality persists in science and in society. It is high time that policy makers, educators and those in the medical-industrial complex rid themselves of the misconception of race as type or as genetic population. This is the message of two recent books: Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth, by Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle, and Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture, edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan. Both volumes are important and timely. Both put race in the context of the history of science and society, relating how the ill-defined word has been given different meanings by different people to refer to groups they deem to be inferior or superior in some way.

Before we turn to the books themselves, a little background is necessary. A turning point in debates on race was marked in 1972 when, in a paper titled “The Apportionment of Human Diversity,” Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin showed that human populations, then held to be races, were far more genetically diverse than anyone had imagined. Lewontin’s study was based on molecular-genetic techniques and provided statistical analysis of 17 polymorphic sites, including the major blood groups in the races as they were conventionally defined: Caucasian, African, Mongoloid, South Asian Aborigines, Amerinds, Oceanians and Australian Aborigines. What he found was unambiguous—and the inverse of what one would expect if such races had any biological reality: The great majority of genetic variation (85.4 percent) was within so-called races, not between them. Differences between local populations accounted for 8.5 percent of total variation; differences between regions accounted for 6.3 percent. The genetic divergence between geographical populations in the course of human evolution does not compare to the variation among individuals. “Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance,” Lewontin concluded…

…Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth is a beautifully presented book, elegantly reasoned and skillfully written. Tattersall, a physical anthropologist, and DeSalle, a geneticist, are both senior scholars at the American Museum of Natural History. Their aim is to explain human diversity in terms of human evolution and dispersal since our ancestors walked out of Africa some 100,000 years ago. The patterns of diversity, they write, reflect the processes of divergence and reintegration, the yin and yang of evolution.

In biology, a grouping has biological meaning based on principles of common descent—the Darwinian idea that all members of the group share a common ancestry. On this basis, and on the ability to interbreed, all humans are grouped into one species as Homo sapiens, the only surviving member of the various species that the genus comprised. Species are arranged within the “tree of life,” a hierarchical classification that situates each species in only one genus, that genus only in one family and so on. Nothing confuses that classification more than the exchange of genes between groups. In the bacterial world, for example, gene sharing can occur throughout the most evolutionarily divergent groups. The result is a reticulate evolution—a global net or web of related organisms, and no species. Among humans, reticulation occurs when there is interbreeding within the species—mating among individuals from different geographical populations. The result of such genetic mixing of previously isolated groups—due to migrations, invasions and colonization—is that no clear boundaries can be drawn around the variety of humans, no “races” of us…

…Although race is void of biological foundation, it has a profound social reality. All too apparent are disparities in health and welfare. Despite all the evidence indicating that “race” has no biological or evolutionary meaning, the biological-race concept continues to gain strength today in science and society, and it is reinforced by those who design and market DNA-based technologies. Race is used more and more in forensics, medicine and the genetic-ancestry business. Tattersall and DeSalle confront those industries head on and in no uncertain terms, arguing that “race-based medicine” and “raced-based genomics” are deeply flawed. Individuals fall ill, not populations. Belonging to any socioculturally defined race is a poor predictor of an individual’s genes, and one’s genes a poor predictor of one’s health.

Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture arose from two projects, both funded by the Ford Foundation and organized by the Council for Responsible Genetics, that “examined the persistence of the concept of human races within science and the impacts such a concept has had on disparities among people of different geographical ancestries.” The first project brought together academics and social-justice advocates to discuss “racialized” forensic DNA databases and seek policy solutions. The second focused on the effects of modern genetic technology in reinscribing and naturalizing the concept of race in science and society. The resulting book is a fine and richly textured compilation, in which a multidisciplinary group of scholars explore racialized medicine, various uses of genetic testing in forensics and the genetic-ancestry industry, and attempts to link intelligence and race.

Sociologist Troy Duster argues that the growing genetic-ancestry industry not only reinforces a biological conception of race but is sorely in need of government regulation in regard to claims made and accuracy of methods used to pinpoint ancestry, as was suggested by the American Society of Human Genetics in 2008…

…A different aspect of racial profiling is evident in the growing industry of racialized medicine, whose proponents might argue that even if race has no evolutionary or biological meaning, it can still be useful for medical treatments. After all, more and more diseases are reportedly correlated with ethnicity and race. But as evolutionary biologists Joseph L. Graves Jr. and Jonathan Kahn argue in their respective chapters on the subject, racialized medicine is a bad investment and is bound to fail for two reasons. First, although individual ancestries are useful on medical questionnaires, ancestry should not be conflated with race. “The issue is not primarily one of whether to use racial categories in medical practice but how,” Kahn writes.

Carefully taking account of race to help understand broader social or environmental factors that may be influencing health disparities can be warranted. . . . But it is always important to understand that race itself is not an inherent causal factor in such conditions.

As an example, he considers the drug called BiDil, FDA approved as an anti–heart-attack agent specifically marketed to African Americans on the grounds that they have a biological propensity for heart disease brought on by high blood pressure. Not only is the drug not effective for all African Americans, it is quite effective for many individuals who self-identify as Caucasian…

Read the entire review here.

Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth

Texas A&M University Press
2011-09-01
256 pages
6 x 9
Photo. 9 line art. 6 tables. Index.
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-60344-425-5

Ian Tattersall, Curator Emeritus
American Museum of Natural History

Rob DeSalle, Curator of Entomology
American Museum of Natural History in the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics

Race has provided the rationale and excuse for some of the worst atrocities in human history. Yet, according to many biologists, physical anthropologists, and geneticists, there is no valid scientific justification for the concept of race.

To be more precise, although there is clearly some physical basis for the variations that underlie perceptions of race, clear boundaries among “races” remain highly elusive from a purely biological standpoint. Differences among human populations that people intuitively view as “racial” are not only superficial but are also of astonishingly recent origin.

In this intriguing and highly accessible book, physical anthropologist Ian Tattersall and geneticist Rob DeSalle, both senior scholars from the American Museum of Natural History, explain what human races actually are—and are not—and place them within the wider perspective of natural diversity. They explain that the relative isolation of local populations of the newly evolved human species during the last Ice Age—when Homo sapiens was spreading across the world from an African point of origin—has now begun to reverse itself, as differentiated human populations come back into contact and interbreed. Indeed, the authors suggest that all of the variety seen outside of Africa seems to have both accumulated and started reintegrating within only the last 50,000 or 60,000 years—the blink of an eye, from an evolutionary perspective.

The overarching message of Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth is that scientifically speaking, there is nothing special about racial variation within the human species. These distinctions result from the working of entirely mundane evolutionary processes, such as those encountered in other organisms.

The Biologistical Construction of Race: ‘Admixture’ Technology and the New Genetic Medicine

Social Studies of Science
Volume 38, Number 5 (2008)
pages 695-735
DOI: 10.1177/0306312708090796

Duana Fullwiley, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and of Medical Anthropology
Harvard University

This paper presents an ethnographic case study of the use of race in two interconnected laboratories of medical genetics. Specifically, it examines how researchers committed to reducing health disparities in Latinos with asthma advance hypotheses and structure research to show that relative frequencies of genetic markers characterize commonly understood groupings of race. They do this first by unapologetically advancing the idea that peoples whom they take to be of the `Old World’, or `Africans’, `Europeans’, `East Asians’, and `Native Americans’, can serve as putatively pure reference populations against which genetic risk for common diseases such as asthma can be calculated for those in the `New World’. Technologically, they deploy a tool called ancestry informative markers (AIMs), which are a collection of genetic sequence variants said to differ in present-day West Africans, East Asians, Europeans, and (ideally Pre-Columbian) Native Americans. I argue that this technology, compelling as it may be to a range of actors who span the political spectrum, is, at base, designed to bring about a correspondence of familiar ideas of race and supposed socially neutral DNA. This correspondence happens, in part, as the scientists in question often bracket the environment while privileging racialized genetic variance as the primary source of health disparities for common disease, in this case between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans with asthma. With their various collaborators, these scientists represent a growing movement within medical genetics to re-consider race and `racial admixture’ as biogenetically valid points of departure. Furthermore, many actors at the center of this ethnography focus on race as a function of their personal identity politics as scientists of color. This to say, they are driven not by racist notions of human difference, but by a commitment to reduce health disparities and to include `their’ communities in what they describe as the `genetic revolution’.

The very word ‘race’ applies to a hypothetical past, or to a problematical future, not to the actual present … the only way to measure the genetic relationship of ethnic groups would be by ascertaining the quantitative values of their coefficients of common ancestry, which would be based entirely upon the statistical methods of probability theory. (We Europeans [Julian Huxley and Alfred Court Haddon, 1939: 114])

To me, the refusal to use race in medicine is political correctness gone awry. It’s a lot of white researchers gone political. (Esteban Gonzàles Burchard, asthma geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco Lung Biology Center; field notes 2003)

The Molecularization of ‘Admixture’: A History of the Present

In 1949, the year before the first United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) statement rallying against the race concept, Linus Pauling characterized sickle cell anemia as the first ‘molecular disease’ (Pauling et al., 1949). At the time, most experts and lay people considered sickle cell a ‘black-race disorder’. Despite global good will and contrition for the violence perpetuated in the name of racial purification in Germany and elsewhere a few short years before, some North American scientists called the UNESCO statement an ‘incautious affirmation’ and claimed that sickle cell anemia in American blacks (who by definition, it was assumed, had white ancestry) was a perfect example of how ‘race mixture can be disadvantageous in its racial effects’ (Gates, 1952: 896). The then ‘odd’ observation that ‘hybrids’ (black Americans) seemed to have more sickle cell disease than their ‘pure’ (African) counterparts who had more sickle cell trait (which was actually mistaken for a milder form of the disease in many cases) gave immediate rise to theories that ‘racial admixture’ could affect disease risk and/or severity (Gates, 1952). With Pauling’s Nobel-winning observations came the first intellectual opening for the molecularization of race. Immediately with it came the idea that racialized ancestral mixing, or ‘admixture’, constituted increased risk of disease pathology. In what follows, I examine a present-day resurgence of the concept of human biological admixture as a factor in disease risk in some quarters of contemporary American medical genetics…

…Over the past few years, social scientists studying genetics and race have urged their colleagues to ‘go to the very sites’ of scientific production and ‘document how [racial] categories are being constructed’ anew (Reardon, 2005: 18; Duster, 2006a: 12). Following from this, it is as imperative that ethnographers also attempt to understand better scientists’ motives for wanting to resuscitate such troubled categories. To this end, it is important for me to note how my informants’ social experiences shape the tautological product of genetic racial admixture they use on a daily basis. In particular, one challenge these scientists have posed for themselves is to ‘care’ for their own disproportionately sick communities of ‘racially admixed subjects’ by recruiting and enrolling them in genetic research. A crucial aspect of their effort to reduce health disparities is a search for the biological component of these communities’ mixed racial heritage. For several of my informants, this heritage is a point of biological difference that may contain clues about present-day health differences. Here it is many ‘drops of blood’ – rather than one – that now constitute the brown bodies in question. Today, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in the US are assumed to be differentially constituted from African-Americans and Native Americans, based on their varying amounts of African, European, and Native (pre-Columbian) genetic ancestral contributions. Yet, contrary to earlier American norms of hypo-descent, these mixed groups must remain conceptually separate, ‘ethnically’ and ‘politically’, from the referent groups that make them up. Today, Mexicans’ and Puerto Ricans’ African ancestries are deemed important for reasons that will become clear below, but they are rarely collapsed into a category of ‘blackness’. In fact, as one of the main researchers featured in this ethnography reminded himself and his team time and again, as of the 2000 census, Latinos surpassed African-Americans as the largest minority group in the US. Over the course of my fieldwork in his lab, I heard this feat by numbers repeated, as if to say that this researcher’s ‘community’ needed and deserved the same kind of attention, political courtship, and scientific resources as one of the most historically ‘important’ and visible American minority groups…

Read the entire artcle here.

Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture

Columbia University Press
September 2011
304 pages
1 illus; 4 tables
Paper ISBN: 978-0-231-15697-4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-15696-7

Edited by:

Sheldon Krimsky, Professor of Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning; Adjunct Professor of Public Health and Family Medicine
Tufts School of Medicine
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Kathleen Sloan

Do advances in genomic biology create a scientific rationale for long-discredited racial categories? Leading scholars in law, medicine, biology, sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology examine the impact of modern genetics on the concept of race. Contributors trace the interplay between genetics and race in forensic DNA databanks, the biology of intelligence, DNA ancestry markers, and racialized medicine. Each essay explores commonly held and unexamined assumptions and misperceptions about race in science and popular culture.

This collection begins with the historical origins and current uses of the concept of “race” in science. It follows with an analysis of the role of race in DNA databanks and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Essays then consider the rise of recreational genetics in the form of for-profit testing of genetic ancestry and the introduction of racialized medicine, specifically through an FDA-approved heart drug called BiDil, marketed to African American men. Concluding sections discuss the contradictions between our scientific and cultural understandings of race and the continuing significance of race in educational and criminal justice policy.

Table of Contents

• A short history of the race concept / Michael Yudell
• Natural selection, the human genome, and the idea of race / Robert Pollack
• Racial disparities in databanking of DNA profiles / Michael T. Risher
• Prejudice, stigma, and DNA databases / Helen Wallace
• Ancestry testing and DNA : uses, limits, and caveat emptor / Troy Duster
• Can DNA witness race? Forensic uses of an imperfect ancestry testing technology / Duana Fullwiley
• BiDil and racialized medicine / Jonathan Kahn
• Evolutionary versus racial medicine : why it matters? / Joseph L. Graves Jr.
• Myth and mystification : the science of race and IQ / Pilar N. Ossorio
• Intelligence, race, and genetics / Robert J. Sternberg … [et al.]
• The elusive variability of race / Patricia J. Williams
• Race, genetics, and the regulatory need for race impact assessments / Osagie K. Obasogie.