Mixed Race Studies

Genetic ancestry data improve diagnosis in asthma and lung disease

University of California, San Fransisco
News Release
2010-07-07

Kristen Bole

Released Jointly by UCSF and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Henry Ford Hospital, and National Jewish Health

Americans with lung disease may face a far greater level of lung damage than either they or their doctor suspect, depending on their individual genetic heritage, according to a study released July 7. The research implications range from diagnosing the severity of asthma to disability decisions or eligibility for lung transplants, researchers say.

In the largest study of its kind to date, spanning a dozen research centers and pooling data on more than 3,000 patients, a team of researchers led by UCSF and Northwestern University found that patients’ precise genetic background told far more about their potential lung function – and therefore any damage that has occurred – than the self-identified racial profile commonly used in such tests.

The results point to a more precise method of assessing patients’ lung function, as well as the potential impact of using precise genetic benchmarks for assessing health overall, researchers say. Findings will appear in the July 22 print edition of the “New England Journal of Medicine” and online on July 7 at nejm.org.

…Standard race categories, however, don’t capture the extent of our ancestral diversity, according to the paper’s senior author, Esteban G. Burchard, MD, MPH, who is director of the UCSF Center for Genes, Environment and Health, and a member of the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, a joint department between the UCSF schools of Medicine and Pharmacy.

“People throughout the world have a richer genetic heritage than can be captured by our current definitions of race,” Burchard said, noting that almost every continent has large populations that are known to be genetically mixed. “When we force patients into an individual box, such as ‘African-American’ or ‘Caucasian’, we’re missing a lot of genetic information.”

While this study focused on patients who define themselves as African-Americans, the participants’ actual genetic ancestry ranged broadly and included Caucasian and African heritage…

To read the entire article, click here.

Hybridity in the Third Space: Rethinking Bi-cultural Politics in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Paper Presented to Te Oru Rangahau Maori Research and Development Conference
1998-07-07 through 1998-07-09
Massey University
7 pages

Paul Meredith (Ngati Kaputuhi/Pakeha), Research Fellow
Te Matahauariki Institute
University of Waikato, New Zealand

This brief paper joins a growing call for a reconceptualisation of bicultural politics in Aotearoa/New Zealand that draws on an inclusionary and multifaceted identity politics. (Reilly 1996; McClean 1997; Spoonley 1997) The paper argues the need for this conceptualisation to take place in an alternative space that blurs the limitations of boundaries and engenders new possibilities.

In this paper I invoke Homi Bhabha’s notions of hybridity and the third space and offer some introductory comment as to what these concepts might mean for a project that seeks to redesign the laws and institutions for a bicultural Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Read the entire paper here.

Claiming the (n)either/(n)or of ‘third space’: (re)presenting hybrid identity and the embodiment of mixed race

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 25, Issue 1 (April 2004)
pages 75 – 85
DOI: 10.1080/07256860410001687036

Torika Bolatagici, Associate Lecturer
School of Communication & Creative Arts
Deakin University, Melbourne, Austrailia

As a multiracial artist, I am interested in how people of mixed race have been represented in popular culture and how mixed race image-makers can redress popular representation and facilitate a movement beyond the dichotomy, which seeks to reduce us to the sum of our parts. In the footsteps of Evelyn Alsultany I advocate the creation of a new cartography—a space that is inclusive and beyond existing notions of race. To this end I embarked on a project of exploration of the representation of multiracial identity, drawing from Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of Third Space.

Read or purchase the article here.

Triracial isolates represent some two hundred communities scattered throughout the eastern United States, particularly in the southeast, of varying combinations and degrees of European American, Native American, and African American descent.

The triracial isolates are known by a wide variety of names. New York is the home of the Van Guilders, the Clappers, the Shinnecock, the Poospatuck, the Montauk, the Mantinecock, and the Jackson Whites.  In Pennsylvania, they are called Pools; in Delaware, Nanticokes; in Rhode Island, Narragansetts; in Massachusetts, Gay Heads and Mashpees; in Ohio, Carmelites. Maryland has its Wesorts; West Virginia its Guineas; and Tennessee its Melungeons.  There are the Ramps, Issues, and Chickhominy in Virginia; the Lumbees, Haliwas, Waccamaws, and Smilings in North Carolina; Chavises, Creels, Brass Ankles, Redbones, Redlegs, Buckheads, and Yellowhammers, all in South Carolina.  Louisiana is the home of a host of triracial communities.

G. Reginald Daniel, More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, December, 2001) 68-69.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Thinking Twice: RACE
The Stanford Review
2009-01-29

C. Matthew Snipp, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
Stanford University

Last week, we inaugurated our first African American president, and coincidentally our first mixed race president, and our first Hawaiian president. The first of these three events captured the public imagination while the other two have passed with barely a comment, and for good reason. Few Americans know the sordid history behind the acquisition of Hawaii. Fewer still have parsed what it means to be multiracial in America. But most Americans are well aware of the travails of African Americans, from slavery to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights movement.

Trolling the news outlets since the November elections yields two seemingly dissonant messages. One is that Obama’s election signals a new era in race relations—that we are living in a “post-civil rights” era, an era of “color blindness.” The New York Times recently published a glowing story about an interracial couple who suddenly have found it less awkward to have to conversations with their friends about racial differences. In contrast, others are quick to point out that racism is alive and well in America, and that Obama’s election will mean little for changing the racial partition that has existed in this country since its inception….

Read the entire article here.

Why Obama is Black Again

Thinking Twice: RACE
The Stanford Review
2009-01-29

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Stanford University

Barack Obama’s inauguration was for so many an awe-inspiring, historic and transnational event: It was full of grand pageantry and a good-humored pomp and circumstance that made D.C. the place to be. People were called together in many ways, and one of the more important ways they were asked to unite was over the contentious matter of race.

But it is worthwhile noting that this unlikely racial consensus was achieved through a strategic kind of absenting: Gone from the inaugural coverage were all the hand-wringing equivocations preceding the Democratic nomination about whether Obama’s person and politics went “beyond race” (and if that was a good thing or not), whether he even met the minimum standards for blackness (it was never clear who got to wield this racial measuring stick), or whether he was capitalizing on what novelist Danzy Senna calls the “mulatto millennium” of mixed-race celebrities…

Read the entire article here.

Identity in Education: Future of Minority Studies

Palgrave Macmillan
May 2009
296 pages
ISBN: 978-0-230-60917-4, ISBN10: 0-230-60917-1
6 1/8 x 9-1/4 inches, 296 pages, 

Edited by

Susan Sánchez-Casal, Director
Tufts University / Skidmore College, Madrid

Amie A. Macdonald, Associate Professor of Philosophy
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

This edited volume explores the impact of social identity (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion and so on) on teaching and learning.  Operating within a realist framework, the contributors to this volume (all of whom are minority scholars) consider ways to productively engage identity in the classroom and at the institutional level, as a means of working toward racial democracy in higher education.  As realists, all authors in the volume hold the theoretical position that identities are both real and constructed, and that identities are always epistemically salient.  Thus the book argues–from diverse disciplinary and educational contexts–that mobilizing identities in academia is a necessary part of progressive (antiracist, feminist, anticolonial) educators’ efforts to transform knowledge-making, to establishcritical access for minority students to higher education, and to create a more just and democratic society.

Introduction—Amie A. Macdonald and Susan Sánchez-Casal

PART I: CRITICAL ACCESS AND PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION
Identity, Realist Pedagogy, and Racial Democracy in Higher Education—Susan Sánchez-Casal and Amie A. Macdonald
What’s Identity Go to Do With It?: Mobilizing Identities in the Multicultural Classroom—Paula M. L. Moya
Fostering Cross-Racial Mentoring: White Faculty and African American Students at Harvard College—Richard Reddick

PART II: CURRICULUM AND IDENTITY
Which America Is Ours?: Martí’s “Truth” and the Foundations of “American Literature”—Michael Hames-García
The Mis-Education of Mixed Race—Michele Elam
Ethnic Studies Requirements and the “White” Dominated Classroom—Kay Yandell
Historicizing difference in The English Patient: The Politics of Identity and (Mis)Recognition—Paulo Lemos Horta

PART III: REALIST PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGIES
Teaching Disclosure: Overcoming the Invisibility of Whiteness in the American Indian Studies Classroom—Sean Kiccumah Teuton
Religious Identities and Communities of Meaning in the Realist Classroom—William Wilkerson
Postethnic America? A Multicultural Training Camp for Americanists and Future EFL teachers—Barbara Bucheneau, Paula Moya, Carola Hecke, J. Nicole Shelton
The Uses of Error: Toward a Realist Methodology of Student Evaluation—John Su