Mixed Race Studies

Genetic analysis strongly suggests that early humans first arose in Africa and emerged out of Africa only ~100,000 years ago, a fairly recent development, evolutionarily speaking, which explains why we are all closely related. Any classification of biological races within our species is arbitrary because there are no major discontinuities in our diversity across the globe. Importantly, genetic data show that currently populous groups are not necessarily reflected by their past abundance, and human history is one of repeated admixture, not maintenance of purity. It is this genetic admixture that has left an imprint on every human disease with a genetic component, including common chronic ones. Thus, it is quite unlikely that the genetic variations underlying our diseases, which represent only a small fraction of our genetic diversity, will vary markedly across humanity.

Aravinda Chakravarti, “Racial profiling in medicine,” Nature Medicine, Volume 19, Number 7 (July 2013), 808. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nm.3254

Mixed Chicks Chat with Professor Rudy Guevarra

Mixed Chicks Chat (Founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Episode: #261: Rudy Guevarra
When: Wednesday, 2012-06-20, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Assistant Professor, Asian Pacific American Studies, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Arizona State University, Tempe

[This is the final episode of Mixed Chicks Chat.]

Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. is an assistant professor of Asian Pacific American Studies at Arizona State University. He is the author of Filipinos in San Diego: Images of America Series, and coeditor of Transnational Crossroads: Remapping the Americas and the Pacific and Crossing Lines: Race and Mixed Race Across the Geohistorical Divide.

His new book, Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego, is a social-historical interpretation of two ethnic groups, one Mexican, the other Filipino, whose paths led both groups to San Diego, California. Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. traces the earliest interactions of both groups with Spanish colonialism to illustrate how these historical ties and cultural bonds laid the foundation for what would become close interethnic relationships and communities in twentieth-century California and the Pacific West Coast. Through racially restrictive covenants, both groups were confined to segregated living spaces along with African Americans, other Asian groups, and a few European immigrant clusters. Within these urban multiracial spaces, Mexicans and Filipinos coalesced to build a world of their own. Mexipino children, living simultaneously in two cultures, have forged a new identity for themselves and their lives are the lens through which these two communities are examined. Using archival sources, oral histories, newspapers, and personal collections and photographs, Guevarra defines the niche that this particular group carved out for itself.

Listen to the episode (00:33:22) here. Download the episode here.

On Martin case, Obama shifts from passion to calm

Associated Press
2013-07-16

Julie Pace

WASHINGTON (AP) – When President Barack Obama first addressed the death of Trayvon Martin last year, he did so passionately, declaring that if he had a son, he would look like the slain 17-year-old. His powerful and personal commentary marked a rare public reflection on race from the nation’s first black president.

But now, with the man who fatally shot Martin acquitted and the burden of any future charges squarely on his own administration, Obama is seeking to inject calm into a case that has inflamed passions, including his own. In a brief statement, the president called Martin’s killing a “tragedy” but implored the public to respect a Florida jury’s decision to clear George Zimmerman, the man charged in the teen’s death.

“I know this case has elicited strong passions. And in the wake of the verdict, I know those passions may be running even higher,” Obama said Sunday. “But we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken.”…

Read the entire article here.

Racial profiling in medicine

Nature Medicine
Volume 19, Number 7 (July 2013)
page 808
DOI: 10.1038/nm.3254

Aravinda Chakravarti, Professor of Medicine
McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine
Johns Hopkins University

Jonathan Kahn, Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age, Columbia University Press, 2012. 28 pp., ISBN: 0231162987

The field of human genetics is moving beyond using genomics as a tool for deeper understanding of human disease pathophysiology to the possibility of translating this knowledge for efficient treatment. A particular emphasis is being placed on Individualized medicine’, promising to tailor treatment based on each of our genomes. This ideal vision, however, can cause unease when our notions of genetic individuality intersect with those of ancestry and race. Jonathan Kahn’s book, Race in a Bottle, is a contemporary medical story born of this nexus. In it, he skillfully uses the story of the drug BiDil, a therapeutic for heart failure marketed specifically for African Americans (but whose use has declined markedly because it provides no unique benefit in comparison to similar drugs), as the backdrop for examining the expanding role of race in medical genomics, even when the same science has called the existence of race into serious doubt.

As Kahn highlights in the book, the innocuous birth of BiDil in 1992 was no predictor of its contorted history. BiDil is a combination of two vasodilators, hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate (H-I), which are presumed to act through the nitric oxide pathway to provide benefit to patients with congestive heart failure. They were combined into one pill for easier administration, although each was already available in generic form. Between 1980 and 1991, two major clinical trials in the United States, involving patients of both European and African ancestries, clearly established that angiotensin-converting-enzyme inhibitors should be the preferred drug for patients with heart failure and that the H-1 combination should be used in individuals who did not benefit from this frontline therapy. Sensing a market opportunity, Medco Research obtained the intellectual property rights to BiDil, demonstrated its bioequivalence to the H-1 formulation and approached the US Food and Drug Administration(FDA) in 1996 for approval to market this ‘new’ drug. The FDA refused, arguing that clinical trials showing the utility of H-1 for heart failure did not meet the stiff criteria for such approval.

There was a suspicion that the nitric oxide response, and heart failure, was somehow different in blacks than in whites. So Jay Cohn, a respected cardiologist and owner of the original BiDil patent, reanalyzed the original clinical trial data to demonstrate that H-1 did work better in blacks than whites, a contention described and contested in the book. This finding not only led to a new patent but prompted its new owner, NitroMed, to conduct a fresh clinical trial in 2001, involving only African-American patients with heart failure, to demonstrate BiDils utility in this group. None of these facts are in doubt. What is doubted, however, is the implicit assumption that BiDil is not useful for white patients, the chronology of key events and the motivations of various actors in medicine, industry and government—factors that morphed an otherwise convenient drug formulation into a race-specific drug. Kahn makes the charge that “BiDil was not about personalizing medicine; it was about exploiting race to obtain cheaper, quicker FDA approval for a drug.”…

…Genetic analysis strongly suggests that early humans first arose in Africa and emerged out of Africa only ~100,000 years ago, a fairly recent development, evolutionarily speaking, which explains why we are all closely related. Any classification of biological races within our species is arbitrary because there are no major discontinuities in our diversity across the globe. Importantly, genetic data show that currently populous groups are not necessarily reflected by their past abundance, and human history is one of repeated admixture, not maintenance of purity. It is this genetic admixture that has left an imprint on every human disease with a genetic component, including common chronic ones. Thus, it is quite unlikely that the genetic variations underlying our diseases, which represent only a small fraction of our genetic diversity, will vary markedly across humanity…

Read or purchase the article here.

New York’s Mixed-Race Riot

The New York Times
2013-07-15

Lisa Orr, Professor of English
Utica College, Utica, New York

When draft rioters set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York on the night of July 13, 1863, one man in the crowd called out, “If there is a man among you with a heart within him, come and help these poor children!” Incensed, the crowd turned on him and almost dismembered him. But he had distracted them, enabling the orphans to escape.

The rioters were Irish. So was the man who sacrificed himself. And chances are good that at least some of those orphans were part Irish, too.

In the years before the Civil War, Irish immigrants to Northern cities inhabited the same slums as free blacks, worked alongside them in the worst jobs and often married them. Antebellum New York held no large, specifically black neighborhoods. Many slaves freed in New York’s gradual emancipation settled in the Sixth Ward, along with other low-income people of Irish, German and Jewish descent. Those neighborhoods were unified mainly by the kind of work residents performed: cartmen, corn sellers and prostitutes all plied their wares around the infamous Five Points. With the rapid influx of immigrants during the famine years of the 1840s, the majority of the neighborhood became Irish. But the hardscrabble, interracial lifestyle remained…

…Harmonious or not, most mixed-race marriages in New York were between Irish women and black men and mulatto children were common. The year 1850 saw a new racial category, mulatto, added to the census, to account for their offspring. When the draft came, during a heat wave in the bleak middle of the Civil War, the mob targeted mixed-race households, especially those containing Irish women who had children with African-American men.

Southerners used the threat of amalgamation to undermine Northern support for the war. A United States representative from a border state, arguing that Republicans favored total race equality, described “a ball held at Five Points in the city of New York, where white women and negroes mingled `in sweet confusion in the mazy dance.’” (His opponent, Francis W. Kellogg, Republican of Michigan, pointed out that Five Points was within the strongest Democratic ward in the city.)

Two New York City Democrats invented the term miscegenation during the 1864 election campaign. “The present war … is a war for the negro,” argued a faked Republican pamphlet, designed to discredit Lincoln. “Let it go on until … the great truth shall be declared in our public documents and announced in the messages of our President, that it is desirable the white man should marry the black woman and the white woman the black man.” One subhead was entitled, “The Irish and Negroes First to Comingle.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race’

The Good Men Project
2011-01-08

Steve Locke, Associate Professor of Art Education
Massachusetts College of Art and Design

Tom Matlack asked his friend Steve Locke to write for us about race. He declined. Here’s why.

Dear Tom,

Thanks so much for asking me to contribute something to GMP. It has been exciting to see how this project has gone from an idea to a reality.

As much as I enjoy reading GMP and as much as I’d love to be a part of it, I don’t think I am able to write about race.

It’s not that I don’t know anything about it. I was on a social media site and I was looking at the post one of my friends shared. He was lamenting the fact that Psychology Today had printed an article saying that black women are “objectively” less attractive than other women. Others of his friends posted on his “wall,” saying that attractiveness was relative and that it was based on symmetry of features and the like. I posted a “sigh” and said that it was sickmaking, in 2011, that someone would even create a study to investigate humans in such a way, that the creation of the study was evidence of a bias, and the notion that peoples’ “tastes” and “preferences” are not affected by 300+ years of racialized bias was ignorant. Also, I have been told that black people are somehow deficient for most of my 48 years and that Psychology Today was passing this crap off as research was sad…

…So you see, it’s not that I don’t know anything about the subject.

Tom, I don’t want to talk about race because it gives weight to a fiction that was created to oppress. It has no basis in biology and is a social construction in this country that was engineered to maintain access to free labor. The fiction created by race distorts the reality in which we live.

Plus, as a black person, I am called on often to speak for my “race.” I can never give an opinion without it being assumed to be that of a multitude. So when a white person asks me my opinion about an issue that can be related to race, I suspect that there is going to be a moment later when that white person is going to say, “Well, I have a black friend, Steve, who says…” And that will be the black authority on the subject.

Black people can’t talk to white people about race anymore. There’s really nothing left to say. There are libraries full of books, interviews, essays, lectures, and symposia. If people want to learn about their own country and its history, it is not incumbent on black people to talk to them about it. It is not our responsibility to educate them about it. Plus whenever white people want to talk about race, they never want to talk about themselves. There needs to be discussion among people who think of themselves as white. They need to unpack that language, that history, that social position and see what it really offers them, and what it takes away from them. As James Baldwin said, “As long as you think that you are white, there is no hope for you.”…

Read the entire article here.