Mixed Race Studies

Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics

University of Minnesota Press
February 2014
304 pages
29 b&w photos
6 x 9
Cloth/jacket ISBN: 978-0-8166-8357-4

Lundy Braun, Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence and Professor of Medical Science and Africana Studies
Brown University

In the antebellum South, plantation physicians used a new medical device—the spirometer—to show that lung volume and therefore vital capacity were supposedly less in black slaves than in white citizens. At the end of the Civil War, a large study of racial difference employing the spirometer appeared to confirm the finding, which was then applied to argue that slaves were unfit for freedom. What is astonishing is that this example of racial thinking is anything but a historical relic.

In Breathing Race into the Machine, science studies scholar Lundy Braun traces the little-known history of the spirometer to reveal the social and scientific processes by which medical instruments have worked to naturalize racial and ethnic differences, from Victorian Britain to today. Routinely a factor in in clinical diagnoses, preemployment physicals, and disability estimates, spirometers are often “race corrected,” typically reducing normal values for African Americans by 15 percent.

An unsettling account of the pernicious effects of racial thinking that divides people along genetic lines, Breathing Race into the Machine helps us understand how race enters into science and shapes medical research and practice.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Measuring Vital Capacity
• 1. “Inventing” the Spirometer: Working-Class Bodies in Victorian England
• 2. Black Lungs and White Lungs: The Science of White Supremacy in the Nineteenth-Century United States
• 3. Filling the Lungs with Air: The Rise of Physical Culture in America
• 4. Progress and Race: Vitality in Turn-of-the-Century Britain
• 5. Globalizing Spirometry: The “Racial Factor” in Scientific Medicine
• 6. Adjudicating Disability in the Industrial Worker
• 7. Diagnosing Silicosis: Physiological Testing in South African Gold Mines
• Epilogue: How Race Takes Root
• Notes
• Index

Are You My Cousin?

The New York Times
2014-01-31

A. J. Jacobs

I love my family, but I’m glad I don’t have to buy birthday presents for all my cousins. I’d be bankrupt within a week.

My family tree sprawls far and wide. It’s not even a tree, really. More like an Amazonian forest. At last count, it was up to nearly 75 million family members. In fact, there’s a good chance you’re on some far-flung branch of my tree, and if you aren’t, you probably will be soon. It’s not really my tree. It’s our tree.

The previously staid world of genealogy is in the midst of a controversial revolution. A handful of websites have turbocharged family trees with a collaborative, Wikipedia-like approach. You upload your family tree, and then you can merge your tree with another tree that has a cousin in common. After that, you merge and merge again. This creates vast webs with hundreds of thousands — or millions — of cousins by blood and marriage, provided you think the links are accurate. One site, Geni, has what it calls the World Family Tree, with about 75 million relatives in more than 160 countries and all seven continents, including Antarctica…

…My journey started a few months ago. I got an email from a stranger named Jules Feldman who lives on a kibbutz in Israel. He had read one of my books. He wrote: “We have in our database about 80,000 relatives of yours. You are an eighth cousin of my wife who, in my opinion, is a fine lady.” I’m also, he said, related to Karl Marx and several European aristocrats.

The email had a bit of a creepy National Security Agency privacy-invasion vibe. But it was also, in a strange way, profoundly comforting. There I was, alone in my office, connected to 80,000 other humans. In a world where extended families lose touch as they spread across time zones, this seemed remarkable…

…Last year, Yaniv Erlich, a fellow at the Whitehead Institute at M.I.T., presented preliminary results of his project FamiLinx, which uses Big Data from Geni’s tree to track the distribution of traits. His work has yielded a fascinating picture of human migration.

Second, a megatree might just make the world a kinder place. I notice that I feel more warmly about people I know are distant cousins. I recently figured out that I’m an 11th cousin four times removed of the TV personality Judge Judy Sheindlin. I’d always found her grating. But when I discovered our connection, I softened. She’s probably a sweetheart underneath the bluster.

That’s a trivial example, I know. But imagine how someone from the Ku Klux Klan might feel when he connects with his African-American relatives. They won’t be singing Kumbaya, but could it nudge him toward more tolerance? I hope so…

Read the entire article here.

Is ruling in the genes? All presidents bar one are directly descended from a medieval English king

The Daily Mail
London, England, United Kingdom
2012-08-04

Snejana Farberov

What do Barack Obama, Thomas Jefferson, George W. Bush and the other past U.S. presidents have in common? Besides holding the coveted title of commander-in-chief, it appears that all of them but one are cousins.

The remarkable discovery was made by 12-year-old BridgeAnne d’Avignon, of Salinas, California, who created a ground-breaking family tree that connected 42 of 43 U.S. presidents to one common, and rather unexpected, ancestor: King John of England.

‘They all have the trait of wanting power,’ d’Avignon told the station WFMY.

King John, also known as John ‘Lackland’, is renowned for signing the Magna Carta in 1215, which limited the monarch’s power and helped form the British Parliament.

D’Avignon, a seventh-grader at Monte Vista Christian School in Watsonville, started the project in hopes of tracing back her own bloodline in France, but somewhere along the way she decided to take her genealogical quest to the highest level.

In order to create the family tree, the 12-year-old spent months scouring through over 500,000 names in search of the ‘presidential Adam.’…

…The teen also found out that she is the 18th cousin of President Obama. She even wrote to her new-found relative a letter to share her findings with him…

Read the entire article here.