Mixed Race Studies

Hidden in Plain Sight — Reconsidering the Use of Race Correction in Clinical Algorithms

The New England Journal of Medicine
Volume 2020, Number 383
pages 874-882
2020-08-27 (published on 2020-06-17, at NEJM.org.)
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMms2004740

Darshali A. Vyas, M.D., Resident Physician
Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts
Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Leo G. Eisenstein, M.D., Resident Physician
New York University Langone Medical Center, New York, New York

David S. Jones, M.D., Ph.D., A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine
Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts
Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts

Physicians still lack consensus on the meaning of race. When the Journal took up the topic in 2003 with a debate about the role of race in medicine, one side argued that racial and ethnic categories reflected underlying population genetics and could be clinically useful.¹ Others held that any small benefit was outweighed by potential harms that arose from the long, rotten history of racism in medicine.² Weighing the two sides, the accompanying Perspective article concluded that though the concept of race was “fraught with sensitivities and fueled by past abuses and the potential for future abuses,” race-based medicine still had potential: “it seems unwise to abandon the practice of recording race when we have barely begun to understand the architecture of the human genome.”³

The next year, a randomized trial showed that a combination of hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate reduced mortality due to heart failure among patients who identified themselves as black. The Food and Drug Administration granted a race-specific indication for that product, BiDil, in 2005.⁴ Even though BiDil’s ultimate commercial failure cast doubt on race-based medicine, it did not lay the approach to rest. Prominent geneticists have repeatedly called on physicians to take race seriously,^5,6 while distinguished social scientists vehemently contest these calls.^7,8

Our understanding of race and human genetics has advanced considerably since 2003, yet these insights have not led to clear guidelines on the use of race in medicine. The result is ongoing conflict between the latest insights from population genetics and the clinical implementation of race. For example, despite mounting evidence that race is not a reliable proxy for genetic difference, the belief that it is has become embedded, sometimes insidiously, within medical practice. One subtle insertion of race into medicine involves diagnostic algorithms and practice guidelines that adjust or “correct” their outputs on the basis of a patient’s race or ethnicity. Physicians use these algorithms to individualize risk assessment and guide clinical decisions. By embedding race into the basic data and decisions of health care, these algorithms propagate race-based medicine. Many of these race-adjusted algorithms guide decisions in ways that may direct more attention or resources to white patients than to members of racial and ethnic minorities…

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Becoming American in Creole New Orleans, 1896–1949

Louisiana State University Press
July 2021
224 pages
5.50 x 8.50 inches
no illustrations
Hardcover ISBN: 9780807175477

Darryl Barthé Jr., Lecturer in History
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Extensive scholarship has emerged within the last twenty-five years on the role of Louisiana Creoles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, yet academic work on the history of Creoles in New Orleans after the Civil War and into the twentieth century remains sparse. Darryl Barthé Jr.’s Becoming American in Creole New Orleans moves the history of New Orleans’ Creole community forward, documenting the process of “becoming American” through Creoles’ encounters with Anglo-American modernism. Barthé tracks this ethnic transformation through an interrogation of New Orleans’s voluntary associations and social sodalities, as well as its public and parochial schools, where Creole linguistic distinctiveness faded over the twentieth century because of English-only education and the establishment of Anglo-American economic hegemony.

Barthé argues that despite the existence of ethnic repression, the transition from Creole to American identity was largely voluntary as Creoles embraced the economic opportunities afforded to them through learning English. “Becoming American” entailed the adoption of a distinctly American language and a distinctly American racialized caste system. Navigating that caste system was always tricky for Creoles, who had existed in between French and Spanish color lines that recognized them as a group separate from Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians even though they often shared kinship ties with all of these groups. Creoles responded to the pressures associated with the demands of the American caste system by passing as white people (completely or situationally) or, more often, redefining themselves as Blacks.

Becoming American in Creole New Orleans offers a critical comparative analysis of “Creolization” and “Americanization,” social processes that often worked in opposition to each another during the nineteenth century and that would continue to frame the limits of Creole identity and cultural expression in New Orleans until the mid-twentieth century. As such, it offers intersectional engagement with subjects that have historically fallen under the purview of sociology, anthropology, and critical theory, including discourses on whiteness, métissage/métisajé, and critical mixed-race theory.

2020 Census Statistics Highlight Local Population Changes and Nation’s Racial and Ethnic Diversity

United States Census Bureau
2021-08-12
Release Number CB21-CN.55

U.S. Census Bureau Delivers Data for States to Begin Redistricting Efforts

AUG. 12, 2021 — The U.S. Census Bureau today released additional 2020 Census results showing an increase in the population of U.S. metro areas compared to a decade ago. In addition, these once-a-decade results showed the nation’s diversity in how people identify their race and ethnicity.

“We are excited to reach this milestone of delivering the first detailed statistics from the 2020 Census,” said acting Census Bureau Director Ron Jarmin. “We appreciate the public’s patience as Census Bureau staff worked diligently to process these data and ensure it meets our quality standards.”

These statistics, which come from the 2020 Census Redistricting Data (Public Law 94-171) Summary File, provide the first look at populations for small areas and include information on Hispanic origin, race, age 18 and over, housing occupancy and group quarters. They represent where people were living as of April 1, 2020, and are available for the nation, states and communities down to the block level.

The Census Bureau also released data visualizations, America Counts stories, and videos to help illustrate and explain these data. These resources are available on the 2020 Census results page. Advanced users can access these data on the FTP site…

…Race and ethnicity highlights:

• The White population remained the largest race or ethnicity group in the United States, with 204.3 million people identifying as White alone. Overall, 235.4 million people reported White alone or in combination with another group. However, the White alone population decreased by 8.6% since 2010.
• The Two or More Races population (also referred to as the Multiracial population) has changed considerably since 2010. The Multiracial population was measured at 9 million people in 2010 and is now 33.8 million people in 2020, a 276% increase.
• The “in combination” multiracial populations for all race groups accounted for most of the overall changes in each racial category…

Read the entire news release here.

Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753-1833

Oxford University Press
2002-12-12
248 pages
9.04 x 6.84 x 0.9 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0195157178
DOI: 10.1093/0195157176.001.0001

John Saillant, Professor of English and History
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan

In the second half of the eighteenth century, British and American men and women began criticizing the slave trade and slavery as violations of the principles of Christianity, natural rights, and political security. A black spokesman for abolitionism was Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833), one of the first African Americans to publish. Haynes served as a minuteman in the American War of Independence and began writing against the slave trade and slavery in the 1770s. After ordination in a Congregational church, he assumed a pulpit in Rutland, Vermont, where he became a leading controversialist, defender of the theology of Jonathan Edwards, and interpreter of republican ideology. He was dismissed from his pulpit in 1818, because his affiliation to the Federalist Party and his opposition to the War of 1812 offended his congregation. The last 15 years of his life were characterized by pessimism about the ability of Americans of the early republic to defeat racism as well as by a defense of Puritanism, which he believed could guide the creation of a free, harmonious, and integrated society.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. A Further Liberty in 1776
• 2. Republicanism Black and White
• 3. The Divine Providence of Slavery and Freedom
• 4. Making and Breaking the Revolutionary Covenant
• 5. American Genesis, American Captivity

‘The Vice President’s Black Wife’: New Book by IU History Professor

Bloom Magazine
Bloomington, Indiana
2021-04-28

Peter Dorfman

Blue Spring Farm, where Julia lived. This is the last standing slave building on the property, likely used as a kitchen. Courtesy photo

Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers regards her work as an academic focused on slavery and Black women’s history as a “labor of recovery.” Her subjects, many illiterate, left little behind.

Myers’ second book, The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn, due out in 2022, focuses on the life of Julia Chinn, an enslaved woman in the early 1800s, on the Kentucky estate of Richard Mentor Johnson. Chinn had two children by Johnson, to whom she was married for 23 years. Because Chinn was Black, the marriage was not legal, but Johnson publicly treated her as his spouse. Chinn was literate, and Johnson put her in charge of the plantation (including oversight of the enslaved laborers) when he was away from home. “She was his wife in every sense,” Myers asserts…

Read the entire article here.

How I Learned to Love Myself as a Black Jew

alma.
2020-06-16

Aviva Davis
Oakland, California

While I am so proud to be a queer Jewish woman of color, it has taken an excruciating amount of work to reach this point.

As a child, I always knew I was Black, but I didn’t know what that meant for me as an individual. I certainly didn’t know how my Blackness intersected with my other identities, including my Jewishness. I didn’t even realize, when one of my friends asked me how I could believe in God but not Jesus, that my religion and my race were informing her question.

Cut to almost 10 years later, and I’m coming out of the closet. I am Black, I am Jewish, I am queer, and on top of all that, I’m a woman, too. Someone once said I decided to play the game of life on “Expert Mode.” I couldn’t help but laugh at such an accurate analogy, because although I am so proud to be a queer Jewish woman of color, it has taken an excruciating amount of work to reach this point and fully love myself…

Read the entire article here.

One of [Richard] Lewontin’s pathbreaking works was to find out how much genetic diversity exists within species. This was at a time when we did not know how many genes humans had. Lewontin’s inspired guess was 20,000, far smaller than what most biologists thought then and remarkably close to what is known today. Most biologists then also believed that races had significant biological differences, which was one of the reasons why they thought that there was a much larger number of genes carrying different traits. Lewontin and geneticist John Hubby used a technique, protein gel electrophoresis, developed by Hubby, to quantify the genetic diversity in fruit flies. At that time, fruit flies were the favorite target for testing genetic theories in the laboratory. This pathbreaking exercise traced evolution at the species level to changes at the molecular level—a foundation for the field of molecular evolution—using statistical methods. The result was startling. Contrary to what most biologists believed, the exercise showed a surprising amount of genetic diversity within a given population and further revealed that evolution led to stable and diverse populations within a species. Later on, Lewontin used this method on human blood groups, to show that the result of stable genetic diversity held true for humans as well. The other result of the human blood group study was that it showed that 85.4 percent of the genetic diversity in humans was found within a population, and only 6.3 percent between ‘races.’ Race was not a biological construct but a social one.

Prabir Purkayastha/Globetrotter, “The great scientific crusader who debunked the biological myths about race,” AlterNet, August 5, 2021. https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/richard-lewontin/.

Willa Brown: Pioneer for Female & African American Aviation

Civil Air Patrol
2020-03-30

Lt. Col. Carlos Montague, MDWG Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Officer
Maryland Wing

“Willa Beatrice Brown, a 31-year-old Negro American, serves her country by training pilots for the U.S. Army Air Forces.” – NARA – 535717 (circa 1941-1945)

CAP recognizes Women’s History Month with a profile of aviator and civil rights pioneer Willa Brown.

There are many pioneering names in African American aviation. Figures like Eugene Bullard, Bessie Coleman, Charles Alfred Anderson, John Forsythe, Thomas Allen, Janet Harmon Bragg and Herman Banning all set out against the odds of social and racial injustice, to achieve excellence.

And then there’s Willa Beatrice Brown Chappell, a pioneer for both women’s equality and civil rights.

Brown was born in Glasgow, Kentucky, in 1906 to a biracial family with a Native American mother and an African American father. Understanding that education was important, Brown graduated from the Indiana State Normal School, now Indiana State University, majoring in commerce and earning her bachelor’s degree in business.

Later she would receive a master’s degree in business administration from Northwestern University and became a teacher at Roosevelt High School in Gary, Indiana. Eventually she moved to Chicago and became a social worker.

“Any time you are a first in anything, that’s a challenge. Willa Brown was the first African American woman in the United States to get a private pilot license, get licensed and certified as a mechanic, and earn a commercial pilot’s license,” said the Rev. Sandra Campbell, a former manager with the Federal Aviation Administration…

Read the entire article here.

Aaron’s Book

The Devil’s Tale: Dispatches from the Davin M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
2021-07-27

Blake Hill-Saya

Above: Portrait in oils of Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore painted by his daughter Lyda Moore Merrick. Located in the North Carolina Collection, Stanford L. Warren Branch of the Durham County Library, Durham, N.C.

Too often we relegate the lives of our ancestors to the basket of nostalgia. We think that because our modern times have dressed us up in different clothes and surrounded us with technology that the lives and struggles of our ancestors can’t speak with any real directness to ours. It is easy in the rush and rattle of the present to allow seasoned historians to define us in macrocosm while overlooking the importance of our own more granular history; a thread waiting to be pulled in the warp and woof of who we think we are. Libraries and historical archives exist to help us pull that thread and expand our understanding of history and our place in it.

Eight years ago, I was chosen by the Durham Colored Library board of directors, led by chairperson C. Eileen Watts Welch, to follow my own ancestral thread and write a biography of my great- great-grandfather, Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore. The dream of this historical biography of Durham’s first Black physician far predates my involvement; it actually predates me. Dr. Moore’s daughter, my great-grandmother, Lyda Moore Merrick, dreamed of a book about her Papa. My grandfather, Dr. Charles DeWitt Watts, a legendary surgeon and healthcare activist in his own right, also dreamed of this book. His dream inspired his daughter, C. Eileen Watts Welch, to make this biography a reality. The Durham Colored Library, an organization founded by Dr. Moore himself in 1913 and now a non-profit focused on uplifting Black narratives, sponsored the project…

Read the entire article here.

The great scientific crusader who debunked the biological myths about race

AlterNet
2021-08-05

Prabir Purkayastha/Globetrotter

On July 4, Richard Lewontin, the dialectical biologist, Marxist and activist, died at the age of 92, just three days after the death of his wife of more than 70 years, Mary Jane. He was one of the founders of modern biology who brought together three different disciplines—statistics, molecular biology and evolutionary biology—that mark the discipline today. In doing so, he not only battled crude racism masquerading as science, but also helped shed light on what science really is. In this sense, he belongs to the rare group of scientists who are equally at home in the laboratory and while talking about science and ideology at a philosophical level. Lewontin is a popular exponent of what science is, and more pertinently, what it is not.

Lewontin always harked back to what being radical means: going back to fundamentals in deriving a viewpoint. This method is important, as it makes radical inquiry a powerful tool in science, compared to lazier ways of relating positions to certain class viewpoints. What is the relation between genes and race, class, or gender? Does social superiority spring from superior genes, or from biological differences between the sexes? As a Marxist and activist, Lewontin believed that we need to fight at both levels: to expose class, race and gender stereotypes as a reflection of power within society, and also at the level of radical science, meaning from the fundamentals of scientific theory and data…

Read the entire article here.