Multiracial Health Risk Claims |
The claim that persons identifying as multiracial suffer health risks due to the lack of a federal multiracial category is without foundation. On March 1 and 2, 1993, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry conducted their Workshop on the Use of Race and Ethnicity in Public Health Surveillance. One of the general principles agreed upon by workshop participants was that “the concept of race as assessed in public health surveillance is a social measure. Biological or genetic reference, or both, should be made with extreme caution.” Clearly, the call for instituting a multiracial category for purposes of disease screening is medically insupportable. According to epidemiologists and workshop participants Robert Hahn and Donna Stroup, medical screening by biological race is not desired since “what is measured as ‘race’ in public health surveillance is not a biological characteristic, but rather a self-perception for which phenotypic characteristics may be one among many criteria… Even were distinctive biological markers of race determined, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to assess such markers in common surveillance processes and in the census.”
Rainier Spencer, Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, (Boulder: Westview Press,1999), 158.
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