racialization is allowed to proceed unchallenged despite its inherent contradictory claims that race is both biologically meaningful and meaningless.

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Why and how race became the key to enslaveability was a question posed and resolved using myriad strategies across the early modern Atlantic as traders and setters constructed paradigms that enabled the exchange of human commodities and the enslaved constructed paradigms that enabled their response to the New World order. Children born to parents who occupied positions increasingly seen as racially distinct posed political, ideological, and economic problems. Their indeterminacy needed to be fixed. Recall the preamble: “Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman shall be slave or free.” The word doubts names mixed-race children as excess, as both circulating and unregulated, and ultimately as a source of chaos.²³ The law imposes order as it both configures those children as property and asserts its right to do so. It also points to a very specific legal case involving Elizabeth Keye (to which I will turn below) that compelled the Virginia legislators to make explicit the implicit logic that regulated the slave markets and the probate courts across Atlantic slave societies. In the context of a nascent colonial setting, then, these reproducing women and their chaotic children were grounds on which claims to sovereign authority rested.

Jennifer L. Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Volume 22, Number 1 (55) (March 3, 2018), 6. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-4378888.

racialization is allowed to proceed unchallenged despite its inherent contradictory claims that race is both biologically meaningful and meaningless.

What is most disturbing about the paradoxical use of race is the effect it may have on the trajectory of ongoing human genetic variation research. By making the moral argument that race-based therapeutics address injustice in health care, and at the same time maintaining that genetics research will ultimately eliminate the need for racial categories, racialization is allowed to proceed unchallenged despite its inherent contradictory claims that race is both biologically meaningful and meaningless. Rather than serving as a way station, the use of race is allowed to become more fully embedded in the production of scientific knowledge and medical practice.

Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, “Racializing Drug Design: Implications of Pharmacogenomics for Health Disparities,” American Journal of Public Health, Volume 95, Number 12 (December 2005): 2137. http://dx.doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2005.068676.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2012 at 00:59Z and is filed under Excerpts/Quotes, Health/Medicine/Genetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Mixed Race Studies

racialization is allowed to proceed unchallenged despite its inherent contradictory claims that race is both biologically meaningful and meaningless.

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