Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Bordering Community: Reclaiming Ambiguity as a Transgressive Landscape of Knowledge

    Bordering Community: Reclaiming Ambiguity as a Transgressive Landscape of Knowledge

    Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work
    Volume 27, Number 2 (May 2012)
    pages 167-179
    DOI: 10.1177/0886109912443957

    Kimberly D. Hudson
    School of Social Work
    University of Washington, Seattle

    Critically investigating the concept of community, this article explores some of the ideological and epistemological frameworks that have defined both the potentialities and the limitations of community as a liberatory and/or liberated space. This article sheds light on how ambiguously identified, bodied, and placed people are affected by cultures and systems of oppression in ways that create unique tensions with community and generate knowledge of the meaning of community itself. The major foci include the transgression, occupation, and policing of racial, gendered, and sexualized borders. In the final section, emerging questions, reflections, and implications for the field of social welfare are discussed.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Lecturer Hettie V. Williams to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

    Lecturer Hettie V. Williams to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

    Mixed Chicks Chat (Founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
    Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
    Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
    Episode: #257: Hettie V. Williams
    When: Wednesday, 2012-05-23, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

    Hettie V. Williams, Lecturer of African American History
    Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

    Hettie Williams’ research and teaching interests include: recent American history; the 1960s; the history of African Americans; race; identity; studies in the African Diaspora; and gender. She has taught survey courses in U.S. history, world history, western civilization, and upper division courses on the history of African Americans. She has published various entries and essays for several volumes and a text on the American civil rights movement titled We Shall Overcome to We Shall Overrun: The Collapse of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Revolt (1962-1968). Currently, she teaches as a lecturer of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University. She has recently completed an edited volume titled Color Struck: Essays on Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective and is currently working on an edited volume titled, Race and the Obama Phenomenon: toward a More Perfect Union? (University of Mississippi Press) with the renown race scholar G. Reginald Daniel.

  • Identity Formation in Biracial Female Authors’ Narratives of Passing: Transgressing Racial and Sexual Boundaries in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

    Identity Formation in Biracial Female Authors’ Narratives of Passing: Transgressing Racial and Sexual Boundaries in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

    Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
    September 2008
    150 pages

    Stamatia Koutsimani

    A Dissertation submitted to the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.

    The complex presence of the mulatta figure in American cultural history is mostly reflected in twentieth-century narratives of passing where the light-skinned enough to pass Negress becomes a vehicle for challenging both the color line and the very notions of blackness and whiteness. Contrary to nineteenth-century whites’ stereotypical representations of the “tragic mulatta” as a victim of her divided racial heritage, the use of the passing mulatta by twentieth-century biracial female authors has served to criticize racial as well as gender essentialisms. In this respect, this thesis will focus on Nella Larsen’s Passing, published in 1929 and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, published in 1998, trying to show how the changing representation of the passing mulatta characters reflects the gradual reversal of the tragic mulatta myth and reveals the interconnections among race, gender, class and sexuality in different sociopolitical contexts. By examining the authors’ use of the passing mulatta as a trope through which to question the dominant political and racial ideology of their time, the thesis will attempt to explain how the biracial female characters’ transgression of racial and gender boundaries contributes to the understanding of identity as constructed and performed. More specifically, the reading of Passing and Caucasia will be based on Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity and Catherine Rottenberg’s theoretical discussion of race performativity. In addition, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, which is central to Valerie Smith’s notion of black feminism, will play a major role in the analysis of the two works.

    Based on a comparative analysis of the novels, the thesis will draw attention to the central mulatta characters’ search for racial and gender identities, with a view to tracing potential changes in the authors’ employment of the passing theme in the increasingly multicultural US racial context. Moreover, by highlighting the passing novels’ difference from stereotypical depictions of mulatta figures, the thesis aims at responding to questions regarding racial dualism and ongoing debates over mixed race identity. On the whole, it will reveal that the biracial female authors’ representations of the permeable borders between identity categories serve to challenge dominant cultural understandings of racial and gender differences which have long contributed to the mulatta figure’s liminal status in American society.

    Read the entire thesis here.

  • Sequencing the Trellis: The Production of Race in the New Human Genomics

    Sequencing the Trellis: The Production of Race in the New Human Genomics

    Brown University
    December 2003
    185 pages

    Brady Dunklee, Executive Director
    ATRAVES US

    In partial completion of the requirements for honors.

    Note on the Title: “Trellis” refers to an analogy that NHGRI director Francis Collins uses to describe race and human evolution, emphasizing mixture between “races,” in opposition to evolutionary trees which emphasize divergence. “Sequencing” refers to the main activity of recent genomic research, and is meant to suggest both this activity and the differentiation of groups of people, which is the subject of this thesis.

    Human genomic science has emerged in the past decade as a powerful new biological field, combining molecular and population genetics with advanced information technologies, allowing DNA sequencing and analysis in a rapid, high throughput fashion. In addition to producing a vast quantity of scientific data, the Human Genome Project and other efforts in human genomics have produced claims about the social implications of their work. The result has been a complex expert discourse on the nature of the human.

    A particularly rich subset of this discourse has addressed the meanings, use and reality of race and ethnicity in light of new genomic knowledge. A great variety of positions on racial and ethnic difference have been put forth, best known of which is the contention that race is biologically meaningless.

    This thesis shows that this claim is not the whole story. Genomic discourse has, since its beginnings, deployed and produced race in a constant, if variegated manner. A “technology of difference” has been produced, a set of terms, meanings, and ways in which knowledge is structured and authorized, whose collective action is to differentiate people racially and ethnically.

    This thesis examines this technology of difference, showing that genomics is in fact making race, and demonstrating some of the ways in which it does so. My approach is an analysis of discourse, which addresses terminology, formal configurations and epistemology in the literatures produced by genomic scientists. The dominant characteristic in this discourse is instability. Meanings, forms, and claims shift and change on a variety of levels.

    This thesis shows that surprising patterns can be seen in this instability, and that instability is itself a constitutive factor giving strength and cohesion to the genomic production of human racial and ethnic difference.

    I suggest, further, that now is a crucial time for interventions to be made in the genomics of human difference. Those who want an end to race, or who want positive, livable transformations of race, can find both opportunity and danger in these new differentiations.

    Table of Contents

    • Title Page
    • Dedication
    • Acknowledgements
    • Table of Contents
    • Table of Figures
    • Inscriptions
    • Thesis Statement…………………………………………………………………
    • Introduction……………………………………………………………………………
      • I. Unifications
      • II. Divisions
      • III. Contexts
      • IV. Materials and Methods
    • Chapter 1: Categories and Keywords in the Genomics of Race
      • I. Transferals
      • II. “Race” and “Ethnicity”
      • III. Populations, Groups and Communities
      • IV. “Minorities” and “Inclusion”
      • VI. Chapter Summary
    • Chapter 2: Formal Configurations: Nested Proxies & Perspectival Phasing
      • I. Theoretical Framework
      • II. Making Difference Within Race
      • III. Making Difference Around Race
    • Chapter 3: Instability and Discourse
      • I. Reading and Writing
      • II. Articulate Instability
    • Chapter 4: Epistemology……………………………………………………………
      • I. Definitions and Methods
      • II. One Drop
      • III. White Normativity
      • IV. Racial Essentialism
      • V. Three Spaces
    • Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………
    • Bibliography

    Table of Figures

    • Figure I-1— Craig Venter of Celera Genomics, left, shakes hands with Francis Collins of NHGRI, right, at a ceremony at the White House, June 2000.
    • Figure I-2 — Cover of Nature, February 15, 2001. The mosaic includes the faces of Mendel, Watson and the Beatles.
    • Figure I-3 — Stills from “Exploring Our Molecular Selves,” a film produced by NHGRI as part of a free educational toolkit for high school students.
    • Figure 1-1 — “Populations” and Race: “Not everyone’s smiling. A plan to study haplotypes in these populations is prompting angry words.”
    • Figure 2-1 — Diagram of racial schema in Risch, et al. (2002).
    • Figure 2-2 — Perspectival Differentiation in Collins (2003).
    • Figure 4-1 — One Drop Rule and Founding Populations in genomics.

    …At first glance, the appearance of these types of anti-race critiques appears to frustrate an attempt to theorize a mainstream of genomic ideas about race and ethnicity—they simply appear contradictory. It is my contention that they are contradictory on significant levels, but that they share a terminology, a set of discursive patterns, and a certain epistemology that allow them to resolve such contradictions, and unite them in making race.

    Even when the term race is used as a “misconception,” race is configured in new ways with respect to genomic knowledge. Race is produced, as an entity that is purely mythical and controverted by this expert discourse. Race is made by genomicists into something new which is not genomic…

    Read the entire thesis here.

  • The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People

    The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People

    University Press of Florida
    1996-09-14
    352 pages
    6 x 9
    Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-1451-7

    Kenneth W. Porter, Professor of History Emeritus
    University of Oregon

    Edited by:

    Alcione M. Amos, Librarian

    Thomas P. Senter, M.D.

    This story of a remarkable people, the Black Seminoles, and their charismatic leader, Chief John Horse, chronicles their heroic struggle for freedom.

    Beginning with the early 1800s, small groups of fugitive slaves living in Florida joined the Seminole Indians (an association that thrived for decades on reciprocal respect and affection). Kenneth Porter traces their fortunes and exploits as they moved across the country and attempted to live first beyond the law, then as loyal servants of it.

    He examines the Black Seminole role in the bloody Second Seminole War, when John Horse and his men distinguished themselves as fierce warriors, and their forced removal to the Oklahoma Indian Territory in the 1840s, where John’s leadership ability emerged.

    The account includes the Black Seminole exodus in the 1850s to Mexico, their service as border troops for the Mexican government, and their return to Texas in the 1870s, where many of the men scouted for the U.S. Army. Members of their combat-tested unit, never numbering more than 50 men at a time, were awarded four of the sixteen Medals of Honor received by the several thousand Indian scouts in the West.

    Porter’s interviews with John Horse’s descendants and acquaintances in the 1940s and 1950s provide eyewitness accounts. When Alcione Amos and Thomas Senter took up the project in the 1980s, they incorporated new information that had since come to light about John Horse and his people.

    A powerful and stirring story, The Black Seminoles will appeal especially to readers interested in black history, Indian history, Florida history, and U.S. military history.

  • Black Indian Slave Narratives

    Black Indian Slave Narratives

    John F. Blair, Publisher
    2004
    200 pages
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-89587-298-2

    Patrick Minges

    Few people realize that Native Americans were enslaved right alongside the African Americans in this country. Fewer still realize that many Native Americans owned African Americans and Native Americans from other tribes. Recently, historians have determined that of the 2,193 interviews with former slaves that were collected by the Federal Writers’ Project, 12 percent contain some reference to the interviewees’ being related to or descended from Native Americans. In addition, many of the interviewees make references to their Native American owners. In Black Indian Slave Narratives, Patrick Minges offers the most absorbing of these firsthand testimonies about African American and Native American relationships in the 19th century.

    The selections include an interview with Felix Lindsey, who was born in Kentucky of Mvskoke/African heritage and who served as one of the buffalo soldiers who rounded up Geronimo. Chaney Mack, whose father was a “full-blood African” from Liberia and whose mother was a “pure-blood Indian,” gives an in-depth look at both sides of her cultural heritage, including her mother’s visions based on the “night the stars fell” over Alabama. There are stories of Native Americans taken by “nigger stealers,” who found themselves placed on slave-auction blocks alongside their African counterparts.

    The narratives in this collection provide insight into the lives of people who lived in complex and dynamically interconnected cultures. The interviews also offer historical details of capture and enslavement, life in the Old South and the Old West, Indian removal, and slavery in the Indian territory.

    I wasn’t as dark as I am now, but kind of red-like, and when Geronimo saw me he said, “You ain’t no nigger, you’re an Indian.”

    “My father may have been an Indian, but I’m a nigger because that’s the race of my mother, and the race I chose,” I said.

    —From Felix Lindsey’s narrative

  • (ANT/NAS 493): Mixed Blood: Looking at the Relationship Between Africans and Native Americans (NAS 493)

    (ANT/NAS 493): Mixed Blood: Looking at the Relationship Between Africans and Native Americans

    Creighton University
    Omaha, Nebraska
    Fall 2005

    Rev. Raymond A. Bucko, S.J., Professor of Anthropology

    In this course the relationship between Africans and Native Americans will be explored.  “Africans and Native Americans worked as slaves and as free men together.  Both groups played important role in the shaping of the history of this country and the relationships that had are often overlooked and unknown.

    Learning Objectives:

    1. Learn and understand the complex relationships between Africans and Native Americans.
    2. Examine pre and post-Civil War African and Native relationship.

    Texts:

    For more information, click here.

  • Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference

    Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    2007
    250 pages

    Anne Pollock, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and Culture
    Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia

    Submitted to the Program in Science, Technology and Society In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the History and Social Study of Science and Technology At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    This dissertation is an examination of intersections of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease over the course of the 20th century and today. Each of these parts has had a dynamic history, and when they are invoked together they provide a terrain for arguments about interventions in health and in justice in the present.

    An enduring aspect of discourses of heart disease over the past century has been articulating connections between characterizations of the modem American way of life and of heart disease. In that process, heart disease research and practice has participated in differentiating Americans, especially by race. This dissertation uses heart disease categories and the drugs prescribed for them as windows into racialized medicine.

    The chapters are organized in a way that is roughly chronological, beginning with the emergence of cardiology as a specialty just before World War II and the landmark longitudinal Framingham Heart Study that began shortly thereafter. A central chapter tracks the emergence and mobilization of African American hypertension as a disease category since the 1960s. Two final chapters attend to current racial invocations of two pharmaceuticals: thiazide and BiDil. Using methods from critical historiography of race, anthropology, and science studies, this thesis provides an account of race in medicine with interdisciplinary relevance.

    By attending to continuities and discontinuities over the period, this thesis illustrates that race in heart disease research and practice has been a durable preoccupation. Racialized medicine has used epistemologically eclectic notions of race, drawing variously on heterogeneous aspects that are both material and semiotic. This underlying ambiguity is central to the productivity of the recorded category of race. American practices of medicating race have also been mediating it, arbitrating and intervening on new and renewed articulations of inclusion and difference in democratic and racialized American ways of life.

    Table of Contents

    • Abstract
    • Acknowledgements
    • Chapter 1: Introduction
    • Chapter 2: Preoccupations with Racialized Modernity in Early Cardiology
    • Chapter 3: Constructing and Supplementing Framingham’s Normal White Americans: The Framingham and Jackson Heart Studies
    • Chapter 4: The Durability of African American Hypertension as a Disease Category
    • Chapter 5: Thiazide and Racialization of a Generic Drug
    • Chapter 6: BiDil: Medi©ating the Intersection of Race and Heart Failure
    • Epilogue: Tracking Plural Noninnocent Discourses
    • Works Cited

    …Early Framingham investigators did their research in an all-white population, but they participated in larger conversations about black/white differences, too. The Framingham investigators themselves participated in the simultaneous constructions of hypertension and African American hypertension in the 1960s, an era that saw the ascendance both of hypertension as a risk factor and of the Civil Rights Movement. Their own study’s lack of inclusion of African Americans did not preclude their participation in arguments about racial differences in hypertension. Addressing “Environmental Factors in Hypertension” in a 1967 publication, the investigators wrote:

    The principal population groups among whom blood pressures have been reported to be lower than among Americans and Europeans are various primitive peoples. The sample size has usually been small, especially in the older ages, and conclusions about age trends are complicated both by this fact, and by the fact that it is often not possible to accurately determine the age of the subjects. Among those population groups studied adequately, the following may be said:

    Blood pressure distributions are similar among such diverse groups as: Caucasians living in Europe, the United States, and the West Indies; among Chinese living in Taiwan, and among Japanese in Japan.

    Negro populations have higher blood pressures than whites living in the same areas and studied by the same investigators, particularly among females and in the older age groups. Distributions of blood pressures among Negro populations living in the United States and in the West Indies, whether rural or urban, high or low salt eaters, are similar. Their blood pressures are higher than those of Negroes in Liberia, a principal source of Negro migration to the Western Hemisphere. Admixture of the Negro races in the Western Hemisphere makes the interpretation of this data difficult. It is in this general background of unencouraging experience that the study of particular environmental factors, which could conceivably affect the blood pressure level, must be approached.

    I will return to the question of African American Hypertension as a disease category in Chapter 4, but for now attend to other aspects of this quote. Here, we can see the distance between direct evidence or argument and the invocation of a common sense of racialization of cardiovascular disease. Although their phrasing evokes neutral grammars of data, there are no citations or evidence for these assertions about “Negro populations,” suggesting that the authors conceive of these statements less as arguments than as reflecting the consensus of the field. Unable to grapple with the embodied admixture that is not merely biological but also historical and cultural, much history is paved over in word choices such as “migration” to describe the slave trade and “admixture” to describe oppressive sexual relations under slavery.

    Paucity of data is not actually the problem. The investigators make an odd claim about the cause of the difficulty of research into environmental causes of racial disease disparities: that “admixture” gets in the way of interpretation. Logically, assimilation would be the kind of mixing that would pose a problem for separating out environmental causes of disease by race, but the investigators lacked a language for cultural, in addition to biological admixture. The peculiarity of the investigators’ framing should alert us both to the fact of racialized hypertension’s existence at the nexus of the biological and the environmental, and that Framingham is telling both a white story and a universal one…

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • A Racialized Medical Genomics: Shiny, Bright and Wrong

    A Racialized Medical Genomics: Shiny, Bright and Wrong

    RACE-The Power of an Illusion
    July 2005

    Robert Wallace, Postdoctoral Fellow
    Public Health Phylogeography
    Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
    University of California, Irvine

    Armand Marie Leroi announces in his Times op-ed that race is biologically real (New York Times, March 14, 2005). The crusty trope that race is a social artifact crumbles in the face of the bright new genomics, he asserts. Genetic variation may be greater within groups than between groups, as Richard Lewontin pointed out back in the dark ages of the 1970s, but only for single genes. Taken together, across genetic loci allelic distributions correlate into clusters long recognized as the five races: European, East Asian, African, Amerindian, and Australasian. So suck it up, constructionists, race is biologically intrinsic.

    Moreover, get out of the way. The recognition that race is inherently biological, Leroi writes, can improve medical care, “as different races are prone to different diseases.” African Americans, for example, suffer greater prevalences of heart disease and prostate cancer. Even if such differences arise from socioeconomic causes, Leroi argues, we should—ignoring the man behind the curtain—embrace geneticists’ very important mission, “searching for racial differences in the frequencies of genetic variants that cause diseases.”

    And yet much of Leroi’s article unravels his own argument. Leroi takes population geneticists to task for caving into political correctness by investigating “ethnic groups,” a euphemism that conflates human differences across scale. Never mind that population geneticists prefer the term less out of deference to present sensibilities than to the data themselves. Work by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza’s group (Cavalli-Sforza 2001, Underhill 2003), among others, show human history—back to our species’ origins—to be marked by layers of migration sweeping back and forth across the continents, gurgling here and there into local pools of idiosyncratic admixture. While the resulting genetic frequencies do not embody a homogenous mush, neither does a stark black and white favored by the new racialists result. Instead, genetic maps are marked by fine-scaled and functionally important population gradients…

    …For one, according to Leroi, the pharmaceutical companies. As race can affect medical treatment, “many new drugs are now labeled with warnings that they may not work in some ethnic or racial groups.” That such effects need not be predominantly biological in origin apparently matters little. Leroi admits differences among races arise from population averages alone. But as we are unlikely to have individuals’ genomes sequenced any time soon, and presumably won’t be able to individualize medical treatment that way, we’ll just have to accept a racialized medical genetics. Nothing like an argument of expediency to convince a crowd. The pharmaceutical companies are doing it, so get with it, baby!

    Here, Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist, bumbles back into the typology the Darwinian revolution revoked. As Ernst Mayr (1976, 2004) explained, until the early 19th century biologists classified species in essentialist terms. A specific type or specimen defined a species and any variation from the type was considered deviant or unreal. In statistical terms, a centroid measure such as the mean phenotype defined the species, while the variance was thought noise. Typological definitions accounted for the differences among species and, without variation, explained the impossibility of evolution.

    Darwin and his colleagues turned biology on its head. The population thinking they introduced emphasized the variation in populations. As natural history studies accumulated, it became apparent individual organisms varied in just about any and all characteristics, both across and within species. Individuals even changed over the course of their lifespans. Here, averages became thought of as constructs and the variances the reality. Variation’s reality proved fundamental to Darwin’s natural selection. The greater the variation in the population, the faster natural selection works and adaptations arise…

    Read the entire article here.

  • “Racially-Tailored” Medicine Unraveled

    “Racially-Tailored” Medicine Unraveled

    American University Law Review
    Volume 55, Number 2 (December 2005)
    pages 395-452

    Sharona Hoffman, Professor of Law, Professor of Bioethics, and Associate Director of the Law-Medicine Center
    Case Western Reserve University School of Law

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction
    • I. “Race-Based” Research and Therapeutic Practices
      • A. The Story of BiDil
      • B. “Race-Based” Research
      • C. A Growing Interest in “Race-Based” Medicine: Why Now?
    • II. Does “Race” Mean Anything?
      • A. “Race” in the Medical and Social Sciences
      • B. “Race” and the Law
      • C. Shifting the Focus Away from “Race”
    • III. The Dangers of “Racial Profiling” in Medicine
      • A. Medical Mistakes
      • B. Stigmatization and Discrimination
      • C. Exacerbation of Health Disparities
    • IV. Violation of Anti-Discrimination Provisions
      • A. Constitution and Federal Civil Rights Laws
      • B. State Laws Prohibiting Discrimination in the Medical Arena
        • 1. Civil rights statutes
        • 2. Hospital and medical facility licensing requirements
        • 3. Patients’ bill of rights laws
        • 4. Public services regulation
        • 5. Insurance codes
      • C. Violation of Research Regulations and Guidelines
        • 1. NIH policy and guidelines
        • 2. Federal research regulations
      • D. Discrimination Theory
    • V. Recommendations
      • A. Review of Research Studies by Scientific Review Boards and IRBs
        • 1. Scientific reviews
        • 2. Institutional review boards
      • B. Investigators and Health Care Providers
      • C. Public Discourse Concerning Attribute-Based Medicine:The Responsibilities of Investigators, Institutions, and the Media
    • Conclusion

    Introduction

    F.D.A. Approves a Heart Drug for African-Americans. This June 2005 headline announced the arrival of BiDil, a heart failure edication that is approved for African-Americans only. BiDil is the first drug in pharmaceutical history that will constitute standard therapy for only one particular “race.”Health care professionals are becoming increasingly interested in “racebased” medicine in the research and therapeutic contexts. Many researchers are attempting to discern “racial” differences in disease manifestation, biological functioning, and therapeutic response rates. As this approach develops, physicians may prescribe different dosages of medication for people of separate “races” or may provide them with entirely different drugs. In light of the success of BiDil, investigators are also likely to pursue the development of additional “racially-tailored” medications. In fact, several academic and professional conferences have already devoted significant time to the discussion of “race-based” medicine. On April 18, 2005, the University of Minnesota hosted aconference entitled Proposals for the Responsible Use of Racial & Ethnic Categories in Biomedical Research: Where Do We Go From Here? Likewise, the Eighth World Congress on Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, held in 2004 in Brisbane, Australia, devoted an afternoon to ethnopharmacology.While “racial profiling” in medicine has generated significant discussion in medical and bioethics circles, it has thus far gained relatively little attention in legal literature. This Article aims to develop the discourse concerning this important topic. It argues that “race-based” medicine is an inappropriate and perilous approach. The argument is rooted partly in the fact that the concept of “race” is elusive and has no reliable definition in medical science, the social sciences, and the law.  Does “race” mean color, national origin, continent of origin, culture, or something else? What about the millions of Americans who are of mixed ancestral origins—to what “race” do they belong? To the extent that “race” means “color” in colloquial parlance, should physicians decide what testing to conduct or treatment to provide based simply on their visual judgment of the patient’s skin tone? “Race,” consequently, does not constitute a valid and sensible foundation for research or therapeutic decision-making.

    Further, this Article contends that “racial profiling” in medicine can be dangerous to public health and welfare. A focus on “race,” whatever its meaning in the physician’s eye, can lead to medical mistakes if the doctor misjudges the patient’s ancestral identity or fails to recall that a particular condition affects several vulnerable groups and not just one “race.” The phenomenon can also lead to stigmatization and discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere if the public perceives certain “races” as more diseased or more difficult to treat than others. In addition, “racial profiling” could exacerbate health disparities by creating opportunities for health professionals to specialize in treating only one “race” or to provide different and inferior treatment to certain minorities. It could also intensify African-Americans’ distrust of the medical profession. Finally, “race-based” medicine might violate numerous anti-discrimination provisions contained in federal law, state law, and federal research regulations and guidelines…

    …The Article will proceed as follows. Part I of the Article will describe “race-based” research and therapeutic practices and will examine the growing interest in “race-based” medicine and the reasons for it. Part II will argue that “race” is a concept that has no coherent meaning and that is potentially pernicious. Part III will focus on the dangers of “raciallytailored” medicine, and Part IV will analyze a variety of anti-discrimination mandates that could potentially be violated by the practice. Finally, Part V will detail recommendations for the development of attribute-based medicine in a manner that will promote the health and welfare of all population groups…

    …This Article argues against substantial use of the concept of “race” in medical settings. A primary reason for this restriction is that “race” has no coherent meaning, and therefore, reliance upon it for research or treatment purposes can be confusing at best and can lead to significant adverse consequences at worst. This section will build the argument that based on medical science, the social sciences, and the law, “race” has no reliable definition or real meaning. Moreover, it is a pernicious concept that has been used to suggest that human beings can be divided into subspecies, some of which are morally, intellectually, and physically inferior to others. Thus, medical professionals should focus on more precise and meaningful aspects of human identity rather than on the amorphous concept of “race.”…

    Read the entire article here.