Mixed Race Studies

Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age

Columbia University Press
December, 2012
336 pages
Charts: 4, B&W Illus.: 1
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-16298-2

Jonathan Kahn, Professor of Law
Hamline University, Saint Paul, Minnesota

At a ceremony announcing the completion of the first draft of the human genome in 2000, President Bill Clinton declared, “I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.” Yet despite this declaration of unity, biomedical research has focused increasingly on mapping that .1 percent of difference, particularly as it relates to race.

This trend is exemplified by the drug BiDil. Approved by the FDA in 2005 as the first drug with a race-specific indication on its label, BiDil was originally touted as a pathbreaking therapy to treat heart failure in black patients and help underserved populations. Upon closer examination, however, Jonathan Kahn reveals a far more complex story. At the most basic level, BiDil became racial through legal maneuvering and commercial pressure as much as through medical understandings of how the drug worked. Using BiDil as a central case study, Kahn broadly examines the legal and commercial imperatives driving the expanding role of race in biomedicine, even as scientific advances in genomics could render the issue irrelevant. He surveys the distinct politics informing the use of race in medicine and the very real health disparities caused by racism and social injustice that are now being cast as a mere function of genetic difference. Calling for a more reasoned approach to using race in biomedical research and practice, Kahn asks readers to recognize that, just as genetics is a complex field requiring sensitivity and expertise, so too is race, particularly in the field of biomedicine.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION: Race and Medicine: Framing [Is] the Problem
• 1. ORGANIZING RACE: Paths Toward the Re-Biologization of Race in Modern Biomedical Research, Practice, and Product Development
• 2. THE BIRTH OF BIDIL: How a Drug Becomes “Ethnic”
• 3. STATISTICAL MISCHIEF AND RACIAL FRAMES FOR DRUG DEVELOPMENT AND MARKETING
• 4. CAPITALIZING [ON] RACE IN DRUG DEVELOPMENT
• 5. RACE-ING PATENTS/PATENTING RACE: An Emerging Political Geography of Intellectual Property in Biotechnology
• 6. NOT FADE AWAY: The Persistence of Race and the Politics of the “Meantime” in Pharmacogenomics
• 7. FROM DISPARITY TO DIFFERENCE: The Politics of Racial Medicine
• CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
• Notes
• Index

Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture

Columbia University Press
September 2011
304 pages
1 illus; 4 tables
Paper ISBN: 978-0-231-15697-4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-15696-7

Edited by:

Sheldon Krimsky, Professor of Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning; Adjunct Professor of Public Health and Family Medicine
Tufts School of Medicine
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Kathleen Sloan

Do advances in genomic biology create a scientific rationale for long-discredited racial categories? Leading scholars in law, medicine, biology, sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology examine the impact of modern genetics on the concept of race. Contributors trace the interplay between genetics and race in forensic DNA databanks, the biology of intelligence, DNA ancestry markers, and racialized medicine. Each essay explores commonly held and unexamined assumptions and misperceptions about race in science and popular culture.

This collection begins with the historical origins and current uses of the concept of “race” in science. It follows with an analysis of the role of race in DNA databanks and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Essays then consider the rise of recreational genetics in the form of for-profit testing of genetic ancestry and the introduction of racialized medicine, specifically through an FDA-approved heart drug called BiDil, marketed to African American men. Concluding sections discuss the contradictions between our scientific and cultural understandings of race and the continuing significance of race in educational and criminal justice policy.

Table of Contents

• A short history of the race concept / Michael Yudell
• Natural selection, the human genome, and the idea of race / Robert Pollack
• Racial disparities in databanking of DNA profiles / Michael T. Risher
• Prejudice, stigma, and DNA databases / Helen Wallace
• Ancestry testing and DNA : uses, limits, and caveat emptor / Troy Duster
• Can DNA witness race? Forensic uses of an imperfect ancestry testing technology / Duana Fullwiley
• BiDil and racialized medicine / Jonathan Kahn
• Evolutionary versus racial medicine : why it matters? / Joseph L. Graves Jr.
• Myth and mystification : the science of race and IQ / Pilar N. Ossorio
• Intelligence, race, and genetics / Robert J. Sternberg … [et al.]
• The elusive variability of race / Patricia J. Williams
• Race, genetics, and the regulatory need for race impact assessments / Osagie K. Obasogie.

Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century

Columbia University Press
August 1997
248 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-231-10493-7
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-10492-0

Kevin Mumford, Professor of African-American History
University of Iowa

Interzones is an innovative account of how the color line was drawn—and how it was crossed—in twentieth-century American cities. Kevin Mumford chronicles the role of vice districts in New York and Chicago as crucibles for the shaping of racial categories and racial inequalities.

Focusing on Chicago’s South Side and Levee districts, and Greenwich Village and Harlem in New York at the height of the Progressive era, Mumford traces the connections between the Great Migration, the commercialization of leisure, and the politics of reform and urban renewal. Interzones is the first book to examine in depth the combined effects on American culture of two major transformations: the migration north of southern blacks and the emergence of a new public consumer culture.

Mumford writes an important chapter in Progressive-era history from the perspectives of its most marginalized and dispossessed citizens. Recreating the mixed-race underworlds of brothels and dance halls, and charting the history of a black-white sexual subculture, Mumford shows how fluid race relations were in these “interzones.” From Jack Johnson and the “white slavery” scare of the 1910’s to the growth of a vital gay subculture and the phenomenon of white slumming, he explores in provocative detail the connections between political reforms and public culture, racial prejudice and sexual taboo, the hardening of the color line and the geography of modern inner cities.

The complicated links between race and sex, and reform and reaction, are vividly displayed in Mumford’s look at a singular moment in the settling of American culture and society.

In Their Siblings’ Voices: White Non-Adopted Siblings Talk About Their Experiences Being Raised with Black and Biracial Brothers and Sisters

Columbia University Press
May 2009
248 pages
5 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-14850-4
Paper ISBN: 978-0-231-14851-1

Rita J. Simon, University Professor Emerita
Department of Justice, Law and Society
American University, Washington, D.C.

In Their Siblings’ Voices shares the stories of twenty white non-adopted siblings who grew up with black or biracial brothers and sisters in the late 1960s and 1970s. Belonging to the same families profiled in Rita J. Simon and Rhonda M. Roorda’s In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories and In Their Parents’ Voices: Reflections on Raising Transracial Adoptees, these siblings offer their perspectives on the multiracial adoption experience, which, for them, played out against the backdrop of two tumultuous, politically charged decades. Simon and Roorda question whether professionals and adoption agencies adequately trained these children in the challenges presented by blended families, and they ask if, after more than thirty years, race still matters. Few books cover both the academic and the human dimensions of this issue. In Their Siblings’ Voices helps readers fully grasp the dynamic of living in a multiracial household and its effect on friends, school, and community.