Mixed Race Studies

Seattle-based Coast Guard cutter’s journey through the Arctic: No ‘ice liberty’ in changing waters

The Seattle Times
2021-10-20

Hal Bernton, Staff Reporter

They call it “ice liberty,” a tradition during the Coast Guard’s maritime missions in Arctic waters. At a thick ice floe, the crew gets to disembark for a brief moment of freedom from the vessel confines. Some play touch football, or bring hockey gear for the occasion. Others just take a stroll.

This year, there was no suitable ice to be found during the Coast Guard Cutter Healy’s northern journey off Alaska and Canada. So the event was canceled.

“A lot of the floes had melt ponds with holes in them like Swiss cheese,” said Capt. Kenneth Boda, commander of the Seattle-based icebreaker. “We couldn’t get the right floe.”

Boda spoke via telephone during a port call in Boston. The vessel is deep into a marathon voyage that began July 10 as the 420-foot ship pulled away from its berth at the Coast Guard base in downtown Seattle and traveled into Arctic waters off Alaska. After a jog south, the Healy headed north again and through the Northwest Passage to the Atlantic…

…Arctic shipwreck found

During the voyage, the Healy crew traversed some of the waters cruised more than a century ago by their vessel’s namesake, “Hell Roaring” Mike Healy, captain of the wooden-hulled U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear from 1886 to 1895.

Healy, who was born into slavery, is a legendary figure in U.S. maritime history. He was the first person of African American descent to command a U.S. government ship, and embarked on annual patrols off Alaska, which covered 15,000 to 20,000 miles.

Healy was a kind of maritime sheriff who helped enforce the law as he acted as “judge, doctor and policeman to Alaska Natives, merchant seamen, and whaling crews,” according to a U.S. Coast Guard history, and also led the Bear on a historic 1884 rescue of starving survivors of an Arctic expedition under command of Army 1st Lt. Adolphus Greely…

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The Galton Society for the Study of the Origin and Evolution of Man (1918–1935)

The Embryo Project Encyclopedia
2021-06-03

Aliya R. Hoff, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology
Arizona State University

Charles Benedict Davenport, Madison Grant, and Henry Fairfield Osborn founded the Galton Society for the Study of the Origin and Evolution of Man, or the Galton Society, in New York City, New York, in 1918. The Galton Society was a scientific society that promoted the study of humans in terms of race in service to the US eugenics movement. The Galton Society was named in honor of Francis Galton who first coined the term eugenics in 1883. Galton and other eugenics proponents claimed that the human species could improve through selective breeding that restricted who could have children. Some of the society members were scientists from a wide range of disciplines who supported the now disproven notion that fundamental biological differences exist between races that may justify the control of human reproduction. The Galton Society drew on the scientific credibility and influence of its members to advocate for eugenics programs, such as immigration restriction laws, in the US…

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Is there evidence for the racialization of pharmaceutical regulation? Systematic comparison of new drugs approved over five years in the USA and the EU

Social Science & Medicine
Volume 280, July 2021, 114049
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114049

Shai Mulinari, Senior Lecturer
Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences
Lund University, Sweden

Andreas Vilhelmsson, Associate Researcher
Division of Social Medicine and Global Health, Department of Clinical Sciences Malmö
Lund University, Malmö, Sweden

Piotr Ozieranski, Senior Lecturer
Department of Social and Policy Sciences
University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom

Anna Bredström, Senior Lecturer, Docent; Associate Professor of Ethnicity and Migration
Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO)
Linköping University, Sweden

Highlights

• We compare race/ethnicity labeling of hundreds of new drugs in the USA and the EU.
• Many labels report race/ethnicity demographics of trials, more often in the USA.
• Fewer labels report race/ethnicity differences in response, more often in the EU.
• Racial/ethnic taxonomy used in labels is variable and inconsistent.
• The racialization of pharmaceutical regulation differs between the USA and the EU.

Recent decades have seen much interest in racial and ethnic differences in drug response. The most emblematic example is the heart drug BiDil, approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2005 for “self-identified blacks.” Previous social science research has explored this “racialization of pharmaceutical regulation” in the USA, and discussed its implications for the “pharmaceuticalization of race” in terms of reinforcing certain taxonomic schemes and conceptualizations. Yet, little is known about the racialization of pharmaceutical regulation in the USA after BiDil, and how it compares with the situation in the EU, where political and regulatory commitment to race and ethnicity in pharmaceutical medicine is weak. We have addressed these gaps by investigating 397 product labels of all novel drugs approved in the USA (n = 213) and the EU (n = 184) between 2014 and 2018. Our analysis considered statements in labeling and the racial/ethnic categories used. Overall, it revealed that many labels report race/ethnicity demographics and subgroup analyses, but that there are important differences between the USA and the EU. Significantly more US labels specified race/ethnicity demographics, as expected given the USA’s greater commitment to race and ethnicity in pharmaceutical medicine. Moreover, we found evidence that reporting of race/ethnicity demographics in EU labels was driven, in part, by statements in US labels, suggesting the spillover of US regulatory standards to the EU. Unexpectedly, significantly more EU labels reported differences in drug response, although no drug was restricted to a racial/ethnic population in a manner similar to BiDil. Our analysis also noted variability and inconsistency in the racial/ethnic taxonomy used in labels. We discuss implications for the racialization of pharmaceutical regulation and the pharmaceuticalization of race in the USA and EU.

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Dialogues Beyond the Master’s Map: An Invitation

Carlos Hoyt, Ph.D., LICSW
2022-01-08

My journey has taken me past constructions of race,
past constructions of mixed race,
and into an understanding of human difference
that does not include race as a meaningful category.
–Race and Mixed-Race: A Personal Tour, Rainier Spencer

Introduction

About ten years ago I invited people who resist the practice of racialization to talk with me about why, when, and how they arrived at a point beyond personal and social identity defined and confined by the dogma of race.

Since then, I’ve had the privilege of being able to write, talk, and teach about the implications of the non-racial worldview in a wide variety of contexts. And all along the way, I’ve heard from folks wishing to gather with others who share an anti-racialization orientation. This is an invitation to such a gathering.

If, despite being told and trained and pressured to embrace and perform a sense of identity that represents a false construct of human differences, you defy racial reduction and seek the company of others who resist racialization, please contact me. About a month from the posting of this invitation, sometime in early February, I’ll contact everyone who expressed interest with a date and time for our first gathering (via Zoom) where we’ll share perspectives and narratives of life beyond the master’s map…

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Race is a Social Construct

Center for Health Progress
2017-10-24

Sarah McAfee
Golden, Colorado

On a recent road trip with my sister, a doctor, we were talking about how race is a social construct. (We’re not the best conversationalists.) She asked, “If there’s no biological basis for race, then why do some medications work better for people of some races than others?” Which is a good question. Since we had a long drive ahead of us, I stalled by pointing out the window at a pretend elk and changed the subject, then did some furious Googling when we stopped for gas.

For hundreds of years, we’ve been told that each race is a discrete group of people defined by specific genetic and biological differences. As a result, we’ve used race as a way of explaining observed differences in health: Sickle Cell Anemia is considered a black person disease; Cystic Fibrosis is considered a white person disease; we’ve said people of color are genetically pre-disposed to diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, and other chronic conditions; the FDA has approved drugs for different races; and through “race-based medicine” we’ve established care standards (such as responding to patients’ pain) that vary by race. But it’s all wrong…

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An Education for All: Teacher Educated Her Hampton Students `for Eternity’

The Daily Press
Norfolk, Virginia
1995-02-07

Felice Belman

Mary S. Peake

HAMPTON — Mary S. Peake was so devoted to her students that she taught them even when it was illegal to do so.

She was so dedicated to education that, even after the city of Hampton was burned by Confederate rebels, she started a school for ex-slaves at Fort Monroe.

And she was so concerned about her work that in February 1862 – so weak from tuberculosis that she couldn’t stand – Peake gathered her students round her bedside and taught lessons between violent spasms of coughing. She died the next day.

”It’s important to remember Mary S. Peake because she taught the prominent people of her time,” said Debbie Lee Bryant, a genealogist and historian in Hampton. ”It’s important to remember her because she was the first black missionary teacher, and because her school was the forerunner to what’s now known as Hampton University.”

Peake’s contemporaries were equally admiring.

”Mrs. Peake was a remarkable person as to disposition, talents and piety,” said an unsigned article in an 1862 edition of the ”American Missionary” magazine, the journal of the American Missionary Association.

”She devoted unreservedly to the elevation of her own race,” the article said.

Mary S. Peake was a free black woman when most Southern blacks were slaves. She taught black children in Hampton and, in 1861, opened a school, marking the beginning of general education for blacks in the South. The founders of Hampton Institute, now called Hampton University, were inspired by Peake’s example.

Peake was the first teacher of blacks in any territory liberated by the Federal Army and the founder of the first school for blacks after the war began.

Born Mary Smith Kelsey, Peake was the daughter of a free black woman and a white Englishman. She was sent away to school in Alexandria but returned home to Norfolk at the age of 16, after Congress shut down schools for blacks in the Washington area. A studious girl, she turned most frequently to the Bible, according to a biography written by her contemporary, the Rev. Lewis C. Lockwood…

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Olivia Ward Bush-Banks and New Negro Indigeneity

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Volume 45, Issue 3, Fall 2020
pages 104–128
Published: 03 July 2020
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlaa033

DeLisa D. Hawkes, Assistant Professor of English
University of Texas, El Paso

Among New Negro Renaissance greats such as Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Wallace Thurman, early twentieth-century African American newspapers referred to the Afro-Montauk Olivia Ward Bush-Banks as “the grand dame of the literati” (Byrd A8).¹ Her poetry and plays often feature representations of African American and Native American life and speculate on the ways these groups’ interactions with each other influenced cultural and racial identity formation. The few scholars that remember her name today might argue that her earlier works reflect on her African-Native American heritage, while her later works focus exclusively on her African American culture (Grant).² However, Bush-Banks’s writings on self- and imposed identities, spanning from the 1890s to the 1940s, challenge ideas about indigeneity, race, and…

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Pauli Murray applied to be a Supreme Court justice in 1971. 50 years later, a Black woman could make history.

The Washington Post
2022-01-27

Anne Branigin

The trailblazing lawyer wrote President Nixon to do something “unprecedented”

When Pauli Murray wrote to President Richard Nixon in September 1971, the trailblazing lawyer, activist, writer and scholar held no illusions about how the letter would be received.

The 60-year-old constitutional lawyer was writing to Nixon to “do something which may be unprecedented in the history of the USA”: to directly apply, as a self-identified “Negro woman,” for a seat on the Supreme Court.

“By the time this letter reaches the White House, I suspect you will have announced your choice to fill the vacancy left by Mr. Justice Hugo L. Black’s resignation,” Murray wrote. “Since I do not expect you to see this letter, it does no harm to amuse your administrative and secretarial staff as it passes up and down the line on its way to the waste basket.”

But while Murray may have taken a tongue-in-cheek tone, the ultimate aim of the letter was a serious one…

Read the entire article here.

The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization

University of California Press
January 2022 (Originally published 1986)
676 pages
Trim Size: 6.14 x 9.21
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520367005
Paperback ISBN: 9780520337060

Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987)

Introduction by: David H. P. Maybury-Lewis (1929-2007)

This title is part of UC Press’s Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.

Table of Contents

• Frontmatter
• Preface to the first English-Language Edition
• Preface to the Second English-language Edition
• Translator’s Acknowledgments
• Author’s Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Introduction to the Paperback Edition
• I General Characteristics of the Portuguese Colonization of Brazil: Formation of an Agrarian, Slave-Holding and Hybrid Society
• II The Native in the Formation of the Brazilian Family
• III The Portuguese Colonizer: Antecedents and Predispositions
• IV The Negro Slave in the Sexual and Family Life of the Brazilian
• V The Negro Slave in the Sexual and Family Life of the Brazilian (continued)
• Plans showing Big House of the Noruega Plantation
• Glossary of the Brazilian Terms Used
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects

75 years after Viola Desmond’s arrest, a north-end Halifax group seeks to honour her

CBC News
2021-11-08

Feleshia Chandler, Reporter

North End Business Association announces it will commission a commemorative art piece

It’s been 75 years since businesswoman-turned social justice activist Viola Desmond was arrested at the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, N.S., for challenging racial segregation by daring to sit in a “whites only” section.

To mark that anniversary, the North End Business Association in Halifax has announced a new commemorative art piece collaboration set to be completed in 2022.

“We’ve been working on it for the last year,” said Bernadette Hamilton-Reid with the African Nova Scotian Decade for People of African Descent Coalition (ANSDPAD).

“It’s very exciting to see this come to fruition as to how we can best commemorate Viola for her strong resiliency as a Black woman entrepreneur and setting the stage for many other generations to come after her.”

ANSDPAD is part of the Viola Desmond Legacy Committee, which was established in 2018 in order to see Desmond, who died in 1965, recognized in Halifax, the city where she lived and where her actions in business and civil rights have a lasting impact.

The North End Business Association is collaborating with the committee to have an art piece built on Gottingen Street, near where Desmond’s old hairdressing shop used to be…

Read the entire article here.