Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Education, Genetic Ancestry, and Blood Pressure in African Americans and Whites

    Education, Genetic Ancestry, and Blood Pressure in African Americans and Whites

    American Journal of Public Health
    August 2012, Volume 102, Number 8
    pages 1559-1565
    DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2011.300448

    Amy L. Non, Assistant Professor of Anthropology,
    Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

    Clarence C. Gravlee, Associate Professor of Anthropology;  affiliate appointments in the Department of Behavioral Science and Community Health
    University of Florida, Gainesville

    Connie J. Mulligan, Professor of Anthropology; Associate Director, University of Florida Genetics Institute
    University of Florida, Gainesville

    • Objectives. We assessed the relative roles of education and genetic ancestry in predicting blood pressure (BP) within African Americans and explored the association between education and BP across racial groups.
    • Methods. We used t tests and linear regressions to examine the associations of genetic ancestry, estimated from a genomewide set of autosomal markers, and education with BP variation among African Americans in the Family Blood Pressure Program. We also performed linear regressions in self-identified African Americans and Whites to explore the association of education with BP across racial groups.
    • Results. Education, but not genetic ancestry, significantly predicted BP variation in the African American subsample (b = –0.51 mm Hg per year additional education; P = .001). Although education was inversely associated with BP in the total population, within-group analyses showed that education remained a significant predictor of BP only among the African Americans. We found a significant interaction (b = 3.20; P = .006) between education and self-identified race in predicting BP.
    • Conclusions. Racial disparities in BP may be better explained by differences in education than by genetic ancestry. Future studies of ancestry and disease should include measures of the social environment. (Am J Public Health. 2012; 102:1559–1565. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2011.300448)

    In recent decades, researchers have struggled to determine the causes of racial disparities in health. Many biomedical researchers have speculated that underlying genetic differences between races may contribute to these disparities. With the increasing availability of high-throughput genotyping platforms, a wealth of genomic data is now available to help address this issue. One consequence is that more researchers are estimating genetic ancestry to capture a presumed genetic basis of racial disparities in health. However, any associations found between genetic ancestry and disease could alternatively be explained by unmeasured environmental factors that are also associated with African genetic ancestry and contribute to health disparities, such as socioeconomic status (SES), neighborhood environment, and psychosocial factors including perceived stress or discrimination. Therefore, to avoid unwarranted inferences about the magnitude of genetic influences on health disparities, it is critical for any analysis of ancestry and disease to include appropriate social–environmental variables.

    Social–environmental factors may be especially important when one is studying a complex disease such as hypertension. Complex diseases, by definition, involve multiple environmental and genetic causes, as well as interactions within and between them. Many studies have identified important social–environmental influences on racial inequalities in hypertension, such as SES, psychosocial stressors, and neighborhood environment, whereas other studies have begun to identify relevant genetic variants, such as those in the rennin–angiotensin–aldosterone axis and the adrenergic system. Few studies, however, have examined genetic and environmental factors simultaneously. The limited scope of this research to date has slowed progress toward explaining racial inequalities in hypertension and other complex diseases.

    To address the relevance of both genetic and environmental factors in racial inequalities in hypertension, we tested associations between genetic ancestry, education, and blood pressure (BP) among Whites and African Americans in the Family Blood Pressure Program (FBPP) study. A previous analysis of this data set by Tang et al. found no evidence of a statistically significant association between African genetic ancestry and blood pressure. They concluded nonetheless that the results were “suggestive of genetic differences between Africans and non-Africans that influence blood pressure, but such effects are likely to be modest compared to environmental ones.” No environmental variables were included in their study, however. Here we reexamine the FBPP data set to test how the addition of education affects the association between ancestry and BP in African Americans. We also explored the association between education and blood pressure across racial groups. We hypothesized that education would show a greater association with BP than would African ancestry among African Americans, and that the association between education and BP may vary by racial and gender groups…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Purple Boots, Silver Stars … and White Parents

    Purple Boots, Silver Stars … and White Parents

    The New York Times
    2013-10-13

    Frank Ligtvoet, Founder
    Adoptive Families With Children of African Heritage and Their Friends, New York, New York

    “WHEN I wear my cap backwards, don’t copy me,” our 8-year-old son says to his 7-year-old sister. “O.K.,” she answers, “I will put it on sideways.”

    Recently our African-American daughter, Rosa, had gone with an older black friend to Fulton Mall, a crowded commercial area in our Brooklyn neighborhood, where the shoppers are mostly black. Fulton Mall is not only about shopping, it’s also a place to flirt, talk, laugh and argue, and to listen in passing to gospel, soul, hip-hop and R & B.

    Rosa had seen some purple canvas boots with silver stars and lost herself in an all-consuming desire to have them. Immediately. I bought them, a bit later. A day later. And to be “fair,” I bought our son, Joshua, who is also African-American, a pair of black and yellow basketball shorts. Pretty cool as well.

    The next day they want to show off their new stuff and, somewhat to my surprise, they decide to do so at Fulton Mall. I am their white adoptive dad, and by now, at their age, they see the racial difference between us clearly and are not always comfortable with it in public. But they know they are too young to go alone to the mall. Before we leave, Rosa, who had always seemed indifferent to fashion, changes into tight jeans and a black short-sleeve T-shirt. Joshua twists his head to see how he looks from behind. He pushes his new shorts a bit lower over his hips, but doesn’t dare to go all the way saggy. And then — after they have their cap conversation — we go.

    They walk ahead. I am kept at a distance, a distance that grows as we get closer to the mall. I respect that; I grin and play stranger.

    Joshua walks with the wide, tentative yet supple steps he sees black teenage boys make, steps he has practiced at home in the mirror. I realize that this is the first time in their lives they are asserting their blackness in a black environment, maybe not in opposition to but in conscious separation from the whiteness of my male partner and me. And we are a bit proud of their budding racial independence, since it comes after years of their having expressed feelings that ranged from “I don’t want to be black” to “I hate white people.” Being black with us was safe now. Being black at Fulton Mall was sort of a test of how safe it was out there in the world. I take a picture with my phone to catch this moment, which they hate. Of course…

    …In the case of transracial adoption, there is the force of horizontal identity, where the child looks for others with the same experience of being adopted, but the vertical identity is complicated as well. When we wake them up in the morning, our kids don’t see parents who look like them. For many young transracial adoptees, every time they look in the mirror it’s a shock to see that they are black or Asian and not white like their parents. (In most transracial families, the parents are white.) The children have to grow out of their internalized whiteness into their own racial identity. Some fail and suffer tremendously…

    Read the entire opinion piece here.

  • Identity issues

    Identity issues

    Harvard Gazette
    2011-01-28

    Stephanie Schorow, Harvard Correspondent

    ‘Black in Latin America’ examines perceptions of race

    There were laughs of recognition as Silvio Torres-Saillant, professor of English and humanities at Syracuse University, told a story that underscored a major point of the “Black in Latin America” conference, which kicked off on Jan. 27 at Harvard.

    Torres-Saillant, a former director of the Syracuse Latino-Latin American Studies Program, described being approached about joining a black campus caucus some years ago. A representative asked the carefully considered question: “Do you consider yourself more Hispanic or more black?”

    His bemused silence may have been seen as an answer by the representative, but it reveals the false dichotomy that, for far too long, has been applied to the study of people of African descent who hail from South, Central, or North America and the Caribbean.

    In what many participants called a “historic moment,” scholars from around the world gathered for three days at Harvard to explore issues of race, racial identity, and racism in countries as diverse as Haiti, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru. Of the estimated 12.5 million Africans shipped to the New World during the Middle Passage of the slave trade, the vast majority were taken to the Caribbean and Latin America.

    “This is not just about Africa; this is not just about Latin America; this is how it all comes together,” said Caroline Elkins, Harvard history professor…

    …In the first session of the conference, which focused on racial identity in the Dominican Republic, anthropologist Juan Rodriguez examined how Dominicans emphasize their European ancestry and distinguish themselves from Haitians who are perceived as the darker “other” or even as “foreigners,” even though the two countries share the same land mass.

    Yet, Rodriguez said, examination of DNA from maternal lines of Dominicans finds that 85 percent have African ancestors, 9.4 Indian, and less than .08 European. DNA from paternal lines found 58 percent from European ancestors, 36 from African, and 1 percent Indian, he said. This emphasizes the abusive role played by the European male in relation to enslaved native and African women, he said.

    In his humorous, yet poignant, remarks, Rodriguez discussed the use of race on Dominican national identification cards, rattling off some of the 12 classifications of skin color from the early 1970s, including white, black, ashen, discolored, so pale as to appear sick, light with freckles or moles, and purple. He also cited the 15 kinds of hair texture that ranged on a spectrum from “bueno” (good) for straight hair to “malo” (bad) for kinky hair.

    Frank Moya Pons, a professor of Latin America and a former minister in the Dominican government, discussed his research into census data that reveals just how reluctant Dominicans have been over the decades to call themselves “mulatto,” preferring to identify themselves as Indians or the native people of the region. “We are in the presence of a mulatto population that calls itself Indian, which gives us much food for thought,” he said…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Influence of Spirituality on the Implicit Identity of Racial African American Women of Ethnically Cherokee Ancestry

    The Influence of Spirituality on the Implicit Identity of Racial African American Women of Ethnically Cherokee Ancestry

    Argosy University, Washington, D.C.
    December 2009
    141 pages

    Daryl Harris Thorne

    Submitted to the Faculty of Argosy University – Washington, DC Campus College of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences In partial fulfillment of The requirements for the  Degree of Doctor of Education

    This dissertation examines the influence of spirituality on implicit identity using a heuristic-case study approach. This research attempted to recognize the complexity of identity construction by acknowledging the myriad of factors that contribute to the human experience beneath surface identity. Historical trauma, marginalization, and the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924 were also explored using Symbolic Interaction as a theoretical frame. Based on the findings, counselors are reminded to remain open to the possibility that there are people who present a certain way, externally, due to external features or socialization yet, internally, identify in a different way. This study adds a substantive dimension to theories of identity formation that place primary focus on spirituality vs. racial, historical and societal constructions.

  • Contesting Identities Through Walker Dance: Mestizo Performance in the Southern Andes of Peru

    Contesting Identities Through Walker Dance: Mestizo Performance in the Southern Andes of Peru

    Repercussions: a journal dedicated to all areas of music studies
    University of California, Berkeley
    Fall 1994, Volume 3, No. 2
    pages 50-80

    Zoila Mendoza-Walker

    This article analyzes an event in the city of Cusco, Peru that reverberated throughout the entire region during the late 1980s. This incident, which became known as the “events of Corpus,” generated a series of open antagonisms that pitted young members of Cusco ritual dance associations (called comparsas) who performed dances from the “Altiplano” region against a coalition of civil, religious and “cultural” authorities who opposed that performance. These confrontations, which have continued into the early 1990s, demonstrated the relevance of comparsa performance and of state and private “cultural institutions” in the definition and redefinition of local and regional identity among Cusco “mestizos.” In particular, they made evident that these dances were being used by young mestizo cusqueños (people of Cusco), especially women, to construct a new public identity that contested the gender and “ethnic” stereotypes promoted by the cultural institutions. Here I will discuss in some detail the confrontations that emerged in, the town of San Jerónimo demonstrating how a “folkloric” institution such as the comparsa can become a site for transformation rather than conservation of cultural values and roles…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Pelo Malo (Bad Hair)

    Pelo Malo (Bad Hair)

    Sudaca Films
    2013
    Venezuela
    93 minutes
    color

    Written and Directed by Mariana Rondón
    Produced by Marité Ugás

    Starring

    Samuel Lange as Junior
    Samantha Castillo as Marta

    Junior is nine years old and has “bad hair.” He wants to have it straightened for his yearbook picture, like a fashionable pop singer. This puts him at odds with his mother Marta. The more Junior tries to look sharp and make his mother love him, the more she rejects him, until he is cornered, face to face with a painful decision.

    Director’s Note

    Bad Hair is the intimate story of a nine-year old child’s initiation to life and his difficult journey marked by intolerance.

    One of the first images that came to me for this movie was a large multi-family building and the thousands of stories that take place behind those walls: heat, nudity, precariousness, fragility, sensuality, sex, violence, family, mother, child. The little, intimate stories I imagined grew more complex and so my characters were born.

    They are helpless characters. Wounded and hurtful adults, and children who are learning how to hurt. Marta, the mother, focused on survival, teaches her son Junior to survive just like her, without resources, without freedom. But Junior is different, he fights with everything he’s got for his desire: to straighten his hair and to dress as a singer for a picture he wants to give his mother: a picture that would show him as he wishes to be seen.

    Caracas is also hostile to them, a city of urban, political and family violence. Dreams encapsulated in multi-family buildings- the result of Le Corbusier’s “Utopian city” project in the 50s—now turned into massive vertical hells.

    I want to talk about intolerance in a social context that is riddled with dogmas, which don’t embrace otherness, where public affairs extend to the private life of its’ inhabitants, highlighting their differences, be they social, political or sexual.

    For more information, click here.

  • Artists, Educators Laud Black Heritage In Dominican Republic

    Artists, Educators Laud Black Heritage In Dominican Republic

    The Associated Press
    2013-10-11

    Ezequiel Abiú López, Foreign Correspondent
    The Associated Press

    SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP) — In a school auditorium filled with laughing students, actresses Luz Bautista Matos and Clara Morel threw themselves into acting out a fairy tale complete with a princess, a hero and acts of derring-do.

    Morel had wrapped a white plastic sheet around her multi-colored blouse, while Bautista donned a brown paper bag over her blue tights. The two black actresses wore their hair free and natural, decorated only with single pink flowers.

    “Yes, you’re a princess,” said Bautista to Morel, who fretted that she didn’t look like a traditional princess with her dark complexion and hair. Bautista then turned to a young girl sitting in the front row, who shared the same African-descended features as both actresses. “And you too,” Morel said as the child smiled back at her.

    The theater group Wonderful Tree has visited schools all over Santo Domingo and some in the countryside to spread the word among black children that their features and heritage should be a source of pride. That message, though simple, has been nothing less than startling in this Caribbean country, where 80 percent of people are classified as mulattos, meaning they have mixed black-white ancestry, but where many still consider being labeled black an offense.

    Wonderful Tree represents a larger cultural movement that’s working to combat the country’s historic bias through arts and education. The Dominican choreographer Awilda Polanco runs a contemporary dance company that’s trying to rescue Afro-Caribbean traditions, while the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo has been training primary school teachers to respect and celebrate their students’ African heritage, including through skits that young children can more easily understand.

    It’s a bid to transform a color-obsessed society where a majority of the country’s 10 million people choose to identify themselves as “Indio” — or “Indian” — on government documents despite their black roots, and many reject afros in favor of closely cropped hair or sleek blowouts. Public schools for decades even prohibited students from attending classes with their hair loose or in a natural frizz.

    Such hair, in fact, is called “bad hair” in the local Spanish lexicon while straightened hair is “good hair.”…

    …Women in the Dominican Republic spend an estimated 12 percent of their household budgets on hair salons and treatments, according to “Good Hair, Bad Hair,” which included an economic and anthropological study of Dominican beauty salons.

    Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, who oversaw the killing of some 17,000 Haitians in 1937 in an effort to expel them from the Dominican Republic, was himself a mulatto who used makeup to make his face lighter.

    Trujillo was the first to include the term “Indio” in official documents, said historian Emilio Cordero Michel…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Despite Options on Census, Many to Check ‘Black’ Only

    Despite Options on Census, Many to Check ‘Black’ Only

    The New York Times
    2000-02-12

    Diana Jean Schemo

    This year’s new, racially inclusive census might have seemed tailor made for Michael Gelobter.

    The son of a white Jewish father and an African-Bermudan mother, Mr. Gelobter lives in Harlem with his wife, Sharron Williams, a black woman whose Caribbean background melds African and Indian influences. Creating their own cultural road map as they go, the couple embrace the range of their heritages and those of friends, marking Passover, for example, with an African-American Latino seder.

    But when the census invites Mr. Gelobter, for the first time, to name all the races that describe him, he will do what he has always done, and claim just one: black. Checking more than one race, he contends, would undermine the influence of blacks by reducing their number as a distinct group and so most likely diluting public policies addressing their concerns.

    The census forms that will be mailed to most Americans in April—the count began last month in Alaska, where the winter chill tends to keep people at home and easier to tally —offers a nod to the nation’s increasing diversity. No longer will the Census Bureau instruct respondents to ”select one” race to describe themselves. Instead, it will tell them to mark one or more of 14 boxes representing 6 races (and subcategories) that apply—white, black, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian Indian, other Asian and Pacific Islander—or to check ”some other race.”

    But like Mr. Gelobter, many people, indeed most, who could claim more than one race are not expected to do so, demographers and census officials say.

    Part of the reason, according to demographers, is habit: Americans are simply unaccustomed to the option. More profoundly, however, the change is fueling a weighty debate about the meaning of race, in which interpretations of history, politics and experience frequently overshadow the simpler matter of parentage.

    Thirty years after Loving v. Virginia struck down the last laws barring interracial marriage, the new change in the census and the ensuing controversy have become a barometer of the complexity of American attitudes toward race, and their contradictions. With the 6 racial categories offering 63 possible combinations of racial identity, which government demographers will tabulate as distinct groups, the census could provide a remarkably meticulous racial profile of American society.

    On one side of the debate stand those who see the revision as a tactic to divide blacks at a time when affirmative action and other remedies to discrimination are under attack. Opposing them are multiracial Americans who resent having to identify with just one part of their heritage.

    Apart from his perception that the change could diminish blacks’ influence, Mr. Gelobter, a 38-year-old professor of environmental policy at Rutgers University, said that claiming a multiracial identity would link him to a bitter, freighted history of privilege for blacks who could cite some white lineage.

    “Should Frederick Douglass have checked white and black?” Mr. Gelobter said. ”Should W. E. B. Du Bois have checked white and black? He practically looked white.”…

    …Kerry Ann Rockquemore, a sociologist at Pepperdine University, polled 250 college students who had one black parent and one white, and found that those reared in middle-class or affluent white neighborhoods tended to identify as biracial, while those who had grown up in black communities generally considered themselves black.

    How will nonblacks of mixed race answer the census? There is little more than anecdotal evidence. But some experts note that checking options like Asian and white, or American Indian and Pacific Islander, does not carry the same historical baggage that mixed-race blacks confront in deciding whether to say they are part white.

    Scott Wasmuth, who is white and has a Filipino wife, said that when he filled out the census in 1990, he ignored the one-race-only rule that then prevailed and checked both white and Asian to describe his daughters. This year he will do the same. ”People are beginning to say, ‘I’m a mixture, and I don’t have to choose one or the other,’ ” he said.

    Bertrand Wade, a 34-year-old industrial electronics technician from Brooklyn, wishes he could avoid descriptions altogether. His father is half-black and half-white, and his mother is East Indian and white.

    When applications ask his race and none of the boxes fit, Mr. Wade said, ”the first thing I feel is excluded; then sometimes I feel that I should not be in a position where I have to state my race.” He said that on the census, he would check all the boxes that describe his heritage.

    Charles Byrd, who runs a Web site called Inter Racial Voice, said, ”What we need to do as a country is get rid of these stupid boxes altogether.”

    On the 1990 census, about 10 million Americans seemed to agree. They did not identify themselves as members of any race, said Margo J. Anderson, author of ”The American Census: A Social History” (Yale University Press, 1988). Another quarter-million, ignoring the instructions, identified themselves as belonging to more than one race.

    Ms. Anderson said that ever since the first head count, in 1790, the census had played an important if subtle role in reflecting preoccupations and shaping social thought. It is only in the last century, though, that the government has devised questions to identify the country’s ethnic makeup. In the 1910 census, for instance, the government asked people their mother tongue, looking for Yiddish as the answer in order to tally the number of Jewish immigrants.

    ”The changes in questions always come about because of the social issues of the day,” Ms. Anderson said.

    Susan Graham, head of Project RACE, a civic group that unsuccessfully pushed for a separate ”multiracial” box for the census, said she wanted a single category that would accurately define her children.

    ”Think of when you open a newspaper and see pie charts,” she said. ”We wanted a slice of the pie that says ‘multiracial.’ ”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • A Fresh Face On Race

    A Fresh Face On Race

    The Hartford Courant
    Hartford, Connecticut
    2001-03-13

    Mike Swift, Courant Staff Writer

    The U.S. Census Bureau’s New Approach And The Latest Population Figures Could Mark ‘The Beginning Of The End Of Racial Classification In America.’

    The federal government Monday pegged the number of Americans who are of multiple races at 6.8 million—about twice the size of Connecticut’s population—as for the first time ever the U.S. Census identified people who belong to more than one racial category.

    Although their share of the U.S. population was a relatively small 2.4 percent, the population of people who claimed a multiple racial identity could have significance beyond their numbers in a society that diversified rapidly during the 1990s.

    “It’s really a major step,” said Kerry Rockquemore, a University of Connecticut professor who is writing a book called, “Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America.”

    “In the past, we’ve thought of race as being these mutually exclusive, biologically real categories that people fit into,” said Rockquemore, who is biracial herself. “And when you insert that option of `check all that apply,’ that blows that out of the water.”

    “Today,” said Charles Byrd, editor and publisher of The Interracial Voice, an Internet magazine for multiracial people, “was the beginning of the end of racial classification in America.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Race and ancestry in biomedical research: exploring the challenges

    Race and ancestry in biomedical research: exploring the challenges

    Genome Medicine 2009
    Volume 1, Number 8 (2009-01-21)
    DOI: 10.1186/gm8

    Timothy Caulfield
    Faculty of Law and School of Public Health Research, Health Law Institute
    University of Alberta

    Stephanie M Fullerton
    Department of Medical History and Ethics and Department of Genome Sciences
    University of Washington School of Medicine

    Sarah E Ali-Khan
    Program on Life Sciences Ethics and Policy, McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health, University Health Network
    University of Toronto

    Laura Arbour
    Faculty of Medicine, Island Medical Program
    University of British Columbia

    Esteban G. Burchard
    Department of Biopharmaceutical Sciences and Department of Medicine, Divisions of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pharmacogenetics, Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine, and Clinical Pharmacology
    University of California, San Francisco

    Richard S. Cooper
    Department of Epidemiology & Preventive Medicine, Stritch School of Medicine
    Loyola University

    Billie-Jo Hardy
    Program on Life Sciences Ethics and Policy, McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health, University Health Network
    University of Toronto

    Simrat Harry
    Faculty of Law and School of Public Health Research, Health Law Institute
    University of Alberta

    Robyn Hyde-Lay
    Genome Alberta, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

    Jonathan Kahn
    Hamline University School of Law

    Rick Kittles
    Department of Medicine, Section of Genetic Medicine, Department of Human Genetics
    University of Chicago

    Barbara A. Koenig
    Program in Professionalism & Bioethics
    Mayo College of Medicine

    Sandra S. J. Lee
    Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics
    Stanford University Medical School

    Michael Malinowski
    Paul M Hebert Law Center
    Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

    Vardit Ravitsky
    Department of Medical Ethics and Center for Bioethics
    University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

    Pamela Sankar
    Department of Medical Ethics and Center for Bioethics
    University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

    Stephen W. Scherer
    for Applied Genomics, The Hospital for Sick Children, and Department of Molecular Genetics
    University of Toronto

    Béatrice Séguin
    Leslie Dan School of Pharmacy; Program on Life Sciences Ethics and Policy, McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health, University Health Network
    University of Toronto

    Darren Shickle
    Leeds Institute of Health Sciences,
    University of Leeds, United Kingdom

    Guilherme Suarez-Kurtz
    Pharmacology Division
    Instituto Nacional de Câncer, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Abdallah S. Daar
    Program on Life Sciences Ethics and Policy, McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health, University Health Network; Department of Public Health Sciences and of Surgery; McLaughlin Centre for Molecular Medicine; Department of Medicine
    University of Toronto

    The use of race in biomedical research has, for decades, been a source of social controversy. However, recent events, such as the adoption of racially targeted pharmaceuticals, have raised the profile of the race issue. In addition, we are entering an era in which genomic research is increasingly focused on the nature and extent of human genetic variation, often examined by population, which leads to heightened potential for misunderstandings or misuse of terms concerning genetic variation and race. Here, we draw together the perspectives of participants in a recent interdisciplinary workshop on ancestry and health in medicine in order to explore the use of race in research issue from the vantage point of a variety of disciplines. We review the nature of the race controversy in the context of biomedical research and highlight several challenges to policy action, including restrictions resulting from commercial or regulatory considerations, the difficulty in presenting precise terminology in the media, and drifting or ambiguous definitions of key terms.

    Correspondence

    Recent advances in biomedical research promise increasing insights into complex contributions to traits and diseases, and there is hope that these will lead to global health benefits [1,2] . Analytical and social-justice considerations both recommend thoughtful assessment of the role of social identity, particularly racial or ethnic identity, in the design, conduct and dissemination of clinical and basic science research. Controversies ranging from James Watson’s comments on racial differences in intelligence [3] to the adoption of racially targeted pharmaceuticals, such as the African-American heart-failure drug BiDil [4-7] , remind us that use of the concept of race in biomedical research can have far-reaching, often unanticipated social consequences.

    The problem of race in scientific research is not a new one, and the issue seems to perpetually reappear and remain fundamentally unresolved [8] . We are, however, entering a new era in which the fruits of initiatives, such as the Human Genome Project [9,10] , the International Haplotype Map Project [11] , and the recently proposed 1000 Genomes Project [12] , promise to elaborate more fully than ever before the nature and extent of human genetic variation and its relation to social identity. A recent interdisciplinary workshop, ‘Ancestry in health and medicine; expanding the debate’, hosted by the Alberta Health Law Institute and the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health, in Toronto, Canada, sought to debate the current status and concerns surrounding these new scientific data, how we relate genetic variation to individual and population-level differences in observable traits, and what this might mean for the effective addressing of significant disparities in health status and disease. A central motivating consideration was how best to secure the anticipated benefits of genetic and related forms of biomedical research in the face of inevitable misunderstandings or misuse concerning genetic variation and race.

    Here, we draw together the perspectives of the scholars who participated in the workshop, who have considered the race issue from the vantage point of a variety of disciplines: anthropology, bioethics, clinical medicine, ethical, social, cultural studies, genetic epidemiology, genome sciences, global heath research, law and the social sciences. We review the nature of the race controversy in the context of biomedical research and highlight several challenges to policy action…

    Read the entire correspondence here.