Mixed Race Studies

[Jennifer] Cramblett in effect sued [in Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank] for ‘wrongful racism’; she did not receive the whiteness bargained for and so sued under terms suggesting she is due compensation for the fact—not that there is racism—but that she now has to deal with it personally. One might question, for example, why the couple supposedly didn’t feel any qualms about raising a white child in a town that is “too racially intolerant.” ‘Wrongful birth’s’ transition into the realm of race significantly marks a recognition of the social, political, and environmental issues sustaining racism and its associated harms, but the problem here is the site of redress—the white mothers—rather than the environment lending credence to their case in the first place. Cramblett describes a personal loss that relies on structural analyses to articulate, all the while refusing to vilify those structures as problems in themselves.

Desiree Valentine, “Women in Philosophy: Cramblett, Race, Disability, and Liberatory Politics,” Blog of the APA, August 14, 2019. https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/08/14/women-in-philosophy-cramblett-race-disability-and-liberatory-politics/.

Women in Philosophy: Cramblett, Race, Disability, and Liberatory Politics

Blog of the APA
The American Philosophical Association
2019-08-14

Desiree Valentine, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

In October of 2014, news outlets began reporting on a case of a lesbian couple suing a sperm bank for receiving the wrong donor’s sperm. As the lawsuit Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank alleged, not only did the couple receive the wrong donor’s sperm, but they had specifically chosen a white donor with blonde hair and blue eyes and the sperm they received had been from a black donor. Both women were white. The couple gave birth to a black/mixed-race child in 2012 and claimed that their daughter’s race posed particular challenges for their family, from facing prejudice in their nearly all-white community to difficulties dealing with their daughter’s hair. The couple sued for “wrongful birth” and “breach of warranty,” citing emotional and economic difficulties.

Clearly, there are legal issues at stake—the particular sperm bank was negligent in their handling of the transaction. But the claim of ‘wrongful birth’ brings up myriad sociopolitical and ethical concerns as well. Effectively, the plaintiff was alleging that her daughter’s blackness generated emotional suffering and economic burdens for Cramblett, and moreover, that she should be compensated for ‘damages’.

Unsurprisingly, many commentators reacted with outrage, disbelief, and dismay—outrage that a mother would sue on account of having a non-white, but healthy child, disbelief that this claim could even be legally articulable, and dismay at the fact that one day this child would learn that her mother implicitly claimed that she should have never been born because she was black/mixed race.

While obviously problematic (the case was thrown out by an Illinois Circuit Court Judge in 2015), the fact that this case was legally and thus on some level, socially and culturally intelligible, sets the stage for an array of philosophical interventions. For my purposes here, I’ll focus primarily on the problems and possibilities of various conceptualizations of race and disability that are illuminated by a politically-aware and historically-situated reading of Cramblett…

Read the entire article here.