Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Both men said [Trevor] Noah distinguished himself from other comics by resisting labels and “genre-based comedy.” [Schalk] Bezuidenhout noted that Noah always identified himself as a mixed-race South African raised in straitened circumstances in Soweto without “using it as a crutch.” Contemporaries who have shared the stage with him say he’s unusually attuned to the audience, shifting direction based on the feel in the room, and Bezuidenhout has seen Noah drop chunks of material based on the city he’s performing in. This was a quality that a number of immigrants in South Africa had already mentioned to me. Omega Chembhere, a waiter, told me that when he had arrived from Zimbabwe 10 years earlier, much of South African pop culture had seemed inaccessible. “Trevor’s different, so good at it,” he said. “His strength is that everything springs from his experience in life, but you understand his reality because he makes an effort to explain.”

Douglas Foster, “Trevor Noah’s World,” The Atlantic, April 5, 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/trevor-noah-world-south-africa-comedy/389697.

Racial Labels Have Limited Use In Personalizing Medicine

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, United States on 2012-10-05 02:59Z by Steven

Racial Labels Have Limited Use In Personalizing Medicine

Shots: NPR’s Health Blog
2011-05-09

Eliza Barclay

For all the fanfare around personalized medicine, the idea has been fairly slow to take off.

Boosters have said if doctors had a patient’s DNA information it would be revolutionary: They could look for genetic risk of certain diseases or mutations that determine whether certain drugs are likely to work or not.

The cost of DNA sequencing keeps falling, yet genetic sequencing for medical use isn’t commonplace. In the meantime, doctors can, in theory, consider a patient’s race in anticipating health conditions that could pose a higher risk.

But a study published recently in PLoS One suggests that using race as a stand in for truly personalized genetic information may not work, especially in the most diverse cities (like New York and Los Angeles) that attract immigrants from around the world.

There’s a lot of genetic variability among races. And the genetic risk profiles for many people with mixed ancestry don’t fit neatly into any category…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Eliza Barclay, National Public Radio, NRP, Shots: NPR's Health Blog

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Mixed Race Studies

Racial Labels Have Limited Use In Personalizing Medicine

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