Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

He [George Schuyler] was a man of contradictions. For someone so utterly unsentimental and sternly rational about race and blackness, he indulged his wife’s [Josephine Cogdell] strange neoessentialist belief in “hybrid vigor”—that is, her belief that their daughter’s racial fusion of black and white represented the birth of a new, superior race. With Schuyler’s help, his wife turned their only daughter into a social experiment, raising Philippa on a scientifically prepared diet of raw meat, unpasteurized milk, and castor oil, and keeping her in near isolation from other children. The child’s strange upbringing was both a raging success and a terrible failure. Philippa learned to read at two, became an accomplished pianist at four, and a composer by five. She was a child celebrity, a kind of black Shirley Temple with a high IQ who became the subject of scores of articles in publications such as Time, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was roundly hailed as a genius. There is a poignant moment in Kathryn Talalay’s biography of Philippa Schuyler, Composition in Black and White, when Philippa is thirteen and her parents finally show her the detailed scrapbook they’ve been keeping about her upbringing and career—notes and articles they’ve been keeping diligently over the years. Philippa, rather than being touched, was horrified to realize, with sudden clarity, all the ways she’d been her parents’ social experiment and “puppet.” In the years that followed, she grew increasingly disillusioned with America, her own blackness, and the musical career of her youth. Like a character out of Black No More, she eventually changed her name and began to pass as white—as an Iberian-American named Filipa Montera. She spent most of her adult life overseas, still playing music, but less seriously, and trying to find herself in various romantic affairs. She eventually tried to reinvent herself as an international journalist and children’s advocate, and in 1967 she died in a helicopter crash while attempting to evacuate war orphans out of Vietnam.

Danzy Senna, “George Schuyler: An Afrofuturist Before His Time,” The New York Review of Books, January 19, 2018. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/19/george-schuyler-an-afrofuturist-before-his-time/.

Race Is Often Used as Medical Shorthand for How Bodies Work. Some Doctors Want to Change That.

Posted in Articles, Audio, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, United States on 2022-06-21 14:28Z by Steven

Race Is Often Used as Medical Shorthand for How Bodies Work. Some Doctors Want to Change That.

KHN (Kaiser Health News)
2022-06-13

Rae Ellen Bichell, Colorado Correspondent

Cara Anthony, Midwest Correspondent

When Pat Holterman-Hommes read in 2021 that her former colleague, Alphonso Harried, was waiting for a kidney transplant, she wanted to see if she could donate one. *(Joe Martinez for KHN)*

SciFri · Some Doctors Want To Change How Race Is Used In Medicine

Several months ago, a lab technologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital mixed the blood components of two people: Alphonso Harried, who needed a kidney, and Pat Holterman-Hommes, who hoped to give him one.

The goal was to see whether Harried’s body would instantly see Holterman-Hommes’ organ as a major threat and attack it before surgeons could finish a transplant. To do that, the technologist mixed in fluorescent tags that would glow if Harried’s immune defense forces would latch onto the donor’s cells in preparation for an attack. If, after a few hours, the machine found lots of glowing, it meant the kidney transplant would be doomed. It stayed dark: They were a match.

“I was floored,” said Harried…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Alphonso Harried, Barnes-Jewish Hospital, Barry Freedman, Cara Anthony, Kaiser Family Foundation, Kaiser Health News, Keith Norris, KFF, KHN, Lisa McElroy, Marva Moxey-Mims, Missouri, Nwamaka Eneanya, Pat Holterman-Hommes, Rae Ellen Bichell, St. Louis, Tanjala Purnell, Tarek Alhamad, Vanessa Grubbs

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Mixed Race Studies

Race Is Often Used as Medical Shorthand for How Bodies Work. Some Doctors Want to Change That.

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