{"id":42370,"date":"2015-08-24T02:14:19","date_gmt":"2015-08-24T02:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=42370"},"modified":"2015-08-24T02:14:19","modified_gmt":"2015-08-24T02:14:19","slug":"biological-determinism-and-racial-essentialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=42370","title":{"rendered":"Biological Determinism and Racial Essentialism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Biological Determinism and Racial Essentialism<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science<\/a>
\nVolume 661, Number 1, September 2015<\/a>
\npages 8-22
\nDOI: 10.1177\/0002716215591476<\/a><\/p>\n

W. Carson Byrd<\/a><\/strong>, Assistant Professor of Pan-African Studies
\nUniversity of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky<\/em><\/p>\n

Matthew W. Hughey<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Sociology
\nUniversity of Connecticut<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In August 2012, nine months after being artificially inseminated<\/a> using a sperm donation from the Midwest Sperm Bank<\/a> of Downers Grove, Illinois<\/a>, a white Ohio<\/a> woman named Jennifer Cramblett gave birth to a racially \u201cmixed\u201d and healthy baby girl named Payton. Despite the triumph, the woman soon filed a \u201cwrongful birth\u201d suit in Cook County Circuit Court<\/a>, alleging that the sperm bank gave her sperm vials from an African American donor instead of a white donor, which in turn caused \u201cpersonal injuries .\u2009.\u2009. pain, suffering, emotional distress and other economic and non-economic losses\u201d (Circuit Court 2014, 8). The lawsuit states \u201cthat they now live each day with fears, anxieties and uncertainty about her future and Payton\u2019s future\u201d (Circuit Court 2014, 6).<\/p>\n

The supposed racial mismatch between parent and child in Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank<\/em><\/a> reveals the presence of two powerful belief systems that haunt both the popular imagination and stalk the scientific landscape: the notions of \u201cbiological determinism\u201d (that race is genetically inherited) and \u201cracial essentialism\u201d (that group-based biology maps to basic social behaviors). Together, biological determinism and racial essentialism form the \u201cideological double helix\u201d that intertwines to shape beliefs about race and inequality and influence the theoretical approaches, analytic strategies, and interpretations taken by scholars conducting biomedical and social scientific research. The suit turns on the assumption that varied racial groups have bounded and characteristically unique arrangements of genetic material: as the complaint contends, \u201cTheir desire was to find a donor with genetic traits similar to both of them\u201d (Circuit Court 2014, 2\u20133). Such devotion to racial essentialism motivates a belief that the two white parents in this case are more similar to each other (because of their shared \u201cwhiteness\u201d) than they are to their child (because of an unknown \u201cblack\u201d father), even though the…<\/p>\n

Read or purchase the article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Biological Determinism and Racial Essentialism The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science Volume 661, Number 1, September 2015 pages 8-22 DOI: 10.1177\/0002716215591476 W. Carson Byrd, Assistant Professor of Pan-African Studies University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky Matthew W. Hughey, Professor of Sociology University of Connecticut In August 2012, nine months after being […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2039,1467,8,394,20],"tags":[11276,20807,5488,17990,12233,12234,18094,1483,20806],"class_list":["post-42370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-law","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-annals-of-the-american-academy-of-political-and-social-science","tag-cramblett-v-midwest-sperm-bank","tag-illinois","tag-jennifer-cramblett","tag-matthew-hughey","tag-matthew-w-hughey","tag-midwest-sperm-bank","tag-the-annals-of-the-american-academy-of-political-and-social-science","tag-w-carson-byrd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42370"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42371,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42370\/revisions\/42371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}