{"id":59788,"date":"2020-06-23T17:55:05","date_gmt":"2020-06-23T17:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=59788"},"modified":"2020-06-23T17:55:08","modified_gmt":"2020-06-23T17:55:08","slug":"how-should-i-think-about-race-when-considering-a-sperm-donor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=59788","title":{"rendered":"How Should I Think About Race When Considering a Sperm Donor?"},"content":{"rendered":"

How Should I Think About Race When Considering a Sperm Donor?<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Ethicist<\/a>
\nThe New York Times Magazine<\/a>
\n2020-06-16<\/p>\n

Kwame Anthony Appiah<\/strong><\/a>, Professor of Philosophy, Law
\nNew York University<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nIllustration by Tomi Um<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n

I am an American woman, of Ashkenazi Jewish<\/a> ancestry, and I strive to live my life as an active agent against racism and white supremacy. I am beginning to consider having children and am open to bearing a child as a single mother. It is possible to sort through sperm donors by race, eye color, education level and so on. If I choose a donor of color, am I condemning my child to be born into a system designed not to serve them? Or can I use my white privilege to help them fight that system? Would my future child of color feel separated from their heritage with me as their mother? If I choose a white donor, am I succumbing to racist ideas of what traits are \u201cdesirable,\u201d or taking the \u201ceasy road\u201d in knowing my child will look more like me? What do you think?<\/em> Name Withheld<\/p>\n

Women have been<\/strong> making choices about their children\u2019s possible appearance and identity from the beginning of human history. Long before genetics, people knew that parental characteristics show up in their offspring. With modern technologies, the prospects for trying to fix your child\u2019s heritable characteristics are expanding, raising plenty of ethical issues. Race, however, is not a biological fact but a social fact \u2014 a social fact that, for example, Americans who are known to have African ancestry are regarded as African-American. What\u2019s more, having an African-American donor doesn\u2019t tell you what your child\u2019s skin or hair will look like. You can be socially black without looking black, like Walter White<\/a>, the longtime head of the N.A.A.C.P.<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m spelling all this out because your question about having a child with a sperm donor of color presupposes that it will produce a child who won\u2019t look \u201cwhite,\u201d and that\u2019s not necessarily the case. Suppose you have a white-looking son with an African-American sperm donor. Then you and your child will have a choice to make about whether he or she should identify as African-American. Some people think that failing to do so \u2014 \u201cpassing for white<\/a>\u201d \u2014 is somehow dishonest. Yet to hold that you must identify as black in those circumstances would be to accede to a longstanding American notion (\u201cthe one-drop rule<\/a>\u201d) that one black ancestor makes you black. You could reasonably reject that notion, which is rooted in the history of slavery and the nonsensical racial theories that grew up with it…<\/p>\n

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

If I choose a donor of color, am I condemning my child to be born into a system designed not to serve them? Or can I use my white privilege to help them fight that system?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,414,2039,8,6941,20],"tags":[2640,8894,22839,2327,13109],"class_list":["post-59788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-family","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","category-philosophy","category-usa","tag-new-york-times","tag-new-york-times-magazine","tag-the-ethicist","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times-magazine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59788","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=59788"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59790,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59788\/revisions\/59790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}