Mixed Race Studies

Antlers, glass mark exhibit of California sculptor in College Park

Gazette.Net: Maryland Community News Online
Gaithersburg, Maryland
2013-09-12

Virginia Terhune, Staff writer

Always looking for new materials, Los Angeles sculptor Alison Saar heard that an organization she knew needed to sell a pile of antlers cast off by deer in Montana. So she bought 200 pairs.

Eager to work with glass, she spent time at the Pilchuck Glass School near Seattle learning about the medium’s malleable properties and how to incorporate them into her work.

Both antlers and glass are integral to the 11 sculptures in her exhibit “Still …” coming to the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park.

In the exhibit, Saar, who is biracial, explores issues of racial identity and bigotry as well as sexism, ageism and love and loss…

…In “Black Lightning” (a play on the slang term “white lightning”), Saar presents a charred stool, a mop, a bucket and a set of glass boxing gloves hanging from a pole and filled with a liquid tinged with red.

She said it’s about black men and the futures once thought suitable for them — to work as a janitor or a boxer but not to work as a president.

Hateful comments about Obama also stirred up her own feelings about being biracial in a culture where often neither black nor white groups accept you as their own.

In “50 Proof,” Saar presents a metal stand holding a basin filled with a dark liquid. Tubing runs through the basin up through a glass heart and into a clear glass head that is half filled with the dark liquid, which drips from the eyes as tears.

“It’s about the theme of the ‘tragic mulatto,’ about being between two worlds, about feeling compelled to align myself,” she said…

Read the entire article here.

I consider racialized medicine to be the inappropriate use of racial categories in medical practice and drug development. It often involves constructing practices around mistaken assumptions of some innate genetic difference among racial groups. For me, the important issue is not whether to use race in biomedicine, but how to use it–and when. There are very real health disparities in the country that are based on a long history of social, economic, and legal practices that have consistently and deliberately subordinated groups of people based on their race. As a social and historical phenomenon the health impacts of race are very real and can only be addressed by taking race into account. The key is to recognize that in these contexts it is the social and historical practices of racism that have become manifest in racialized bodies as the very real biological differences of health disparities. That is, it is history and culture that has created these biological differences in the incidence of disease across racial groups–not genes. —Jonathan Kahn

“An Interview with Race in a Bottle author Jonathan Kahn,” Columbia University Press, (January 16, 2013). http://www.cupblog.org/?p=8710.

What’s Wrong with Race-Based Medicine?: Genes, Drugs, and Health Disparities

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology
Volume 12, Issue 1 (Winter 2011)
pages 1-21

Dorothy E. Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

In June 2005, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a historic decision: it approved the first pharmaceutical indicated for a specific race. BiDil, a combination drug that relaxes the blood vessels, was authorized to treat heart failure in self-identified black patients. BiDil had been tested in the African-American Heart Failure Trial (A-HeFT) launched in 2001. A-HeFT enrolled 1,050 subjects suffering from advanced heart failure, all self-identified African Americans. A-HeFT showed that BiDil worked; in fact, it worked so spectacularly that the trial was stopped ahead of schedule. BiDil in-creased survival by an astonishing 43 percent. Hospitalizations were reduced by 39 percent. It was a momentous accomplishment for Jay Cohn, the University of Minnesota cardiologist who invented BiDil and had pioneered vasodilators as an important treatment for heart failure.

Given evidence of BiDil’s efficacy, but little evidence that race mattered to its efficacy, the FDA should have made one of two decisions: reject the request for race-specific approval or approve BiDil for all heart failure patients, regardless of race. Instead, the FDA put race at the center of its decision, sparking controversy and paving the way for a new generation of racial medicines.

No one is complaining that BiDil is available to people who will benefit from it. The problem is that BiDil was made available on the basis of race. Its racial label elicited three types of criticism: scientific, commercial, and political. I will discuss the first two controversies en route to what I consider the main problem with race-based medicine, its political implications. By claiming that race, a political grouping, is important to the marketing of drugs and that race-based drugs can reduce health disparities, which are caused primarily by social inequality, those who promote racialized medicine have made it a political issue. Yet, having made these political claims, these very advocates answer criticism by saying that we must put aside social justice concerns in order to improve minority health. This article explains why marketing pharmaceuticals on the basis of race is more likely to worsen racial inequities than cure them…

Read the entire article here.

But blackness also points to a history of mixed racialization that, although always acknowledged among blacks, is rarely understood or seen among other groups. I have argued elsewhere, for instance, that to add the claim of “mixture” to blacks in both American continents would be redundant, because blacks are their primary “mixed” populations to begin with. Mixture among blacks, in particular, functions as an organizing aesthetic, as well as a tragic history. On the aesthetic level, it signifies the divide between beauty and ugliness. On the social level, the divide is between being just and unjust, virtuous and vicious; “fair skin” is no accidental, alternative term for “light skin.” And on the historical level, the divide signifies concerns that often are denied.

Lewis R. Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997). 57.

An Inconvenient Truth: “Hispanic” is an ethnic origin, not a “race”

National Institute for Latino Policy, Inc.
2013-08-24

Nancy López, Guest Commentator and Associate Professor of Sociology
University of New Mexico

Kenneth Prewitt’s provocative August 21st New York Times commentary calls us to “fix the census archaic racial categories.” He contends that the current national statistical system is untenable because it has not kept pace with post-1965 demographic shifts. However, it is puzzling that while Dr. Prewitt chides the Census for conflating race and nationality, he proceeds to do just that.

His solution is to ask two new questions: “One based on a streamlined version of today’s ethnic and racial categories/’ and a second, separate comprehensive nationality question. This recommendation would effectively conflate race with ethnic origin as if these were one and the same thing. But the inconvenient truth is that knowing a person’s ethnicity, (for example, their cultural background, nationality or ancestry), tells you nothing about their race or their social position in society that is usually related to the meanings assigned to a conglomeration of one’s physical traits, including skin color and facial features.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Dr. Prewitt’s recommendation for a streamlined version of today’s ethnic and racial categories is his proposal to make Hispanics a “race.” He points to the fact that 37% of Hispanics marked “some other race” in the 2010 Census race question as proof that the question is flawed. But could it be that it is that many Hispanics or Latinos occupy an in-between racial status that precludes them from being readily identified as white, black, Asian or Native American in the U.S. context?…

Read the entire article here.

Never-Ending Story

The New York Times
2013-09-27

A. O. Scott, Chief Film Critic

‘Conversation About Race’ Has Not Brought Cultural Consensus

The “conversation about race” that public figures periodically claim to desire, the one that is always either about to happen or is being prevented from happening, has been going on, at full volume, at least since the day in 1619 when the first African slaves arrived in Jamestown. It has proceeded through every known form of discourse — passionate speeches, awkward silences, angry rants, sheepish whispers, jokes, insults, stories and songs — and just as often through double-talk, indirection and not-so-secret codes.

What are we really talking about, though? The habit of referring to it as “race” reflects a tendency toward euphemism and abstraction. Race is a biologically dubious concept and a notoriously slippery social reality, a matter of group identity and personal feelings, mutual misunderstandings and the dialectic of giving and taking offense. If that is what we are talking about, then we are not talking about the historical facts that continue to weigh heavily on present circumstances, which is to say about slavery, segregation and white supremacy.

But of course we are still talking about all that, with what seems like renewed concentration and vigor. Nor, in a year that is the sesquicentennial of the Gettysburg Address and the semicentennial of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, are we simply looking back at bygone tragedies from the standpoint of a tranquil present. The two big racially themed movies of the year, “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” and Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave,” are notable for the urgency and intensity with which they unpack stories of the past, as if delivering their news of brutal bondage and stubborn discrimination for the first time…

Read the entire article here.

Some Critical Thoughts on the Census Bureau’s Proposals to Change the Race and Hispanic Questions

National Institute for Latino Policy, Inc.
2013-01-10

Nancy López, Guest Commentator and Associate Professor of Sociology
University of New Mexico

As a sociologist of racial, ethnic and gender stratification, I applaud the Census Bureau’s ongoing efforts to examine how we can collect race and ethnicity data that address our increasingly complex and changing demographics for generations to come. Among the key recommendations of their 2010 Alternative Questionnaire Experiment (AQE) Report is a call for further testing of the combined race and Hispanic origin question format.

Accordingly, the Census will continue testing questionnaire formats that include Hispanic as a racial category (the first and only time that a specific Hispanic origin group was included in the U.S. Census was in 1930 when “Mexican” was included as a racial group). Including Hispanic as a racial category is a significant departure from current Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines that require that Hispanic Origin (ethnicity) is asked as a separate question from Race (racial status). It is important to note that since 2000, individuals may mark one or more race (but only one Hispanic ethnicity).

While the Census engages in further testing and refinement of questionnaire formats for race and ethnicity data collection, it is important that we consider why we collect and analyze race and ethnicity data in the first place: the focus is to assess our progress in Civil Rights enforcement. Data collection on race and ethnicity is used by federal, state and local agencies to monitor discrimination and segregation in housing (Fair Housing Act), labor market participation (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), political participation (Voting Rights Act, Redistricting), educational attainment (Department of Education), health (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), and criminal Justice (Department of Justice), among other policy areas…

Read the entire commentary here.