Mixed Race Studies

Dismantling the Race Myth

Kyoto International Conference Center
Kyoto, Japan
2012-12-15 through 2012-12-16

Poster (PDF, Japanese)

Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University presents International Symposium.
 
“Race” still has social reality even though it has no biological reality. This symposium aims to dismantle the race myth by bringing together scholars in a wide range of disciplines from Japan and abroad. While race studies have hitherto been confined to trans-Atlantic experiences, we will shed lights on “invisibility,” “ambiguity,” and “in-between-ness” with special reference to Japanese and Asian experiences.

Schedule

• Saturday, December 15, 2012
  • Part I. Invisibility: Representation of Invisible Race
    • Takashi Fujitani (Toronto University) / Appearances Can Be Deceiving: Tennosei, Global Modernity, and the Anxieties of Ocular-centric Racism
    • Ayako Saito (Meiji Gakuin University) / Note on the Film Representation of the “Hisabetsu Burakumin”
    • Joong-Seop Kim (Gyeongsang National University) / The Formation of an Invisible Race: the case of the Korean “Paekjong”
    • Ariela Gross (University of Southern California) / Laws of Blood: The Science and Performance of Race in U.S. Courtrooms
    • Relay Talk and Poster Session by Junior Researchers
    • Social Hour
• Sunday, December 16, 2012
  • Part II. Knowledge: Co-production of Science and Society
    • Arnaud Nanta (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) / Critique on the Idea of “Race” in French Anthropology, 1930s-1940s
    • Wataru Kusaka (Kyoto University) / American Colonial Public Health and the Leprosy Patients’ Revolt: Discipline and Desire on Culion Island, Philippines
    • Miho Ishii (Kyoto University) / Blood, Gifts, and “Community” in India: Betwixt and Between Marking and Anonymisation
    • Yasuko Takezawa (Kyoto University), Kazuto Kato (Osaka University), Hiroki Oota (Kitazato University) / Population Descriptors in Genetic Studies and Biomedicine
  • Part III. Hybridity: Beyond the Politics of “Blood”
    • Ryuichi Narita (Japan Women’s University) / Politics of “Mixed Race” in Modern Japan
    • Mika Ko (Rikkyo University) / Cinematic Representations of “Mixed-Race” People in 1930s Japanese Cinema: The Two Faces of Japan’s Modernity
    • Masako Kudo (Kyoto Women’s University) / Border-crossing and Identity Construction by Children of Japanese-Pakistani Marriage
    • Duncan Williams (University of Southern California) / Japan and Its Global Mixed Race History

This is part of a joint research project, a Japan-based Global Study of Racial Representations with Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S). The organizers are grateful to Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for its sponsorship of this event. We are also thankful to Science Council of Japan for their support.

For more information, click here.

Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age

Columbia University Press
December, 2012
336 pages
Charts: 4, B&W Illus.: 1
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-16298-2

Jonathan Kahn, Professor of Law
Hamline University, Saint Paul, Minnesota

At a ceremony announcing the completion of the first draft of the human genome in 2000, President Bill Clinton declared, “I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.” Yet despite this declaration of unity, biomedical research has focused increasingly on mapping that .1 percent of difference, particularly as it relates to race.

This trend is exemplified by the drug BiDil. Approved by the FDA in 2005 as the first drug with a race-specific indication on its label, BiDil was originally touted as a pathbreaking therapy to treat heart failure in black patients and help underserved populations. Upon closer examination, however, Jonathan Kahn reveals a far more complex story. At the most basic level, BiDil became racial through legal maneuvering and commercial pressure as much as through medical understandings of how the drug worked. Using BiDil as a central case study, Kahn broadly examines the legal and commercial imperatives driving the expanding role of race in biomedicine, even as scientific advances in genomics could render the issue irrelevant. He surveys the distinct politics informing the use of race in medicine and the very real health disparities caused by racism and social injustice that are now being cast as a mere function of genetic difference. Calling for a more reasoned approach to using race in biomedical research and practice, Kahn asks readers to recognize that, just as genetics is a complex field requiring sensitivity and expertise, so too is race, particularly in the field of biomedicine.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION: Race and Medicine: Framing [Is] the Problem
• 1. ORGANIZING RACE: Paths Toward the Re-Biologization of Race in Modern Biomedical Research, Practice, and Product Development
• 2. THE BIRTH OF BIDIL: How a Drug Becomes “Ethnic”
• 3. STATISTICAL MISCHIEF AND RACIAL FRAMES FOR DRUG DEVELOPMENT AND MARKETING
• 4. CAPITALIZING [ON] RACE IN DRUG DEVELOPMENT
• 5. RACE-ING PATENTS/PATENTING RACE: An Emerging Political Geography of Intellectual Property in Biotechnology
• 6. NOT FADE AWAY: The Persistence of Race and the Politics of the “Meantime” in Pharmacogenomics
• 7. FROM DISPARITY TO DIFFERENCE: The Politics of Racial Medicine
• CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
• Notes
• Index

Angry Black White Boy or The Miscegenation of Macon Detornay: A Novel

Random House
2005-03-08
352 pages
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4000-5487-9

Adam Mansbach

From the acclaimed author of Shackling Water comes the first great race novel of the twenty-first century, an incendiary and ruthlessly funny satire about violence, pop culture, and American identity.

Macon Detornay is a suburban white boy possessed and politicized by black culture, and filled with rage toward white America. After moving to New York City for college, Macon begins robbing white passengers in his taxicab, setting off a manhunt for the black man presumed to be committing the crimes. When his true identity is revealed, Macon finds himself to be a celebrity and makes use of the spotlight to hold forth on the evils and invisibility of whiteness. Soon he launches the Race Traitor Project, a stress-addled collective that attracts guilty liberals, wannabe gangstas, and bandwagon riders from all over the country to participate in a Day of Apology—a day set aside for white people to make amends for four hundred years of oppression. The Day of Apology pushes New York City over the edge into an epic riot, forcing Macon to confront the depth of his own commitment to the struggle.

Peopled with all manner of race pimps and players, Angry Black White Boy is a stunning breakout book from a critically acclaimed young writer and should be required reading for anyone who wants to get under the skin of the complexities of identity in America.

Read Chapter One here.

Did one-drop rules have a positive side?

Cable News Network (CNN)
Black in America: A Soledad O’Brien Report
2012-12-05

Soledad O’Brien, Host
 
Ethnographer and professor Dr. Yaba Blay explains why she thinks the one-drop rule has a positive side.

[Transcription by Steven F. Riley]

Soledad O’Brien: Why do so many black people—me included—embrace the “one-drop rule” when it really, literally, has its roots in terrible things?

Yaba Blay: Again, I think because the “one-drop rule,” in as much as it was oppressive, protected us.  It gave us an identity in the same way that when we talk about white parents of mixed-race kids, you know, and you’ll hear a lot of white parents say, “oh my child can choose to be whatever they want to be.” And then you see the child struggling. That there’s some comfort and there’s some strength that comes with being told what you are. And so I think the “one-drop rule” gave us a definition of blackness that was unquestionable. There was no space to be mixed-race, biracial, any of these things. And from that, we were able to mobilize, right, in the fight against Jim Crow; in the fight against segregation; in the fight against racism. That, again it gave us the parameters for what our community ultimately was.

Laylah Ali’s show both confounds and mesmerizes

The Boston Globe
2012-02-19

Sebastian Smee,  Art Critic

Laylah Ali is an artist to reckon with. Any opportunity to see her work should not be missed, and for the next two weeks, the Jaffe-Friede Gallery, a small college gallery a short walk from the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, is offering just such an opportunity.

Born in 1968, Ali grew up in Buffalo and lives in Williamstown. She has been an artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College this winter. But the current show of drawings in pencil and black ink is the fruit of an earlier period. All were made between 2005 and 2007.

They show Ali’s inimitable cast of two-dimensional characters, many of them missing arms and other anatomical parts, some of them solo, others in groups of two or three. They are of indeterminate sex and indeterminate race. But all have extra features – strange encumbrances that resemble humps, hoods, headdresses, horns, turbans, goggles, burkas, and beards…

Read the entire review here.

How the United States Racializes Latinos: White Hegemony and Its Consequences

Paradigm Publishers
May 2009
264 pages
6″ x 9″
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-59451-598-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59451-599-6

Edited by

José A. Cobas, Emeritus Professor of Sociology
Arizona State University

Jorge Duany, Professor of Anthropology
University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras

Joe R. Feagin, Ella C. McFadden Professor of Sociology
Texas A&M University

Mexican and Central American undocumented immigrants, as well as U.S. citizens such as Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans, have become a significant portion of the U.S. population. Yet the U.S. government, mainstream society, and radical activists characterize this rich diversity of peoples and cultures as one group alternatively called “Hispanics,” “Latinos,” or even the pejorative “illegals.” How has this racializing of populations engendered governmental policies, police profiling, economic exploitation, and even violence that afflict these groups?

From a variety of settings—New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Central America, Cuba—this book explores this question in considering both the national and international implications of U.S. policy. Its coverage ranges from legal definitions and practices to popular stereotyping by the public and the media, covering such diverse topics as racial profiling, workplace discrimination, mob violence, treatment at border crossings, barriers to success in schools, and many more. It shows how government and social processes of racializing are too seldom understood by mainstream society, and the implication of attendant policies are sorely neglected.

Contents

• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction: Racializing Latinos: Historical Background and Current Forms / José A. Cobas, Jorge Duany, and Joe R. Feagin
• Chapter 1: Pigments of Our Imagination: On the Racialization and Racial Identities of “Hispanics” and “Latinos” / Rubén G. Rumbaut
• Chapter 2: Counting Latinos in the U.S. Census / Clara E. Rodríguez
• Chapter 3: Becoming Dark: The Chilean Experience in California, 1848–1870 / Fernando Purcell
• Chapter 4: Repression and Resistance: The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin in the United States, 1848–1928 / William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb
• Chapter 5: Opposite One-Drop Rules: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Need to Reconceive Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Race Relations / Laura E. Gómez
• Chapter 6: Racializing the Language Practices of U.S. Latinos: Impact on Their Education / Ofelia García
• Chapter 7: English-Language Spanish in the United States as a Site of Symbolic Violence / Jane H. Hill
• Chapter 8: Racialization among Cubans and Cuban Americans / Lisandro Pérez
• Chapter 9 Racializing Miami: Immigrant Latinos and Colorblind Racism in the Global City / Elizabeth Aranda, Rosa E. Chang, and Elena Sabogal
• Chapter 10: Blacks, Latinos, and the Immigration Debate: Conflict and Cooperation in Two Global Cities / Xóchitl Bada and Gilberto Cárdenas
• Chapter 11: Central American Immigrants and Racialization in a Post-Civil Rights Era / Nestor P. Rodriguez and Cecilia Menjívar
• Chapter 12: Agency and Structure in Panethnic Identity Formation: The Case of Latino/a Entrepreneurs /Zulema Valdez
• Chapter 13: Racializing Ethnicity in the Spanish-Speaking Caribbean: A Comparison of Haitians in the Dominican Republic and Dominicans in Puerto Rico / Jorge Duany
• Chapter 14: Transnational Racializations: The Extension of Racial Boundaries from Receiving to Sending Societies / Wendy D. Roth
• Contributors
• Index

Genomics and Health Care Disparities: The Role of Statistical Discrimination

The Journal of the American Medical Association
Volume 308, Number 19 (2012-11-21)
pages 1979-1980
DOI: 10.1001/2012.jama.10820

Katrina Armstrong, MD, MSCE, Professor of Medicine
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

Ten years ago, 2 events occurred that have transformed biomedical research. In 2001, the draft sequence of the human genome was announced. One year later, the Institute of Medicine released “Unequal Treatment,” the first comprehensive report on racial and ethnic health care disparities in the United States.1 Although the report downplayed the contribution of genetics to disparities, enthusiasm about the human genome spread rapidly to disparities research, creating a new field focused on translating knowledge of human genetic variation into reductions in disparities in health and health care. This Viewpoint examines the potential contribution of 2 pathways in this field—the identification of genetic variation as a cause of disparities and the reduction of clinical uncertainty and statistical discrimination. The terms race and ethnicity are used to mean socially determined, generally self-reported, categories.

A common hypothesis is that advances in human genomics will reduce disparities by identifying genetic causes of disparities. In support of this hypothesis, racial and ethnic differences in genetic variant frequency have been demonstrated for many diseases. However, translating this evidence into reductions in disparities has proven challenging for several reasons. First, many variants identified have a small attributable risk and explain little of the disease burden in any group, either because of a weak association between variant and disease or because the variant is rare in the population. Second, far more genetic variation occurs within racial or ethnic groups than between groups,and disease-associated variation has no apparent predilection for the 4% to 8% of variation that can be linked to race or ethnicity. Thus, if genomic variation explains a minority of most diseases and is unlikely to be linked to a racial or ethnic group, it becomes unlikely that genomic variation between groups will be a substantial cause of disparities in most common diseases. Third, developing interventions based on this information is challenging. Although prenatal or even premarital genetic screening can reduce the burden of severe diseases if screening influences reproductive decision making, lack of acceptance of these approaches has limited their effectiveness. For other diseases, knowledge of genetic risk factors should increase the ability to target preventive interventions to high-risk individuals. However, the limited effect of genomics on risk prediction for many diseases combined with the relative paucity of effective preventive interventions for some diseases has limited the benefit of such an approach.

Another pathway by which genomics may reduce racial disparities that has received considerably less attention is its effect on clinical uncertainty and statistical discrimination. The need to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty is one of the hallmarks of medicine. This uncertainty arises on 2 levels. For many decisions, there is no credible and consistent evidence about risks and benefits of different interventions. Moreover, even when evidence exists, uncertainty arises about the effect of that evidence on the individual patient. The gap between the average effect in a population and the effect in a specific patient can be substantial, in part because of differences between patients in practice and trial participants and in part because the average effect in a trial masks substantial variation among trial participants…

Read or purchase the article here.

The concept and measurement of race and their relationship to public health: a review focused on Brazil and the United States

Cadernos de Saúde Pública/Reports in Public Health
Volume 20, Number 3, Rio de Janeiro, (May/June 2004)
pages 660-678
DOI: 10.1590/S0102-311X2004000300003

Claudia Travassos
Departamento de Informações em Saúde
Centro de Informação Científica e Tecnológica,
Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

David R. Williams, Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health; Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Race has been widely used in studies on health and healthcare inequalities, especially in the United States. Validity and reliability problems with race measurement are of concern in public health. This article reviews the literature on the concept and measurement of race and compares how the findings apply to the United States and Brazil. We discuss in detail the data quality issues related to the measurement of race and the problems raised by measuring race in multiracial societies like Brazil. We discuss how these issues and problems apply to public health and make recommendations about the measurement of race in medical records and public health research.

“Race is a social construct, but as for other aspects of social stratification, with biological consequences.”

The notion that health is influenced by the social position of individuals has been known for many centuries. Nancy Krieger notes that since Hippocrates the relationship between health and social position has been acknowledged. It has also been shown that social disparities in mortality exist for almost all causes of death in most societies, and these disparities have been increasing in recent decades in several developed countries.

Race has been used extensively in the medical and public health literature, especially in the United States, to measure social differences in health outcomes and treatment, and its use has increased in recent decades. In the US, there is a vast literature that relates race to disparities in health outcomes, which shows that race is an important predictor of health status. “Blacks” in the US are disadvantaged compared to “Whites” on most indicators of economic status and health. Despite a reduction in these racial inequalities on both of these indicators during and immediately after the Civil Rights movement (the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s), they have remained large or have widened ever since. In the US, adjustment for socio-economic status (SES) always reduces and sometimes even eliminates racial disparities in health. A recent publication of the Institute of Medicine also documented that there are large racial differences in the quality and intensity of medical treatment in the US, even after adjustment for access factors, SES, and severity of illness.

In Brazil, there are fewer studies of racial inequalities in health. Batista, using data from death certificates, has shown that “Black” men and women had the highest crude mortality rates in 1999 in the State of São Paulo. Data based on census and national household surveys show that aggregate infant mortality in Brazil in the years 1977, 1987, and 1993 was higher for “Blacks and “Pardos” (“Browns”) and that it declined at a lower rate when compared with “Whites”. Martins & Tanaka, using data from the Committee on Maternal Mortality, have also shown large differences in the risk of dying due to maternal causes in the State of Paraná in the years 1993 and 1997, which disproportionately affected “Black” and “Yellow” (Asian) women. Maternal mortality did not differ between “Parda” (“Brown”) and “White” women. Dachs, using data from the 1998 National Household Survey (PNAD), found no statistically significant difference by “skin color/ race” in self-assessed health status after adjusting for education and income level. Barros et al., based on longitudinal data, have shown worse health outcomes for “Black” children in Southern Brazil, which is reduced after adjustment for SES and various other variables (marital status, maternal age, parity, planned pregnancy, social support, smoking, work during pregnancy, and antenatal care). The study results also suggest that “Black” mothers receive lower quality of care as compared to “White” ones. There are also indications that in Brazil racial inequalities are more common in treatment than in access to health care services.

The objective of this article is to review the literature related to the concept and measurement of race with a focus on the US and Brazil. We will discuss both the measurement of race in these two multiracial societies and data quality problems. We also make recommendations about the measurement of race in medical records and public health research. Although the use of race in public health research has been discussed in relation to definitional and methodological problems in the United States, the Brazilian public health literature has not discussed in detail how such problems apply to Brazil. This article is intended to review the literature and introduce a discussion regarding broader as well as country-specific questions and problems related to the use of this category in public health…

…Despite the fact that race has been used as a surrogate for genetic information until the onset of molecular genetics, there is no scientific support to continue using race in Public Health as a marker for genetic susceptibility. Parra et al. have recently shown that skin color in Brazilians cannot be used as a genetic marker, because physical traits have been shown to be a poor predictor of African ancestry in this population. In both the United States and Brazil, although the risk of sickle-cell anemia varies by race, race is not a reliable predictor of sickle-cell anemia…

…Despite existing controversies in the biomedical literature, it is widely accepted that racial/ethnic categories are imprecise and changing measures that are historically, administratively, and politically constructed. The salience given to race, as well as the meaning and the measure of race itself in census and health data, varies across countries and across time. The history of race classification in the US and Brazil are good examples of these variations as will be discussed later in this article…

…Measuring race in admixed populations

The question of whether populations of mixed origins can be categorized into any simple, finite, discrete categories is becoming central to racial/ethnic taxonomy. Some societies have large proportions of admixed people and many others are increasingly becoming admixed. Immigration in the US, especially from Latin American countries, increased in the last few decades, making its population much more heterogeneous. The projection of the US Census Bureau is that by 2050 one half of the US population will be “Non-White” and 21% of the population will be of multiple ancestry.

Despite the possibility of answering questions with multiple races, the new OMB classification in the US is not a good solution for classifying admixed people. For miscegenation that goes back many generations, individuals simply do not know about their ancestry. Whenever people’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents descend from intermarriages of admixed people, “pure” ancestry becomes very difficult to trace. In Latin American countries such as Brazil where miscegenation occurred at very early stages, it is difficult for a large number of people to answer questions about their origins.

It can also be argued that people do not know their ancestry because origin played a distinct role in societies with early miscegenation. As a result, many people may not find a place in any of the selected discrete “races” categories. In the 2000 US census, 43% of people that identified themselves as “Hispanic or Latino” chose, in the race question, to answer “some other race” (http://www.census.gov/mso/www/rsf/racedata/sld008.htm, accessed on 10/Oct/ 2002). And they usually inserted their country of origin or an alternative term for their Hispanic ethnicity for their race.

When assessing their own race, recent immigrants from countries where race is not as central in social structure as in the US may apply criteria adopted in their original country. On the other hand, descendents of migrants are more likely to respond to the race question using different criteria from the ones used by their parents. The fact that this classification is based on pure-race categories of ancestry and the absence of a multiracial category increases the chance of misclassification or non-specification for admixed people. On the other hand, multiracial categories tend to be very heterogeneous, and the greater the admixture in a population, the lower the discriminatory power of racial classifications.

Therefore, fluidity and ambiguity of racial measurement increases as the population becomes more multicultural and admixed. The more admixed a society, the greater the misspecification and heterogeneity of racial categories based on ancestry. Bias will also affect classifications that allow people to be classified in more than one pure-race category, as in the new US classification. Multiracial categories also tend to be very heterogeneous. At the same time, US data on children born to Black/White unions indicate that infants with a Black mother and White father consistently have higher health risks than those with a White mother and Black father, suggesting that in at least some situations there may be health risks linked to the specific pattern of multiracial status.

The use of skin color may be a more adequate proxy for racial/ethnic discrimination in admixed societies than racial measurement based on ancestry. Ethnicity or nationality may also be more meaningful in societies with recent migrants…

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

Othering Obama: How Whiteness is Used to Undermine Authority

Altre Modernità/Other Modernities
ISSN 2035-7680
Number 3 (2010)
pages 112-119
DOI: 10.6092/2035-7680/517

David S. Owen, Associate Professor of Philosophy; Director of Diversity Programs, College of Arts and Sciences
University of Louisville

In this paper, I argue that the sociocultural structuring property of whiteness has been utilized to marginalize President Obama and effectively undermine his presidential authority.  Whiteness functions in a largely invisible and ostensibly deracialized way to normalize the interests, needs, and values of whites, while at the same time marginalizing and devaluing the voice of people of color.  Analyzing the health care debate through this theoretical lens generates insights into how the debate reproduced the system of racial oppression, and how whiteness functions in political discourse.

Introduction

The election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency in 2008 was undoubtedly a truly historic moment. The election of a self-identified black man to the highest political office in the nation was symbolic of a degree of progress the U.S. has made towards racial justice. However, there has been considerable disagreement in public discourse about how substantive a change this Obama presidency reflects. Some have  claimed (and did so immediately after the election) that the Obama presidency signals the end of racial oppression in the U.S. Others have argued that while the Obama presidency is significant, it does not indicate that the system of racial oppression has dissolved over night. This debate was sharpened in the summer of 2009 by the public discourse concerning health care reform. To many, that discourse often devolved from rational policy critique to racist attacks of Obama. And, in fact, the topic of racism broke into explicit discourse during this period, culminating with former President Jimmy Carter accusing many of the president’s critics with racism. Much of the debate around whether or not the critics of health care reform were behaving in a racist manner turned on the question of intent: Did they, or did they not, intend to send a racist message? I will argue in this paper that this question misses the point. The system of racial oppression, which was not dissolved on election night in 2008, is maintained and reproduced by behavior that echoes and carries forward racist imagery, representations, and symbols of the past in the guise of structures of whiteness. While there were clearly explicitly racist actions taken by the health care reform critics, much of the harm and effectiveness of the racially oppressive behavior is found in what ostensibly looks like non-racial behavior. Such behavior appears to be non-racial because it presumes the norm of whiteness. These debates provide a constructive case study for understanding how people of color can be marginalized and devalued—even when they have achieved very high accomplishments…

Read the entire article here.

Race Card Project Creates New Type of Conversation

The Associated Press
2012-11-30

Jesse Washington, National Writer on Race and Ethnicity

She asked for just six words.

Michele Norris, the National Public Radio host, was starting a book tour for her memoir, which explored racial secrets. Sensing a change in the atmosphere after the election of the first black president, and searching for a new way to engage and listen, Norris printed 200 postcards asking people to express their thoughts on race in six words.

The first cards that trickled into her mailbox were from Norris’ friends and acquaintances. Then they started coming from strangers, from people who had not heard Norris speak, from other continents. The tour stopped; the cards did not:

“You know my race. NOT ME!”

“Chinese or American? Does it matter.”

“Oh, she’s just another white girl.”

“Waiting for race not to matter.”

Such declarations brought the Race Card Project to life.

“I thought I knew a lot about race,” says Norris, 51, an award-winning black journalist. “I realized how little I know through this project.”

Two years later, the cards have become almost a parallel career for Norris, best known for her work on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” She and an assistant have catalogued more than 12,000 submissions on http://www.theracecardproject.com/. People now send them via Facebook and Twitter or type them directly into the website, leading to vibrant online discussions…

…Or the story of Arlene Lee, who posted: “Birthday present; you are black, sorta?”

On the night before Lee’s 50th birthday, she was going through the papers of her late mother, an immigrant from Peru. Lee found her mother’s real birth certificate, plus a fake one she had used to enter the United States in 1958. On the fake document, Lee’s mother had changed her race from black to white.

“My mother raised me to be white and I am, at least by self identification I guess,” Lee wrote on the Race Card Project website.

“It breaks my heart that we never had a chance to talk about it, that she didn’t feel she could trust her only child to understand and that she didn’t feel she could ever come out of hiding,” Lee wrote.

“And now, I have a new prism through which to see things.”…

Read the entire article here.