Mixed Race Studies

On Race, Medicine, and Reproduction: An Interview with Dorothy Roberts

Bluestockings Magazine
Brown University
February 2014 (2014-02-14)

Dorothy Roberts is a scholar, professor, author and social justice advocate, and currently the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She has published a range of groundbreaking articles and books analyzing issues of law, race, gender, health and social inequality, including Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997), Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2002) and, most recently Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2012). When she visited Brown University to discuss her latest work on race and health inequities, Bluestockings Magazine had the privilege of interviewing Prof. Roberts beforehand.

Sophia Seawell [Co-Editor-in-Chief]: To begin with, I was hoping that for those of us who aren’t able to come to your lecture if you could tell us what you’ll be speaking about and how it fits into what you’ve been working on lately.

Dorothy Roberts: I’m going to be talking about what I’m calling race medicine, which is the practice of treating diseases according to race both by using the notion that people of different races have different diseases and also that they experience common diseases differently. I argue that you can trace that practice in the United States from slavery, where the idea that Africans have different diseases was used to justify enslaving them, and also explained resistance to enslavement as a form of mental illness.

Race medicine has been used to treat social inequality as if it’s natural, and that’s a way to justify repression and to steer attention away from the need for social change. And so I show how those concepts and strategies that came out of slavery continue in contemporary medicine today, and how they’ve in fact been exacerbated by a new resurgence of the concept of biological races in genomic science, biomedical research, and medical practice.

So it’s a little bit of history, but I’m mostly looking at the way that treating disease as race-based and using that as a way to explain social inequality, especially racial inequality, has travelled across the centuries. We can’t believe that today, because we live in a liberal democracy and doctors say that they’re not racially biased, that we shouldn’t worry about it anymore.

SS: The first thing that comes to mind when you talk about race-based disease is high blood pressure in African Americans.

DR: I’ll use that example in my talk. I point out that it’s commonly thought among doctors and biomedical researchers that hypertension is higher in African Americans because of some innate difference—today it’s explained as a genetic difference—but actually these ideas originated before there was even knowledge of genetics, only now they’re cloaked in genetic terms.

I’ll mention a study conducted by a researcher named Richard Cooper who looked at a number of global studies, did a meta-analysis and discovered that in fact across theses studies people of African descent have a lower rate of hypertension than white people. It’s just in the United States that Blacks have a higher rates than whites; Nigerians have a lower rate than the average of people of European descent around the world. That’s pretty strong evidence, and there’s lots of other evidence as well that to the extent that African Americans have higher rates of blood pressure in the U.S., it’s nothing innate. There have been all sorts of biological theories—the salt hypothesis claimed that the Middle Passage weeded out certain genes and so those who survived it had a gene pool that predisposed them to hypertension. It doesn’t make sense! Because first of all, Jamaicans, whose ancestors also crossed the Atlantic, have a lower rate of hypertension than whites in the U.S.

SS: But we just won’t mention that!

DR: And I’ll talk about some other new fangled and ridiculous genetic explanations.

SS: I was also wondering, on a different note, about your experience in academia as a woman of color—specifically, since you do so much writing on race, medicine and science, if your work has ever been criticized because it’s “not objective” because it discusses race, or that you’re trying to “read race” into things.

DR: I’ve certainly gotten that response—pretty frequently in audiences when I talk about my most recent book, Fatal Invention, and especially if I’m talking to a group of physicians or people who are doing biomedical research. With genetic counselors I’ve also gotten a very defensive response. People feel you’re accusing them personally of racism and they want to defend their use of race in their practice and in their research. I’ve found that there’s this desire to hold on to biological racial concepts that is very disturbing to me. There’s a lot of resistance out there.

I’ve also spoken to very receptive audiences, and audiences that weren’t aware of this resurgence of concepts of biological concepts of race in science—what I call a new racial science—and many are very grateful to hear this information; they’re alarmed, but happy to hear about it.

Others believe that race is a political category if not a biological category, and that includes many scientists who understand that. So I’ve also been welcomed by some for my book, but there still is this resistance I’ve met and often the argument is “well, you just don’t understand the science.” But the thing is I’ve read many of these articles that claim to show that there are race-based genetic differences or that racial differences in health can be explained genetically and there’s so many flaws in them. Just simple flaws, like not defining what the scientist means by race…

SS: It’s just understood to be a natural category.

DR: They just use the term! They don’t explain how they decided who among their research subjects gets grouped in which race. Most of them use self-identification or come up with some made-up, invented way of determination… there are just so many flaws. They often control for just one socioeconomic variable and if they continue to see that race has an effect they leap to the conclusion that it must be genetic—which is also bad research, bad science. But the basic flaw is that they’re using a social category as if it was a biological category or a genetic category, and it isn’t. So the very basis of their hypothesis that genes cause health inequities, for example, is flawed. And then the methods of flawed on top of that…

Read the entire interview here.

Kaa-tipeyimishoyaahk – ‘We are those who own ourselves’: A Political History of Métis Self-Determination in the North-West, 1830-1870

University of Victoria, British Columbia
2014
394 pages

Adam James Patrick Gaudry

Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of Indigenous Governance

This dissertation offers an analysis of the history of Métis political thought in the nineteenth century and its role in the anti-colonial resistances to Canada’s and Hudson’s Bay Company governance. Utilizing the Michif concepts of kaa-tipeyimishoyaahk and wahkohtowin to shed light on Métis political practices, this work argues that the Métis people had established themselves as an independent Indigenous people in the nineteenth century North West. By use of a common language of prairie diplomacy, Métis had situated themselves as a close “relation” of the Hudson’s Bay Company, but still politically independent of it. Nineteenth century Métis had repeatedly demonstrated their independence from British institutions of justice and politics, and were equally insistent that Canadian institutions had no authority over them. When they did choose to form a diplomatic relationship with Canada, it was decidedly on Métis terms. In 1869-1870, after repelling a Canadian official who was intended to establish Canadian authority over the North-West, the Métis formed a provisional government with their Halfbreed cousins to enter into negotiations with Canada to establish a confederal treaty relationship. The Provisional Government of Assiniboia then sent delegates to Ottawa to negotiate “the Manitoba Treaty,” a bilateral constitutional document that created a new province of Manitoba, that would contain a Métis/Halfbreed majority, as well as very specific territorial, political, social, cultural, and economic protections that would safeguard the Métis and Halfbreed controlled future of Manitoba. This agreement was embodied only partially in the oft-cited Manitoba Act, as several key elements of the agreement were oral negotiations that were later to be institutionalized by the Canadian cabinet, although were only ever partially implemented. These protections included restrictions on the sale of the 1.4 million acre Métis/Halfbreed land reserve, a commitment to establish a Métis/Halfbreed controlled upper-house in the new Manitoba legislature, a temporary limitation of the franchise to current residents of the North West, and restrictions on Canadian immigration to the new province until Métis lands were properly distributed. While these key components of the Manitoba Treaty were not included in the Manitoba Act, they remain a binding part of the agreement, and thus, an unfulfilled obligation borne by the contemporary government of Canada. Without adhering to Canada’s treaty with the Métis people, its presence on Métis lands, and jurisdiction over Métis people is highly suspect. Only by returning to the original agreement embodied by the Manitoba Act can Canada claim any legitimacy on Métis territories or any functional political relationship with the Métis people.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Advancing Health Through A Racial Lens: The New Biopolitics of Race, Health, and Justice

University of Maryland, College Park
Stamp Student Union
Banneker Room 2212
Thursday, 2014-02-20, 12:30-15:00 EST (Local Time)

Moderated by:

Dorothy Roberts J.D., Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, and the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Dorothy Roberts holds appointments in the Law School and Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. Professor Roberts is author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2002); and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011). Among her many public interest activities, Roberts serves as chair of the board of directors of the Black Women’s Health Imperative.

Distinguished University of Maryland Panelists:

“Racial Coping in African American Mothers & Adolescents”
Mia A. Smith Bynum, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Family Science

“Treating Difference: Race, Risk, and the Politics of HIV/AIDs Prevention”
Thurka Sangaramoorthy, Ph.D., MPH, Assistant Professor of Anthropology

“Addressing Racial Disparities in Cardiovascular Disease: Directions for the Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act”
Gneisha Y. Dinwiddie, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of African American Studies

For more information, click here or here.

In meetings with young black men, Obama tries to leave a mark

The Washington Post
2014-02-09

Zachary A. Goldfarb, Staff Writer

CHICAGO – Kerron Turner sat with more than a dozen other teenagers in a classroom at Hyde Park Academy High School on this city’s troubled South Side, nervously settling in for an unusual meeting with the president of the United States.

They told their stories: Turner worried about the gangs he passes on his way home from school. Robert Scates had dropped out of high school and was working to catch up in time to graduate. Lazarus Daniels feared what would happen to his anger if he couldn’t play football anymore.

Eventually, it was President Obama’s turn to check in — to say how he was feeling emotionally, physically, intellectually and spiritually.

Obama’s quiet visit a year ago to the “Becoming a Man” program for inner-city youth in Chicago, along with a follow-up meeting several months later, would test whether Obama could transform the symbolism of his presidency into something more personal, one young man at a time. The meetings left a mark on the president, who has used them as motivation for a forthcoming White House initiative on young men of color that he promised to launch in this year’s State of the Union address.

Back in Room 208 of Hyde Park Academy that winter afternoon, Obama told the group he tries to exercise every day but was feeling the aches of a 51-year-old. Emotionally, he was always thinking about his daughters, and he said he feels intellectually challenged all the time. Spiritually, he said, he prays every night.

Then Obama was asked to tell his story: How did a black man become president? He talked about his anger as a young man growing up without a father in the picture. When he was a teen in high school, he partied too much, ignored school too much. He confided that he drank and smoked pot.

Daniels struggled to grasp what the president was saying. That could not be the life of the man who became a president, Daniels thought. He half-raised his hand, and asked, “Are you talking about you?”

It wasn’t a question the president was expecting. “Yeah, I’m talking about me,” Obama said. “None of this is a secret. I wrote about all of this in my book.”

Obama has recounted his meetings with the young men as among the most raw encounters of his tenure. Now, as he uses his second term to address race and the fortunes of urban youth more directly, the president’s experience with the young men, and their experience with him, offer an intimate look at the promise and limitations of his presidency.

The encounters last year showed the first African American president trying to improve the lives of young black men — a group he has sometimes been criticized for not focusing enough on. But it also revealed how the notion of a black man in the Oval Office, although a reality, remains a distant abstraction for those who might want to imagine following in his footsteps…

Read the entire article here.

Multicultural families: Deracializing Transracial Adoption

Critical Social Policy
Volume 34, Number 1 (February 2014)
pages 66-89
DOI: 10.1177/0261018313493160

Suki Ali, Senior Lecturer of Sociology
London School of Economics and Political Science

In 2010, the Coalition government announced its plans for adoption reform which included ‘removing barriers’ to transracial adoption. The government has blamed social workers’ looking for ‘perfect ethnic matches’ for denying black and minority ethnic children placements with ‘loving and stable families’. The paper draws upon qualitative research with professionals and parents, which shows that the government has failed to take into account the complex ways in which race and ethnicity matter within adoption. Their wish to deracialize transracial adoption fits with wider concerns about race mixing, families and national belonging in multicultural Britain. While they attempt to minimize the importance of race and ethnicity, they continue to place race at the heart of these debates.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Global Obama: Crossroads of Leadership in the 21st Century

Routledge
2013-11-29
344 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84872-625-3
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-84872-626-0

Edited by:

Dinesh Sharma, Senior Fellow
Institute for International and Cross-Cultural Research
St. Francis College, New York

Uwe P. Gielen, Founder and Executive Director
Institute for International and Cross-Cultural Psychology
St. Francis College, New York

The Global Obama examines the president’s image in five continents and more than twenty countries. It is the first book to look at Barack Obama’s presidency and analyze how Obama and America are viewed by publics, governments and political commentators around world. The author of Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President (Top 10 Black History Book) scaled the globe to gather opinions—cultural, historical and political analyses—about Obama’s leadership style. Writers, journalists, psychologists, and social scientists present their views on Obama’s leadership, popularity, and many of the global challenges that still remain unsolved. As a progress report, this is the first book that tries to grasp ‘the Obama phenomenon’ in totality, as perceived by populations around the world with special focus on America’s leadership.

Contents

• Part I: Obama as a Global Leader
  • 1. Obama’s Adventures in Globalization D. Sharma, U.P. Gielen
  • 2. President Obama and American Exceptionalism: Is the U.S. an Indispensable Nation in a Multipolar World? G.W. Streich, K Marrar
  • 3. Obama’s Leadership in the Era of Globalization: A Critical Examination R.S. Bhagat, A.S. McDevitt, M. Shin, B.N. Srivastava, D.L. Ford
  • 4. Barack Obama and Inclusive Leadership in Engaging Followership E. Hollander
• Part II: Africa
  • 5. Obama, Hillary, and Women’s Voices D. Sharma
  • 6. Afro-Optimism from Mahatma Gandhi to Barack Obama: A Tale of Two Prophecies A. Mazrui
  • 7. African Diasporas, Immigration, and the Obama Administration P. T. Zeleza, C. Veney
• Part III: The Americas
  • 8. Love as Distraction: Canadians, Obama, and African- Canadian Political Invisibility R. Walcott
  • 9. Changing Times and Economic Cycles: President Obama – the Southern Continent, Mexico, and the Caribbean E. Moncarz, R. Moncarz
• Part IV: Europe
  • 10. Is Obamamania over in Europe? A. Kalaitzidis
  • 11. Obama’s French Connection D. Morrison
  • 12. A Relationship of Hope and Misinterpretation: Germany and Obama T. Cieslik
• Part V: The Middle East and Israel
  • 13. Arab Images of Obama and the United States: An Egyptian R. Ahmed
  • 14. Obama, Iran, and the New Great Game in Eurasia P. Escobar
  • 15. Great Disappointments in the Arab World during Obama’s First Term M. Masad
• Part VI: Asia-Pacific Region
  • 16. Bent by History in Afghanistan A. Muñoz
  • 17. Between Popularity and Pragmatism: South Korea’s Perspectives on Obama’s First Term M. Maass
  • 18. The Chinese View of President Obama B. Shober
  • 19. Radical Manhood and Traditional Masculinity: Japanese Acknowledgements for Literary Obama E. Senaha
• Part VII: Conclusion
  • 20. A View from Israel: A Critical Commentary of Obama’s Leadership Style D. Efune
  • 21. A Commentary from South Africa: Commentary S. Cooper
  • 22. Obama’s Leadership Paradigm in India: A Personal Reflection S. Singh
  • 23.President Obama: A Commentary From Russia E. Osin
  • 24. America’s Asian Century: A Mirage or Reality? D. Sharma

Preface

This book began as a companion volume to Barack Obama in Hawai’i and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President (Sharma, 2012), which was rated as the Top 10 Black History Book for 2012 by the American Library Association. While researching and lecturing about the earlier book, which entailed travel throughout the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia, there were varied and diverse perceptions about President Obama as a leader. However, the president frequently garnered higher approval ratings in most parts of the world than in the United States. What a paradox, we thought at the time. The first black president elected with great enthusiasm, loved by people around the world, yet struggling for approval for his policies at home—whether it be the healthcare initiative, the stimulus to bail out the economy, or his “leading from behind” on foreign policies.

We wanted to explore the stark contrast between Obama’s popularity abroad and his suboptimal ratings at home, which puzzled almost everyone we interviewed: Why the inverse correlation between the public image at home versus abroad? You can’t be a prophet in your own land, Obama suggested to the senior editor of India Today during his visit. Thus, the idea was hatched to publish an edited volume on “Ghe Global Obama.”

As Obama himself has said, his life story spans many continents, races, cultures, and histories. It is only appropriate that we try to grasp the total Obama and not try to box him into a preconceived theory, which may capture only a part of his persona. Clearly, part of Obamas worldwide appeal is due to his international biography and global roots, but we found there is invariably a chasm be- tween the soaring rhetoric and foreign policy due to various forces of history, culture, and political cycles. Yet, the search for great leaders who can speak to the totality of human experience is never- ending. Across the cultural divide from North-to-South and East-to-West, the romance of leadership continues.

Barack Hussein Obama’s rise from his early life as a multiracial and multicultural outsider in a broken family—repeatedly changing composition and shifting residence between Hawai’i and Indonesia—to assuming the world’s most powerful executive position is as improbable as it is global in its trajectory and in its implications for the evolving twenty-first century. But whereas his life story has been the subject of several good biographies, his global position as a leader has not been assessed in a sustained manner. Obama’s global leadership qualities and position and how he is being perceived and judged around the world are the central and intertwined topics of this book.

Given that no one scholar, social thinker, or journalist has an expertise in all of the regions of the world we wanted to cover, we decided early on to develop the project as a collected volume, relying on a group of local scholars and observers connected with their communities. Our methodology is broadly social science based, yet also relying on the skills and knowledge of local journalists and reporters. The central theme of the book is Obama’s leadership style as it is perceived around the world. With the guidance of Anne Duffy, the acquisition editor, the series in leadership with Routledge Press became a natural home for this project.

While the book was conceived several years ago, we decided to wait for the reelection outcome to fully gather our views on Obama’s potential impact. His reelection clearly makes this project much more viable, although potentially in need of a follow-up in four years at the end of his second term. Thus, the questions raised in this book do not necessarily draw out a final conclusion but rather sug- gest working hypotheses and specific lines of inquiry to be followed up over time. These are issues we plan to revisit for future analysis. However, we have attempted to organize the debate in a concerted manner around the president’s leadership style, which no other book has as yet attempted. In this way, we hope to make a significant contribution to the field on leadership research and practice and to the emerging field of political leadership within the ever-expanding context of globalization…

Read the Preface here.

Skin color remains big barrier

The Korea Times
2014-01-27

Park Si-soo

Min Kyung-joon (alias) is a “good boy” in many aspects.

The freshman at a middle school in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, has been acknowledged by his teachers for his outstanding academic achievement and affable personality. Min is also very actively engaged in sports, which explains why he is one of the top players of an intramural soccer club.

Notwithstanding his good standing, he still has a hard time associating with his classmates, mainly because of his “exotic” appearance. The 15-year-old’s father is Pakistani and his mother a Korean native.

“That’s a huge disadvantage in making new friends among young children,” said Kim Young-im, a counselor who has interviewed numerous biracial children, including Min, in Ansan, home to one of the country’s largest population of low income immigrants.

“Children tend to get along with those who share similarity in looks and other visible characteristics. But he is different (from others) in many ways.”

For that reason, Kim added, it’s a common trend in the industrial town to see “exotic-looking” teenagers hanging out together, isolating themselves from their peers of Korean parentage.

“This is a problem that is very difficult to address,” the counselor said. “The government and school authorities have tried hard to solve this with various kinds of measures. But I think many of these programs turned out to be in vain.”

The number of biracial students like Min in Korea is estimated at 55,780 as of last year, representing 0.86 percent of the 6.53 million students enrolled in primary and secondary schools nationwide. The figure is expected to steadily increase to reach five percent by 2020, according to the education ministry…

Read the entire article here.

A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White

University of Georgia Press
1994 (First published in 1948)
392 pages
5.5 x 8.5
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8203-1698-7

Walter White (1893-1955)

Foreword by Andrew Young

The life story of a man who crossed the color line to fight for civil rights

First published in 1948, A Man Called White is the autobiography of the famous civil rights activist Walter White during his first thirty years of service to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. White joined the NAACP in 1918 and served as its executive secretary from 1931 until his death in 1955. His recollections tell not only of his personal life, but amount to an insider’s history of the association’s first decades.

Although an African American, White was fair-skinned, blond-haired, and blue-eyed. His ability to pass as a white man allowed him—at great personal risk—to gather important information regarding lynchings, disfranchisement, and discrimination. Much of A Man Called White recounts his infiltration of the country’s white-racist power structure and the numerous legal battles fought by the NAACP that were aided by his daring efforts.

Penetrating and detailed, this autobiography provides an important account of crucial events in the development of race relations before 1950—from the trial of the “Scottsboro Boys” to an investigation of the treatment of African American servicemen in World War II, from the struggle against the all-white primaries in the South to court decisions–at all levels—on equal education.

Going the Distance: On and off the road with Barack Obama.

The New Yorker
2014-01-27

David Remnick, Editor

Obama’s Presidency is on the clock. Hard as it has been to pass legislation, the coming year is a marker, the final interval before the fight for succession becomes politically all-consuming.

On the Sunday afternoon before Thanksgiving, Barack Obama sat in the office cabin of Air Force One wearing a look of heavy-lidded annoyance. The Affordable Care Act, his signature domestic achievement and, for all its limitations, the most ambitious social legislation since the Great Society, half a century ago, was in jeopardy. His approval rating was down to forty per cent—lower than George W. Bush’s in December of 2005, when Bush admitted that the decision to invade Iraq had been based on intelligence that “turned out to be wrong.” Also, Obama said thickly, “I’ve got a fat lip.”

That morning, while playing basketball at F.B.I. headquarters, Obama went up for a rebound and came down empty-handed; he got, instead, the sort of humbling reserved for middle-aged men who stubbornly refuse the transition to the elliptical machine and Gentle Healing Yoga. This had happened before. In 2010, after taking a self-described “shellacking” in the midterm elections, Obama caught an elbow in the mouth while playing ball at Fort McNair. He wound up with a dozen stitches. The culprit then was one Reynaldo Decerega, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. Decerega wasn’t invited to play again, though Obama sent him a photograph inscribed “For Rey, the only guy that ever hit the President and didn’t get arrested. Barack.”

This time, the injury was slighter and no assailant was named—“I think it was the ball,” Obama said—but the President needed little assistance in divining the metaphor in this latest insult to his person. The pundits were declaring 2013 the worst year of his Presidency. The Republicans had been sniping at Obamacare since its passage, nearly four years earlier, and HealthCare.gov, a Web site that was undertested and overmatched, was a gift to them. There were other beribboned boxes under the tree: Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency; the failure to get anything passed on gun control or immigration reform; the unseemly waffling over whether the Egyptian coup was a coup; the solidifying wisdom in Washington that the President was “disengaged,” allergic to the forensic and seductive arts of political persuasion. The congressional Republicans quashed nearly all legislation as a matter of principle and shut down the government for sixteen days, before relenting out of sheer tactical confusion and embarrassment—and yet it was the President’s miseries that dominated the year-end summations…

…Obama’s election was one of the great markers in the black freedom struggle. In the electoral realm, ironically, the country may be more racially divided than it has been in a generation. Obama lost among white voters in 2012 by a margin greater than any victor in American history. The popular opposition to the Administration comes largely from older whites who feel threatened, underemployed, overlooked, and disdained in a globalized economy and in an increasingly diverse country. Obama’s drop in the polls in 2013 was especially grave among white voters. “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President,” Obama said. “Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black President.” The latter group has been less in evidence of late.

“There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues,” he went on. “You can be somebody who, for very legitimate reasons, worries about the power of the federal government—that it’s distant, that it’s bureaucratic, that it’s not accountable—and as a consequence you think that more power should reside in the hands of state governments. But what’s also true, obviously, is that philosophy is wrapped up in the history of states’ rights in the context of the civil-rights movement and the Civil War and Calhoun. There’s a pretty long history there. And so I think it’s important for progressives not to dismiss out of hand arguments against my Presidency or the Democratic Party or Bill Clinton or anybody just because there’s some overlap between those criticisms and the criticisms that traditionally were directed against those who were trying to bring about greater equality for African-Americans. The flip side is I think it’s important for conservatives to recognize and answer some of the problems that are posed by that history, so that they understand if I am concerned about leaving it up to states to expand Medicaid that it may not simply be because I am this power-hungry guy in Washington who wants to crush states’ rights but, rather, because we are one country and I think it is going to be important for the entire country to make sure that poor folks in Mississippi and not just Massachusetts are healthy.”…

Read the entire article here.

Brazil Endorses International Decade for People of African Descent

Americas Quarterly: The Policy Journal for Our Hemisphere
Blog
2014-01-16

Shari Wejsa

On Monday, December 23, 2013, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing the International Decade for People of African Descent, which will run from January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2024. The aim will be to raise social consciousness in the fight against prejudice, intolerance, xenophobia, and racism.

The resolution follows a series of related efforts, including the General Assembly’s December 12, 1997 resolution, which convened the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, and the December 16, 2005 resolution, which guided the implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action.

Assembly representatives emphasized its importance. Verene Shepherd, chair of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, stated that the “indigestible fishbone of slavery” continued to stick in the throat due to the persistence of its legacies.  She added that the impact of slavery and colonialism were most obvious in the Americas and on the African content itself.

Responses from Brazilian representatives reinforced this perspective.  Bruno Santos de Oliveira noted that the 2010 national census data indicated that “more than 100 million Brazilians, more than half the population, had declared themselves African descendants,” and that the country has the largest number of people of African descent outside of Africa. The Brazilian Delegation recalled that the country continues to face racism and intolerance inherited from its colonial past.

This legacy is evident in high poverty levels, which vary significantly by region within Brazil. More than half of all poor Brazilians live in the Northeast, which is home to the highest concentration of African descendants. In the Northeast, the head of the household is often illiterate, despite attending school, and works in agriculture. Poor households are generally quite large, having nearly twice as many children when compared to families in higher socioeconomic levels, with limited resources and access to utilities. In Salvador, the capital of the northeastern state of Bahia, approximately 80 percent of the population is said to be of African ancestry.  Some critics claim that “the majority of Brazilians of African descent in Salvador are an example of continuing discrimination, living in the poorest areas, their lives often blighted by violence and largely excluded from political power.” Although recent studies indicate that the income gap between black and mixed race Brazilians and that of white Brazilians has been falling, a notable difference remains. From access to a high quality education to health and housing, Brazilians of African descent are usually worse off than their white counterparts…

Read the entire article here.