Mixed Race Studies

Law, Race, and Biotechnology: Toward a Biopolitical and Transdisciplinary Paradigm

Annual Review of Law and Social Science
Volume 9, Issue 1 (November 2013)
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-102612-134009

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

Law influences and is shaped by the emergence of race-based biotechnologies in the genomic age. This review examines how law and social science scholars have approached the role of legal regulation, theories, and norms in governing the definition and utility of race in gene-based technological innovation. I structure my discussion around four main themes: the institutional regulation of biotechnology research, commercial incentives for race-specific products, the paradoxes of inclusion and difference, and racial equality jurisprudence. My attention then turns to future directions for research in this field needed to attend to the serious political implications of increasing race consciousness in genomic research and technology at a time when color blindness and postracialism are gaining popularity. I argue for a biopolitical and transdisciplinary paradigm that is committed to our common humanity and to the need for social change.

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Germany elects its first two black MPs in breakthrough hailed as ‘historic’

The Telegraph
2013-09-23

Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent

Berlin—Karamba Diaby and Charles Huber were elected for rival Left and Right political factions in Sunday’s general election to Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag. Both have Senegalese backgrounds but followed very different paths into politics…

…Mr Huber, 56, is a well-known television actor, having featured for years in a popular peak-time detective series, Der Alte (The Old Man). A nephew of a former president of Senegal, Mr Huber, whose mother is German, played the character of a police superintendent Henry Johnson between 1986 and 1997. …

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Colour Coded Health Care: The Impact of Race and Racism on Canadians’ Health

Wellesly Institute: advancing urban health
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
January 2012
30 pages

Sheryl Nestel, Ph.D.

Scope and Purpose of the Review

Canada is home to a much-admired system of universal health care, understood as a central pillar of this nation’s overall commitment to principles of social equity and social justice. Such an understanding makes it difficult to raise the issue of racial inequities within the context of the Canadian health-care system. Indeed, as a number of Canadian health scholars have argued, with the exception of the substantial data on First Nations health, very little research has been conducted in Canada on racial inequality in health and health care (Health Canada, 2001; Johnson, Bottorff, Hilton, & Grewell, 2002; O’Neill & O’Neill, 2007; Rodney & Copeland, 2009). This literature review attempts to bring together data published between 1990 and 2011 on racial inequities in the health of non-Aboriginal racialized people in Canada. The decision not to include data on Aboriginal people in this review is by no means intended to obscure or minimize the appalling health conditions among Aboriginal people and the central role of colonialism and racism in their creation and perpetuation. It is clear, as Kelm (2005) has argued, that “social and economic deprivation, physical, sexual, cultural and spiritual abuse” (p. 397) underlie inexcusable inequities in Aboriginal health. Aboriginal health inequities were not included in this review because we chose not to subsume under an umbrella of racial inequities in health the unique history and continuing injustice of Aboriginal health conditions.

We begin our review with a discussion of the concept of race and its relationship to health outcomes and then move to a discussion of the significance of racial inequities in health and the relationship of these inequities to other forms of social inequality. We also examine mortality and morbidity data for various racialized groups in Canada and explore evidence of the role of bias, discrimination, and stereotyping in health-care delivery. Unequal access to medical screening, lack of adequate resources such as translation services, and new and important research on the physiological impact of a racist environment are also explored. This review concludes with a discussion of the limitations of available data on racial inequities in health and health care in Canada. It also surveys the challenges faced by other jurisdictions, such as the United States and Great Britain, in collecting racial data to monitor the extent of such inequities, understand their causes, and address the consequences of unequal access to health care. Finally, it offers recommendations related to the collection of racial data…

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Vietnam Legacy: Finding G.I. Fathers, and Children Left Behind

The New York Times
2013-09-16

James Dao, Military and Veterans Affairs Reporter

SALTILLO, Miss. — Soon after he departed Vietnam in 1970, Specialist James Copeland received a letter from his Vietnamese girlfriend. She was pregnant, she wrote, and he was the father.

He re-enlisted, hoping to be sent back. But the Army was drawing down and kept him stateside. By the time Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975, he had lost touch with the woman. He got a job at a plastics factory in northern Mississippi and raised a family. But a hard question lingered: did she really have his child?

“A lot of things we did in Vietnam I could put out of my mind,” said Mr. Copeland, 67. “But I couldn’t put that out.”

In 2011, Mr. Copeland decided to find the answer, acknowledging what many other veterans have denied, kept secret or tried to forget: that they left children behind in Vietnam…

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Identity Politics, in a Brand-New Form

The New York Times
2013-09-14

Sam Roberts, Urban Affairs Correspondent

ARGUABLY, New York’s identity politics peaked in 1945. That year, William O’Dwyer, the Democratic Party machine’s mayoral favorite, was Irish and from Brooklyn. Lazarus Joseph, the candidate for comptroller, was Jewish and from the Bronx. Party leaders balanced their citywide ticket with a candidate for City Council president by plucking the name of Vincent R. Impellitteri, an obscure legal secretary to a Manhattan judge, from the index to the official city directory.

“We flipped through the Green Book for the longest Italian name we could find,” Bert Stand, the secretary of Tammany Hall, the venerable Democratic organization, explained at the time.

Last week, after Bill de Blasio finished first in the Democratic mayoral primary, students of New York politics were already pronouncing identity politics dead. After all, half the black voters abandoned the black candidate, William C. Thompson Jr., to back Mr. de Blasio (he and Mr. Thompson each got 42 percent among blacks, according to an Edison Research survey of voters leaving the polls). Ideology trumped race as even the Rev. Al Sharpton, more impressed with Mr. de Blasio’s policy agenda, remained publicly neutral instead of reflexively endorsing the black candidate. Mr. Thompson carried Italian and Irish Catholic districts in Staten Island and Breezy Point, Queens, which, in the past, have not routinely embraced black candidates, as well as several Orthodox Jewish and Russian enclaves…

…This year, said John H. Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a neighbor of Mr. de Blasio, “the really big story is that black central Brooklyn, the single largest contiguous settlement of black people anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, did not back an African-American who climbed up the rungs of regular Democratic politics in the borough, but chose instead a younger white leader in a biracial family who is a former organizer and much more Obamaesque.”…

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Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History

University of Texas Press
2003
456 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
142 illustrations, 3 tables
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-292-70527

Teresa Palomo Acosta

Ruthe Winegarten (1929-2004)

Awards

• 2004 T.R. Fehrenbach Award; Texas Historical Commission
• Texas Reference Source Award; Reference Round Table, Texas Library Association

This groundbreaking book is at once a general history and a celebration of Tejanas’ contributions to Texas over three centuries

Since the early 1700s, women of Spanish/Mexican origin or descent have played a central, if often unacknowledged, role in Texas history. Tejanas have been community builders, political and religious leaders, founders of organizations, committed trade unionists, innovative educators, astute businesswomen, experienced professionals, and highly original artists. Giving their achievements the recognition they have long deserved, this groundbreaking book is at once a general history and a celebration of Tejanas’ contributions to Texas over three centuries.

The authors have gathered and distilled a wide range of information to create this important resource. They offer one of the first detailed accounts of Tejanas’ lives in the colonial period and from the Republic of Texas up to 1900. Drawing on the fuller documentation that exists for the twentieth century, they also examine many aspects of the modern Tejana experience, including Tejanas’ contributions to education, business and the professions, faith and community, politics, and the arts. A large selection of photographs, a historical timeline, and profiles of fifty notable Tejanas complete the volume and assure its usefulness for a broad general audience, as well as for educators and historians.

Contents

• Foreword by Cynthia E. Orozco
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Native Women, Mestizas, and Colonists
• Chapter 2: The Status of Women in the Colonial Period
• Chapter 3: From the Republic of Texas to 1900
• Chapter 4: Revolution, Racism, and Resistance: 1900-1940
• Chapter 5: Life in Rural Texas: 1900-1940
• Chapter 6: Life in Urban Texas: 1900-1940
• Chapter 7: Education: Learning, Teaching, Leading
• Chapter 8: Entering Business and the Professions
• Chapter 9: Faith and Community
• Chapter 10: Politics, the Chicano Movement, and Tejana Feminism
• Chapter 11: Winning and Holding Public Office
• Chapter 12: Arts and Culture Epilogue: Grinding Corn Fifty Notable Tejanas
• Time Line
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “Colorblind?: The Contradictions of Racial Classification”

Seminar Series: Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective
University of California, Merced
California Room
5200 North Lake Rd.
Merced, California 95343
2013-09-19, 10:30 PDT (Local Time)

Michael Omi, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley

The dominant racial ideology of colorblindness in the United States holds that the most effective anti-racist policy, and practice, is to ignore race. Issues continue to arise, however, that present a set of contradictions for colorblind ideology by “noticing” race. On-going debates about racial data collection by the state and the “rebiologization” of race in biomedical research and DNA sampling illustrate, in different ways, the inherently problematic character of racial classification.

Michael Omi is associate professor of Ethnic Studies and the associate director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society (HIFIS) at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the co-author of Racial Formation in the United States, a groundbreaking work that transformed how we understand the social and historical forces that give race its changing meaning over time and place. Professor Omi’s research interests include racial theory and politics, racial/ethnic classification and the census, Asians Americans and racial stratification, and racist and anti-racist social movements. He is a recipient of UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award—an honor bestowed on only 240 Berkeley faculty members since the award’s inception in 1959.

The seminar series “Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective” is organized by Tanya Golash-Boza, Nigel Hatton, and David Torres-Rouff. The event is co-sponsored by the UC Center for New Racial Studies, Sociology, and SSHA.

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Black and white in America: The culture and politics of racial classification

International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society
Volume 7, Issue 2 (Winter 1993)
pages 229-258
DOI: 10.1007/BF02283196

Ernest Evans Kilker

The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and external career for a variety of individuals . . . The first fruit of this imagination —and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it—is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his chances in life only by becoming aware of all those individuals in his circumstances . . . The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. —C. W. Mills

It is in race that the postmodern world today finds its most exemplary vanishing point. Race appears as if it is fixed and permanent, immune to being altered by the ideas or expressions used to address or comprehend it. Yet what does it really mean? To what extent does it have anything to say about specifiable differences between peoples, cultures and histories? The point here is when we talk about race we are never sure what we are referring to: a dilemma which posits many contradictory futures and opportunities. —Timothy Maliqualim Simone

THE POLITICS OF RACIAL CLASSIFICATION

Who is Black? Is there any “scientific” and “objective” answer or simply a cultural and “subjective one? In a racist culture, the answer to this question is fraught with political, economic, legal, familial, psychological, and sexual intended and unintended consequences. Surprisingly, the first book length sociological survey treatment of this subject, by F. James Davis appeared only last year (Davis, 1991: ix). Davis himself admits that the theoretical connections, to phenomenological, symbolic interactionist, structural, and conflict theories, which his excellent work implicitly suggests, go unexplored (Davis, 1991: x). Although we take for granted our definition of “black” which pivots on the Louisiana “one drop” or “any known black ancestry” rule (Dominquez, 1986), cross culturally its definition and meanings are extremely variable (Adams, 1969; Hoetnik, 1967; Lowenthal, 1969; Pierson, 1942; Freyre, 1963). In addition, historical studies of racial miscegenation and mulattos in the United States are few and far between (Williamson, 1980: xi; Reuter, 1918).

Because of the amount of interbreeding that has taken place over the last several thousand years, the scientific status of the biological concept of race is an especially dubious one (Simone, 1989). What exists is a spectrum and continuum of human types which share certain physical traits in an almost infinite variety of combinations (Kuper, 1975; Montagu, 1965). However, from a cultural point of view, the American belief in the biological reality of race is still a pervasive one. In our racist culture, any known black ancestry (i.e. “one drop”) can lead to the societal designation of the individual genetically as “black” — even if the individual is overwhelmingly “white.” As a result of this cultural rule, many black leaders, who were significantly and even predominantly white, were defined and defined themselves as “black.” The most dramatic example on this longand illustrious list (which would include Frederick Douglass, Booker T, Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, A. Phillip Randolph, and Adam Clayton Powell) is Walter White, head of the NAACP from 1931-1955, who anthropologists estimate could not have been more than one sixty-fourth African black (Davis, 1991:7). Walter White “passed for white” when he went “undercover” while investigating lynchings in the South for the NAACP. In addition in 1923 he deceived Edward Y. Clark, a Ku Klux Klan recruiter, into inviting him to Atlanta to advise him on recruitment. However his cover was blown before the trip could take place (Lewis, 1979: 131). In the same year he managed to embarass many a federal legislator, while lobbying for an anti-lynching bill. When they discovered White was Black, they regretted their candor (Lewis, 1979: 132). Even Malcolm X, the individual most responsible for the black consciousness and black power movement in the United States, had a white rapist for a grandfather and a mother who, for employment purposes, regularly “passed for white” (Haley, 1964: 2). Malcolm’s mother, Louise, claimed that if she scrubbed the young Malcolm hard and often enough, “I can make him look almost white” (Perry, 1991: p. 5). Once Malcolm himself converted to the nation of Islam, he regularly took “skin baths” in the sun to deepen his self-described “light” skin tone (Perry, 1991: 117)…

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Luck and a Shrewd Strategy Fueled de Blasio’s Ascension

The New York Times
2013-09-11

Michael Barbaro, Political Writer

The commercial that changed the course of the mayor’s race almost never happened.

Bill de Blasio’s campaign team had mused about building an ad around his wife, Chirlane McCray, a telegenic African-American poet, then abandoned the concept.

They then turned to his 15-year-old son, but nothing seemed to go right. The de Blasio family kitchen in Brooklyn was not big enough for the camera crew, so they borrowed a bigger one from a neighbor.

The neighbor’s kitchen turned out to be too fancy, sending the wrong message for a populist candidate. So a long lens was used to blur out the expensive fixtures.

But when the commercial was finally shown to the candidate and his wife, they seemed overcome, instantly recognizing the power of its message: that the aggressive policing of the Bloomberg era was not an abstraction to Mr. de Blasio, it was an urgent personal worry within his biracial household.

“This,” predicted the campaign’s pollster, Anna Greenberg, “will be huge.”…

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De Blasio First in Mayoral Primary; Unclear if He Avoids a Runoff

The New York Times
2013-09-10

David M. Halbfinger, Reporter

David W. Chen, City Hall Bureau Chief

Bill de Blasio, whose campaign for mayor of New York tapped into a city’s deepening unease with income inequality and aggressive police practices, captured far more votes than any of his rivals in the Democratic primary on Tuesday.

But as Mr. de Blasio, an activist-turned-operative and now the city’s public advocate, celebrated a remarkable come-from-behind surge, it was not clear if he had won the 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff election on Oct. 1 with William C. Thompson Jr., who finished second. At night’s end, he had won just over 40 percent of the ballots counted; thousands of paper ballots had yet to be tallied, which could take days.

…Mr. de Blasio, a white Brooklynite who frequently showcased his biracial family, built a broad coalition of support among nearly every category of Democratic primary voters on Tuesday, according to the exit poll by Edison Research. His critique of a city divided between rich and poor — tried in the past by other candidates in New York and nationally with little success — resonated…

“I love his message about the tale of two cities, the big inequality gap,” said Jelani Wheeler, 19, a politics student at St. John’s University in Queens…

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