Mixed Race Studies

White Yet Non-White: Miscegenation in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2007)

American Studies Today Online
Volume 19, (2012)
2012-05-30
ISSN: 2044-804X

Sofia Politidou
Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece

This article examines the changes in the concept of miscegenation, from the slavery years to the 1960s and the 2000s, as recorded in Natasha Trethewey’s Pulitzer Prize poetry collection Native Guard (2007). Through a close reading of the poems “Pastoral,” “Miscegenation,” “Blond,” “Southern Gothic” and “South” from the third mainly autobiographical section of the collection, it shall be argued that, while in the past, miscegenation was strictly a matter of race for African-Americans, nowadays, it is also a matter of identity and self identification. Trethewey narrates how she experienced discrimination for being a mixed-race person in the early years of her life. She also describes how being a mixed-race person led her to a quest for selfhood. Trethewey believes that American anti-miscegenation laws enhanced her feeling of being different and caused her to doubt her identity as black, white or a person of mixed race.

Read the entire article here.

The Myth of Native American Blood

The Hyphenated Life
The Boston Globe
2012-06-01

Francie Latour

The African-American grandmother of a friend of mine once summed up the laws that govern black identity in this country. “If you ever want to know if someone’s black or not,” she would say, “go ask their white neighbor.”

That succinct, small-town Georgia wisdom essentially outlines the rule of hypodescent, also known as the one-drop rule. The one-drop rule emerged during slavery and hardened in Reconstruction, automatically classifying as black anyone with any trace of African ancestry. It is the reason why, in the 1800s, the extremely light-skinned offspring of white fathers and black mothers were deemed slaves. It’s also the reason why, in 2011, the actress Halle Berry, who is biracial but identifies as black, became a lightning rod of controversy for maintaining that her own daughter, with white Canadian actor Gabriel Aubry, is also black.

The fact that Americans with vastly different complexions know they are black by the number of cab drivers who don’t stop for them as much as by any internal measure is a dilemma on many levels. But for Kim Tallbear, an enrolled member of South Dakota’s Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe and a UC Berkeley professor who studies race, genomics and Native American identity, the tyranny of the one-drop rule poses a specific problem in the ongoing controversy surrounding US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren and her shifting, dubious claims of Native American identity…

…“If you want to understand Native American identity,” Tallbear said, “you need to get outside of that binary, one-drop framework. Native Americans do not fit in that binary. We have been racialized very differently in relationship to whites.”

How do we know Native Americans are racialized differently, Tallbear said? Because a white person—say, Elizabeth Warren, for example—can absorb a Native American ancestor and still maintain an identity as white. If Warren had a black ancestor, that fact would threaten her white identity…

Read the entire essay here.

Ireland and African-America

Clinton Institute for American Studies
University College Dublin, Ireland
2012-03-09 through 2012-03-11

Report

On the 9 – 10 March 2012, The Clinton Institute for American Studies held a two day international conference entitled Ireland and African-America.  Unfortunately, the main keynote speaker Ishmael Reed had to withdraw from the conference on the 6 March due to the passing of his mother.  Reed passed along his sincere regrets and though he was much missed he was very much there in spirit.  However, other auspicious plenaries included Professor Luke Gibbons, Professor Eric Lott and Professor Diane Negra.  The conference drew together a community of international scholars and academics whose research interests speak towards the crossover between Ireland and African-America.

Friday afternoon kicked off with parallel sessions entitled ‘Identity and Belonging’ and ‘The Bod[ies] Politic’ respectively.  Papers included productive discussions on representations of Irish and Africa-American identity on film, stage and through the motif of music in literature, and on Isaac Nelson and Slavery, The African Blood Brotherhood and the Easter Rebellion and on Crosscurrents of the Green and Black Atlantics in New York City in 1920.  Friday afternoon was brought to a close with a rousing lecture by Professor Luke Gibbons on Slavish Representations in the work of controversial Cork artist James Barry.  Gibbons’ sweeping lecture drew together Barry’s largely eighteenth century body of work with twentieth century political theories regarding the power of the state and the rights of the citizen.

Saturday morning sessions began with panels on Irish national and ethnic attitudes on race and further papers on the Green and Black Atlantic (with a specific focus on black abolitionist Fredrick Douglass).  The latter panel was very kindly rounded out at the last minute by Ann Coughlan, a PhD student in University College Cork after the withdrawal of two planned speakers.  Following a catered lunch, Professor Diane Negra gave the conference’s second plenary on The Tragicomic Irish-America Personae of Denis Leary and Kathy Griffin which examined the manner in which Leary and Griffin access African-American tropes in order to communicate an analogous working class Irish identity which might otherwise be at odds with their celebrity status…

Read the entire report here.

The Problem of Race in Medicine

Philosophy of the Social Sciences
Volume 31, Number 1 (March 2001)
pages 20-39
DOI: 10.1177/004839310103100102

Michael Root, Professor of Philosophy
University of Minnesota

The biomedical sciences employ race as a descriptive and analytic category. They use race to describe differences in rates of morbidity and mortality and to explain variations in drug sensitivity and metabolism. But there are problems with the use of race in medicine. This article identifies a number of the problems and assesses some solutions. The first three sections consider how race is defined and whether the racial data used in biomedical research are reliable and valid. The next three sections explain why racial variation in disease, including genetic disease, is not evidence that race is biological. The final section explains how a proper understanding of the role of race in medicine bears on public policy.

Read or purchase the article here.

Portland Chapter Member: Dmae Roberts

Asian American Journalists Association
2012-05-28

Doris Truong

Dmae Roberts is a two-time Peabody Award-winning radio artist/writer whose work airs regularly on NPR. Her work is often autobiographical and cross-cultural and is informed by her biracial identity. Her Peabody award-winning documentary, “Mei Mei: A Daughter’s Song,” is a harrowing account of her mother’s childhood in Taiwan during World War II.  Dmae won a second Peabody for the documentary “Crossing East,” the first Asian American history series on public radio. She received the Dr. Suzanne Ahn Civil Rights and Social Justice Award from the Asian American Journalists Association and was selected as a United States Artists (USA) Fellow. Dmae is a regular columnist for the Asian Reporter and hosts a weekly arts show in Portland, Ore., called “Stage & Studio.” Her essay “Finding the Poetry” was published in a book of essays called “Reality Radio.” She is working on her memoir, “Lady Buddha and the Temple of Ma.” Dmae is on Twitter: @dmaeroberts.

Q&A

What’s your life’s motto?

I don’t know that I have one. I’ve worked since I was 14 years old during summers in farm fields and all through college in canneries and mills to support myself. My driving theme, though, has been to have work that means something and somehow make the world better in even a small way. … It was important to me have work I loved and not focus only on the financial aspects but find the passion

Why did you become a journalist? What inspired you?

I was a theater major in college and saved up money after the first two years of school to travel the world both to Asia and Europe. When I returned I decided to focus on my writing and get a degree in journalism at the University of Oregon so I could make a living doing something other than manual labor. That’s when I happened upon KLCC, a community radio station in Eugene. I fell in love with producing creative art pieces for public radio. I found that creating radio movies puts powerful images, emotions and scenes in your imagination in a way no other medium can do…

Read the entire interview here.

Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith

Duke University Press
2011
328 pages
58 illus., including 18 color plates
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4799-6
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4782-8

Cherise Smith, Assistant Professor of Art and Art History
Univerity of Texas, Austin

The artists Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, Anna Deavere Smith, and Nikki S. Lee have all crossed racial, ethnic, gender, and class boundaries in works that they have conceived and performed. Cherise Smith analyzes their complex engagements with issues of identity through close readings of a significant performance, or series of performances, by each artist. She examines Piper’s public embodiment of the Mythic Being, a working-class black man, during the early 1970s; Antin’s full-time existence as the fictitious black ballerina Eleanora Antinova for several weeks in 1981; and Smith’s shifting among more than twenty characters of different ages and racial, ethnic, gender, and class backgrounds in Twilight: Los Angeles. She also considers Lee’s performances of membership in cultural groups—including swing dancers, hip-hop devotees, skateboarders, drag queens, and yuppies—in her Projects series (1997–2001). The author historicizes the politics of identity by exploring each performance in relation to the discourses prevalent in the United States at the time of its development. She is attentive to how the artists manipulated clothing, mannerisms, voice, and other signs to negotiate their assumed identities. Cherise Smith argues that by drawing on conventions such as passing, blackface, minstrelsy, cross-dressing, and drag, they highlighted the constructedness and fluidity of identity and identifications. Enacting Others provides a provocative account of how race informs contemporary art and feminist performance practices.

Elizabeth Warren: Box-Checking for Fun and Profit

Indican Country Today Media Network
2012-05-16

Steve Russell, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice
Indiana University

Forrest Carter, Carlos Castaneda, Ward Churchill, Iron Eyes Cody, Jamake HIghwater, Nasdijj, Princess Pale Moon, Andrea and Justine Smith, Mary Thunder, Dhyani Ywahoo.

Some of these people have done good work; others have profited only themselves. Some have traded in valuable insights; others in execrable garbage. They have one thing in common.

The question recently has been whether Elizabeth Warren belongs on that list. I am personally unclear about the standards of admission, so I will be thinking out loud. I contributed to Elizabeth Warren’s campaign before and after her opponent nominated her for inclusion, so feel free to consider these remarks biased for that reason…

…I was born and raised in the Creek Nation, and some of our customs are remarkably similar. We share the history of removal to Indian Territory and the abrogation of our treaties to create the State of Oklahoma. We produced the most effective organizers against the Dawes Act abomination in the Cherokee Redbird Smith and the Creek Chitto Harjo. But I never, ever, thought I was the same as a Creek. Different language, different stories, different traditions of governing—let’s face it, different peoples.

How can you maintain a tribal identity without knowing at least some of what that identity means?

A genealogist in Boston claimed to have discovered that Elizabeth Warren’s g-g-g-grandmother is listed on a marriage application as Cherokee. This would not tell us blood quantum because, even in those times, one was either a Cherokee citizen or not.

Elizabeth Warren’s alleged Cherokee ancestor would have been a contemporary of John Ross, Cooweescowee, the Bird Clan Cherokee who led the tribal government though our most tragic confrontations with American greed. Ross was one-eighth Cherokee by blood, as I am. I draw the conclusion that if Warren’s ancestor were in fact Cherokee, we would still know nothing about her blood quantum.

A prominent Cherokee scholar, Dr. Richard Allen, points out that Warren’s ancestor was allegedly married to a white man in Tennessee at a time when such a marriage would have been prohibited by anti-miscegenation laws. Those laws only fell when struck down by the Supreme Court in 1967, a blow for equality every bit as significant as the legalization of gay marriage in our time. Like the prohibitions on gay marriage, anti-miscegenation laws were justified by a comical admixture of fake science and superstition, only comical to those not separated from persons they loved.

It’s only fair to admit the Cherokee Nation had such laws as well, but applying only to “Negroes.” However, white Cherokee citizens were limited to one wife. While that limitation sounds absurd, it was a rational attempt to avoid white intruders entering marriages of convenience with Cherokee women, which brings up another speculation about Ms. Warren’s story…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Race Finished: Book Review

American Scientist
April-May, 2012

Jan Sapp, Professor of Biology and History
York University, Toronto

Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth. Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle. xviii + 226 pp. Texas A&M University Press, 2011.

Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture. Edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan. xiv + 296 pp. Columbia University Press, 2011. cloth.

Few concepts are as emotionally charged as that of race. The word conjures up a mixture of associations—culture, ethnicity, genetics, subjugation, exclusion and persecution. But is the tragic history of efforts to define groups of people by race really a matter of the misuse of science, the abuse of a valid biological concept? Is race nevertheless a fundamental reality of human nature? Or is the notion of human “races” in fact a folkloric myth? Although biologists and cultural anthropologists long supposed that human races—genetically distinct populations within the same species—have a true existence in nature, many social scientists and geneticists maintain today that there simply is no valid biological basis for the concept.

The consensus among Western researchers today is that human races are sociocultural constructs. Still, the concept of human race as an objective biological reality persists in science and in society. It is high time that policy makers, educators and those in the medical-industrial complex rid themselves of the misconception of race as type or as genetic population. This is the message of two recent books: Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth, by Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle, and Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture, edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan. Both volumes are important and timely. Both put race in the context of the history of science and society, relating how the ill-defined word has been given different meanings by different people to refer to groups they deem to be inferior or superior in some way.

Before we turn to the books themselves, a little background is necessary. A turning point in debates on race was marked in 1972 when, in a paper titled “The Apportionment of Human Diversity,” Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin showed that human populations, then held to be races, were far more genetically diverse than anyone had imagined. Lewontin’s study was based on molecular-genetic techniques and provided statistical analysis of 17 polymorphic sites, including the major blood groups in the races as they were conventionally defined: Caucasian, African, Mongoloid, South Asian Aborigines, Amerinds, Oceanians and Australian Aborigines. What he found was unambiguous—and the inverse of what one would expect if such races had any biological reality: The great majority of genetic variation (85.4 percent) was within so-called races, not between them. Differences between local populations accounted for 8.5 percent of total variation; differences between regions accounted for 6.3 percent. The genetic divergence between geographical populations in the course of human evolution does not compare to the variation among individuals. “Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance,” Lewontin concluded…

…Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth is a beautifully presented book, elegantly reasoned and skillfully written. Tattersall, a physical anthropologist, and DeSalle, a geneticist, are both senior scholars at the American Museum of Natural History. Their aim is to explain human diversity in terms of human evolution and dispersal since our ancestors walked out of Africa some 100,000 years ago. The patterns of diversity, they write, reflect the processes of divergence and reintegration, the yin and yang of evolution.

In biology, a grouping has biological meaning based on principles of common descent—the Darwinian idea that all members of the group share a common ancestry. On this basis, and on the ability to interbreed, all humans are grouped into one species as Homo sapiens, the only surviving member of the various species that the genus comprised. Species are arranged within the “tree of life,” a hierarchical classification that situates each species in only one genus, that genus only in one family and so on. Nothing confuses that classification more than the exchange of genes between groups. In the bacterial world, for example, gene sharing can occur throughout the most evolutionarily divergent groups. The result is a reticulate evolution—a global net or web of related organisms, and no species. Among humans, reticulation occurs when there is interbreeding within the species—mating among individuals from different geographical populations. The result of such genetic mixing of previously isolated groups—due to migrations, invasions and colonization—is that no clear boundaries can be drawn around the variety of humans, no “races” of us…

…Although race is void of biological foundation, it has a profound social reality. All too apparent are disparities in health and welfare. Despite all the evidence indicating that “race” has no biological or evolutionary meaning, the biological-race concept continues to gain strength today in science and society, and it is reinforced by those who design and market DNA-based technologies. Race is used more and more in forensics, medicine and the genetic-ancestry business. Tattersall and DeSalle confront those industries head on and in no uncertain terms, arguing that “race-based medicine” and “raced-based genomics” are deeply flawed. Individuals fall ill, not populations. Belonging to any socioculturally defined race is a poor predictor of an individual’s genes, and one’s genes a poor predictor of one’s health.

Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture arose from two projects, both funded by the Ford Foundation and organized by the Council for Responsible Genetics, that “examined the persistence of the concept of human races within science and the impacts such a concept has had on disparities among people of different geographical ancestries.” The first project brought together academics and social-justice advocates to discuss “racialized” forensic DNA databases and seek policy solutions. The second focused on the effects of modern genetic technology in reinscribing and naturalizing the concept of race in science and society. The resulting book is a fine and richly textured compilation, in which a multidisciplinary group of scholars explore racialized medicine, various uses of genetic testing in forensics and the genetic-ancestry industry, and attempts to link intelligence and race.

Sociologist Troy Duster argues that the growing genetic-ancestry industry not only reinforces a biological conception of race but is sorely in need of government regulation in regard to claims made and accuracy of methods used to pinpoint ancestry, as was suggested by the American Society of Human Genetics in 2008…

…A different aspect of racial profiling is evident in the growing industry of racialized medicine, whose proponents might argue that even if race has no evolutionary or biological meaning, it can still be useful for medical treatments. After all, more and more diseases are reportedly correlated with ethnicity and race. But as evolutionary biologists Joseph L. Graves Jr. and Jonathan Kahn argue in their respective chapters on the subject, racialized medicine is a bad investment and is bound to fail for two reasons. First, although individual ancestries are useful on medical questionnaires, ancestry should not be conflated with race. “The issue is not primarily one of whether to use racial categories in medical practice but how,” Kahn writes.

Carefully taking account of race to help understand broader social or environmental factors that may be influencing health disparities can be warranted. . . . But it is always important to understand that race itself is not an inherent causal factor in such conditions.

As an example, he considers the drug called BiDil, FDA approved as an anti–heart-attack agent specifically marketed to African Americans on the grounds that they have a biological propensity for heart disease brought on by high blood pressure. Not only is the drug not effective for all African Americans, it is quite effective for many individuals who self-identify as Caucasian…

Read the entire review here.

Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth

Texas A&M University Press
2011-09-01
256 pages
6 x 9
Photo. 9 line art. 6 tables. Index.
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-60344-425-5

Ian Tattersall, Curator Emeritus
American Museum of Natural History

Rob DeSalle, Curator of Entomology
American Museum of Natural History in the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics

Race has provided the rationale and excuse for some of the worst atrocities in human history. Yet, according to many biologists, physical anthropologists, and geneticists, there is no valid scientific justification for the concept of race.

To be more precise, although there is clearly some physical basis for the variations that underlie perceptions of race, clear boundaries among “races” remain highly elusive from a purely biological standpoint. Differences among human populations that people intuitively view as “racial” are not only superficial but are also of astonishingly recent origin.

In this intriguing and highly accessible book, physical anthropologist Ian Tattersall and geneticist Rob DeSalle, both senior scholars from the American Museum of Natural History, explain what human races actually are—and are not—and place them within the wider perspective of natural diversity. They explain that the relative isolation of local populations of the newly evolved human species during the last Ice Age—when Homo sapiens was spreading across the world from an African point of origin—has now begun to reverse itself, as differentiated human populations come back into contact and interbreed. Indeed, the authors suggest that all of the variety seen outside of Africa seems to have both accumulated and started reintegrating within only the last 50,000 or 60,000 years—the blink of an eye, from an evolutionary perspective.

The overarching message of Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth is that scientifically speaking, there is nothing special about racial variation within the human species. These distinctions result from the working of entirely mundane evolutionary processes, such as those encountered in other organisms.

The Biologistical Construction of Race: ‘Admixture’ Technology and the New Genetic Medicine

Social Studies of Science
Volume 38, Number 5 (2008)
pages 695-735
DOI: 10.1177/0306312708090796

Duana Fullwiley, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and of Medical Anthropology
Harvard University

This paper presents an ethnographic case study of the use of race in two interconnected laboratories of medical genetics. Specifically, it examines how researchers committed to reducing health disparities in Latinos with asthma advance hypotheses and structure research to show that relative frequencies of genetic markers characterize commonly understood groupings of race. They do this first by unapologetically advancing the idea that peoples whom they take to be of the `Old World’, or `Africans’, `Europeans’, `East Asians’, and `Native Americans’, can serve as putatively pure reference populations against which genetic risk for common diseases such as asthma can be calculated for those in the `New World’. Technologically, they deploy a tool called ancestry informative markers (AIMs), which are a collection of genetic sequence variants said to differ in present-day West Africans, East Asians, Europeans, and (ideally Pre-Columbian) Native Americans. I argue that this technology, compelling as it may be to a range of actors who span the political spectrum, is, at base, designed to bring about a correspondence of familiar ideas of race and supposed socially neutral DNA. This correspondence happens, in part, as the scientists in question often bracket the environment while privileging racialized genetic variance as the primary source of health disparities for common disease, in this case between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans with asthma. With their various collaborators, these scientists represent a growing movement within medical genetics to re-consider race and `racial admixture’ as biogenetically valid points of departure. Furthermore, many actors at the center of this ethnography focus on race as a function of their personal identity politics as scientists of color. This to say, they are driven not by racist notions of human difference, but by a commitment to reduce health disparities and to include `their’ communities in what they describe as the `genetic revolution’.

The very word ‘race’ applies to a hypothetical past, or to a problematical future, not to the actual present … the only way to measure the genetic relationship of ethnic groups would be by ascertaining the quantitative values of their coefficients of common ancestry, which would be based entirely upon the statistical methods of probability theory. (We Europeans [Julian Huxley and Alfred Court Haddon, 1939: 114])

To me, the refusal to use race in medicine is political correctness gone awry. It’s a lot of white researchers gone political. (Esteban Gonzàles Burchard, asthma geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco Lung Biology Center; field notes 2003)

The Molecularization of ‘Admixture’: A History of the Present

In 1949, the year before the first United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) statement rallying against the race concept, Linus Pauling characterized sickle cell anemia as the first ‘molecular disease’ (Pauling et al., 1949). At the time, most experts and lay people considered sickle cell a ‘black-race disorder’. Despite global good will and contrition for the violence perpetuated in the name of racial purification in Germany and elsewhere a few short years before, some North American scientists called the UNESCO statement an ‘incautious affirmation’ and claimed that sickle cell anemia in American blacks (who by definition, it was assumed, had white ancestry) was a perfect example of how ‘race mixture can be disadvantageous in its racial effects’ (Gates, 1952: 896). The then ‘odd’ observation that ‘hybrids’ (black Americans) seemed to have more sickle cell disease than their ‘pure’ (African) counterparts who had more sickle cell trait (which was actually mistaken for a milder form of the disease in many cases) gave immediate rise to theories that ‘racial admixture’ could affect disease risk and/or severity (Gates, 1952). With Pauling’s Nobel-winning observations came the first intellectual opening for the molecularization of race. Immediately with it came the idea that racialized ancestral mixing, or ‘admixture’, constituted increased risk of disease pathology. In what follows, I examine a present-day resurgence of the concept of human biological admixture as a factor in disease risk in some quarters of contemporary American medical genetics…

…Over the past few years, social scientists studying genetics and race have urged their colleagues to ‘go to the very sites’ of scientific production and ‘document how [racial] categories are being constructed’ anew (Reardon, 2005: 18; Duster, 2006a: 12). Following from this, it is as imperative that ethnographers also attempt to understand better scientists’ motives for wanting to resuscitate such troubled categories. To this end, it is important for me to note how my informants’ social experiences shape the tautological product of genetic racial admixture they use on a daily basis. In particular, one challenge these scientists have posed for themselves is to ‘care’ for their own disproportionately sick communities of ‘racially admixed subjects’ by recruiting and enrolling them in genetic research. A crucial aspect of their effort to reduce health disparities is a search for the biological component of these communities’ mixed racial heritage. For several of my informants, this heritage is a point of biological difference that may contain clues about present-day health differences. Here it is many ‘drops of blood’ – rather than one – that now constitute the brown bodies in question. Today, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in the US are assumed to be differentially constituted from African-Americans and Native Americans, based on their varying amounts of African, European, and Native (pre-Columbian) genetic ancestral contributions. Yet, contrary to earlier American norms of hypo-descent, these mixed groups must remain conceptually separate, ‘ethnically’ and ‘politically’, from the referent groups that make them up. Today, Mexicans’ and Puerto Ricans’ African ancestries are deemed important for reasons that will become clear below, but they are rarely collapsed into a category of ‘blackness’. In fact, as one of the main researchers featured in this ethnography reminded himself and his team time and again, as of the 2000 census, Latinos surpassed African-Americans as the largest minority group in the US. Over the course of my fieldwork in his lab, I heard this feat by numbers repeated, as if to say that this researcher’s ‘community’ needed and deserved the same kind of attention, political courtship, and scientific resources as one of the most historically ‘important’ and visible American minority groups…

Read the entire artcle here.