Breast cancer and racialized medicine

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, United States on 2015-04-16 22:17Z by Steven

Breast cancer and racialized medicine

Race, Racism & Human Genetics IDS 243: Race, Racism, and Human Genetics
Willamette University
Salem, Oregon
2014-11-28

Stephanie Matsuura

Katie Herr

Camille Debreczeny

Race, Racism & Human Genetics IDS 243: Race, Racism, and Human Genetics is an interdisciplinary course taught at Willamette University by Emily Drew and Chris Smith. This blog represents the work of students enrolled in the course, and their reactions to current scholarly and popular work relating to the biology of human difference.

Racial disparities in breast cancer are often attributed to biology uncritically, without considering social factors. In many genetic studies, rhetorical framing of human diversity conflates differences between populations with racial categories. An unconscious complicity in the racial worldview informs these studies, which are then used to justify racialized explanations for disparities in breast cancer. Many researchers recognize that individualized, complete genome analysis would provide better care for patients, but lack the technological and economic resources to make this a realistic goal. Instead they rely on racialized medicine, which has serious consequences for women of color with breast cancer.

Racialized medicine occurs when the U.S. racial worldview goes unchallenged in the way it shapes medical research, health care practices, and public health policy. It is a way of making inequalities in health and illness seem natural by erroneously linking them to “innate” and “biological” differences between racial groups. In the U.S., women of color are disproportionately affected by breast cancer. Black women in particular have higher breast cancer mortality rates than any other racial/ethnic group in the country (Happe 2006). In this blog we aim to cover the main possible explanations for observed racial disparities in both incidence and prognosis of breast cancer. Studies have attributed racial disparities in both incidence and prognosis to the genetics underlying breast cancer as well as to social factors…

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The 99% Mayor

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2013-11-11 11:38Z by Steven

The 99% Mayor

New York Magazine
2013-10-27

Chris Smith

Bill de Blasio’s promise may also be his problem.

He is joking, but he’s not kidding. “When I spoke last time, they needed a much smaller room,” Bill de Blasio says to laughter. “This is the glory of American democracy!” Exactly one year earlier, De Blasio had appeared before the same group, the Association for a Better New York, an alliance of city businesses and civic organizations; the turnout then, in October 2012, was 400, and the reaction was chilly—especially when De Blasio unveiled what would become a signature element of his run for mayor, a proposal to tax the wealthy to pay for new pre­kindergarten and after-school programs. This morning—fresh off an improbable, resounding victory in the Democratic primary—De Blasio is greeted by a sold-out crowd of 800 and a standing ovation.

Still, there’s a bit of tension served with the scrambled eggs: De Blasio unflinchingly repeats his vow to boost taxes, to which he adds emphatic praise for labor unions and higher minimum wages. To lighten the mood, De Blasio improvises a running joke. He decries the decline in city and state funding to the City University of New York, and the table directly in front of the podium—full of CUNY executives—breaks into loud applause. A few paragraphs later, De Blasio says he wants to restore $150 million in funding to CUNY, producing the same thrilled, noisy result. “I love these guys!” he cracks. “Whenever I need a little pick-me-up, I’ll just say the word ‘CUNY’ and this whole table will erupt!” When he opens the floor to questions, a woman from a tech firm asks how the likely future mayor feels about her industry. “I would like to have seen the same vigorous applause as from CUNY,” he says, “so you need to think about that.” But De Blasio quickly makes it clear he’s joshing, that he loves the tech sector, too. Then, a few minutes later, a representative of the hospital industry stands up and praises De Blasio. “You know, I just want to say, I’ve lost my interest in CUNY,” De Blasio says, smiling. “I think the health-care sector is where I want to put my attention after all! They placated me better than CUNY did! CUNY, it was great while it lasted.”

More laughter, but this time there’s an uneasy undercurrent. And, at a table of real-estate executives, raised eyebrows and shaking heads. They’ve got nothing against hospitals or city colleges, mind you. They’re just wondering what, exactly, the city’s next mayor really stands for…

…Enter the candidate, sweating and laughing. “Hey!” De Blasio says, bounding through the front door of his Brooklyn house and spotting me sitting at the kitchen table with his wife and son and noticing that I’m wearing a dress shirt and tie. “Chris Smith thinks he’s on East 79th Street, in a townhouse!”

Which is funny and self-deprecating, because this sure isn’t the $30 million Bloomberg manse. The De Blasio homestead in Park Slope is a humble three-story rectangle covered in faded green-painted wood paneling. Inside, the first floor is a combined living room and kitchen, all of it well worn. On one wall is a small, framed drawing of the “Sodium Avenger,” a superhero created by daughter Chiara to lovingly tease Mom for banning salt from the dinner table. On the opposite wall is a vivid yellow-and-red floor-to-­ceiling poster commemorating the mid-eighties Artists Against Apartheid movement; his wife, Chirlane McCray, did poetry readings and is listed among the performers. If I needed any further indication that the city is on the verge of a radical change in mayoral style from Bloomberg, who seems as if he were born in a pin-striped suit, there’s the 52-year-old De Blasio himself: He’s just back from his daily workout at the 9th Street Y and wearing a frayed, sweat-soaked blue T-shirt and baggy gray sweatpants…

…As his own life has become more public, De Blasio has propelled his family into the spotlight with him. Having cheery, mixed-race kids has paid political dividends, but De Blasio claims his motivation is educational as much as anything else. “You have to understand our family is different in the way we think about things. Chirlane and I met in City Hall; we had both had a history of activism,” he says. “We talked about it in broad ways; it was unspoken that we were going to pursue not only our love, our relationship, but our commitment to the world, and that was going to be a given in our lives … These are kids who, by the time Chiara was 5 and Dante was 2, they had slept overnight in the Clinton White House. [The kids] both got so much out of this experience this year, they got some real-life lessons about how the world works, but they also gained a lot of strength, a lot of confidence, a lot of understanding.”…

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