scholarly journals The racist “one drop rule” influencing science: it is time to stop teaching “race corrections” in medicine

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 644-650
Author(s):  
Heidi L. Lujan ◽  
Stephen E. DiCarlo

Glomerular filtration rate (GFR) is a key index of renal function. The classic method for assessing GFR is the clearance of inulin. Several current methods using isotopic (125I-iothalamate, 51Cr-EDTA, or 99Tc-DTPA) or nonisotopic (iohexol or iothalamate) markers are available. Clinically, GFR is estimated (eGFR) from serum creatinine or cystatin C levels. Estimated GFR based on creatinine and/or cystatin are less accurate than measured GFR. The creatinine-based equations calculate higher eGFR values (suggesting better kidney function) for black individuals. This upward adjustment for all black individuals is embedded in eGFR calculations on the belief of higher serum creatinine concentrations among black individuals than among white individuals. Thus “race-corrected” eGFR has become a widely accepted and scientifically valid procedure. However, race is not a genetic or biological category. Rather, race is a social construction defined by region-specific cultural and historical ideas. Furthermore, there is no accepted scientific method for classifying people as black or white individuals. Studies typically rely on self-identification of race. However, any person in the United States with any known black ancestry is considered to be a black individual. This is known as the “one-drop rule,” meaning that a single drop of “black blood” makes anyone a black individual. It does not matter if an individual has 50%, 25%, 5%, or 0.5% African ancestry. The limited accuracy and reliability of this approach would not be allowed for any other scientific variable. Admixture and migration have produced such broad variations that race categories should not be used as experimental variables.

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas John Cooke ◽  
Ian Shuttleworth

It is widely presumed that information and communication technologies, or ICTs, enable migration in several ways; primarily by reducing the costs of migration. However, a reconsideration of the relationship between ICTs and migration suggests that ICTs may just as well hinder migration; primarily by reducing the costs of not moving.  Using data from the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics, models that control for sources of observed and unobserved heterogeneity indicate a strong negative effect of ICT use on inter-state migration within the United States. These results help to explain the long-term decline in internal migration within the United States.


2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter P. Smith

The United States is in a bind. On the one hand, we need millions of additional citizens with at least one year of successful post-secondary experience to adapt to the knowledge economy. Both the Gates and Lumina Foundations, and our President, have championed this goal in different ways. On the other hand, we have a post-secondary system that is trapped between rising costs and stagnant effectiveness, seemingly unable to respond effectively to this challenge. This paper analyzes several aspects of this problem, describes changes in the society that create the basis for solutions, and offers several examples from Kaplan University of emerging practice that suggests what good practice might look like in a world where quality-assured mass higher education is the norm.


Screen Bodies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-37
Author(s):  
David Yagüe González

The behaviors and actions that an individual carries out in their daily life and how they are translated by their society overdetermine the gender one might have—or not—according to social norms. However, do the postulates enounced by feminist and queer Western thinkers still maintain their validity when the context changes? Can the performances of gender carry out their validity when the landscape is other than the one in Europe or the United States? And how can the context of drag complicate these matters? These are the questions that this article will try to answer by analyzing the 2015 movie Viva by Irish director Paddy Breathnach.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harlan Koff

The European Union’s (EU) 2015–2016 “migration/asylum crisis” gave discussions over the relationships between migration, security and development renewed prominence in global affairs. In response to record migratory flows, the EU, like the United States (US), has implemented security responses to migration aimed at protecting territorial integrity. This article addresses the migration–security–development nexus through the lens of policy coherence for development (PCD). It compares EU and US migration policies within the framework of the “transformative development” associated with the Sustainable Development Goals. It contends that these donors have undermined transformative development through the regionalization of development aid, which has contributed to the securitization of both development and migration policies. Thus, the article contends that new mechanisms for change need to be identified. It introduces the notion of “normative coherence” and proposes a potential role for regional human rights courts in fostering migration-related PCD.Spanish abstract: La “crisis migratoria” de la Unión Europea (UE) del 2015–2016 arrojó discusiones sobre las relaciones entre migración, seguridad y desarrollo renovando su prominencia en los asuntos globales. La UE, como los Estados Unidos de América (EE.UU), ha implementado respuestas de seguridad a la migración dirigidas a proteger la integridad territorial. Este artículo se dirige al nexo entre migración, seguridad y desarrollo a través de la lente de la coherencia de políticas públicas para el desarrollo (CPD). Compara las políticas migratorias de UE y EE.UU dentro del marco del “desarrollo transformativo” asociado con los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible. Sostiene que estos donantes han socavado el desarrollo transformativo mediante la regionalización de la ayuda al desarrollo, el cual ha contribuido a incorporar aspectos de seguridad. Así, el artículo sostiene que se requiere identificar nuevos mecanismos para el cambio. Se introduce la noción de “coherencia normativa” y propone el rol potencial de cortes regionales de derechos humanos para promover CPD relacionadas a la migración.French abstract: La crise migratoire 2015-2016 de l’Union Européenne (UE) a replacé les discussions en matière de migration, de sécurité et de développement dans une perspective globale renouvelée. En réponse aux flux sans précédent, l’UE tout comme les Etats-Unis (EU) ont développé des réponses sécuritaires, destinées à protéger leur intégrité territoriale. Cet article évoque la connexion entre la migration, la sécurité et le développement à travers l’optique de la cohérence des politiques publiques pour le développement (CPD). Il compare les politiques migratoires de l’UE et des EU à partir du cadre du « développement transformateur » associé aux ODD. Il révèle que ces donateurs ont saboté le développement transformateur à travers la régionalisation de l’aide au développement, ce qui a contribué à octroyer un impératif sécuritaire. Ainsi, l’article soutient que de nouveaux mécanismes doivent être identifiés. Il introduit la « cohérence normative » et propose un rôle potentiel pour les Cours régionales des droits humaines dans la perspective de promouvoir la CPD en matière de migration.


2000 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Sherman A. Jackson

Native born African-American Muslims and the Immigrant Muslimcommunity foxms two important groups within the American Muslimcommunity. Whereas the sociopolitical reality is objectively the samefor both groups, their subjective responses are quite different. Both arevulnerable to a “double Consciousness,” i.e., an independently subjectiveconsciousness, as well as seeing oneself through the eyes of theother, thus reducing one’s self-image to an object of other’s contempt.Between the confines of culture, politics, and law on the one hand andthe “Islam as a way of life” on the other, Muslims must express theircultural genius and consciously discover linkages within the diverseMuslim community to avoid the threat of double consciousness.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Holslag

The chapter argues that India has a strong interest to balance China and that the two Asian giants will not be able grow together without conflict. However, India will not be able to balance China’s rise. The chapter argues that India remains stuck between nonalignment and nonperformance. On the one hand, it resists the prospect of a new coalition that balances China from the maritime fringes of Eurasia, especially if that coalition is led by the United States. On the other hand, it has failed to strengthen its own capabilities. Its military power lags behind China’s, its efforts to reach out to both East and Central Asia have ended in disappointment, and its economic reforms have gone nowhere. As a result of that economic underachievement, India finds itself also torn between emotional nationalism and paralyzing political fragmentation, which, in turn, will further complicate its role as a regional power.


This chapter reviews the books Fútbol, Jews and the Making of Argentina (2014), by Raanan Rein, translated by Marsha Grenzeback, and Muscling in on New Worlds: Jews, Sport, and the Making of the Americas (2014), edited by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin. Rein’s book deals with the “making” of Argentina through football (soccer), while Muscling in on New Worlds focuses on the “making” of the Americas (mainly the one America, called the United States) through sports. Muscling in on New Worlds is a collection of essays that seeks to advance the common theme of sport as “an avenue by which Jews threaded the needle of asserting a Jewish identity.” Topics include Jews as boxers, Jews and football, Jews and yoga, Orthodox Jewish athletes, and American Jews and baseball. There are also essays about the cinematic and literary representations of Jews in sports.


Author(s):  
Mark Byers

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.


Author(s):  
June Howard

The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on but is not limited to fiction in the United States, also considering the place of the genre in world literature. It argues that regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood, the province, and nation, but also the world. It argues that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It demonstrates the importance of the figure of the schoolteacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color writing and subsequent place-focused writing. These representations embody the contested relation between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning, in modernity. The book undertakes analysis of how concepts work across disciplines and in everyday discourse, coordinating that work with proposals for revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors’ work. Works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are discussed, and the book’s analysis of the form is extended into multiple media.


Author(s):  
Lionel K. McPherson

Understanding black American social identity has suffered from association with the race idea. Being black American is not a racial designation. The tendency to reduce color-conscious social identity to racial classification is a mistake. Black American social identity gets its “blackness” from traceable African ancestry and is marked by the legacy of slavery. Yet being black American has become an elective identity: Americans with visible African ancestry no longer must count as black. But this hardly threatens black social identity and black solidarity, which continue to represent resistance to dishonor and mistreatment attaching to blackness in the United States.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document