Moving Beyond Mistrust: Centering Institutional Change by Decentering the White Analytical Lens
Bioethics Special issue on racism in health and bioethics (March 2022)
Volume 36, Issue 3, pg. 267-273 doi: 10.1111/bioe.12992
The topic of Black mistrust of medical institutions and health care has received a great deal of attention over the course of the Covid‐19 pandemic, especially with the arrival of vaccines and the emergence of a gap in vaccination rates by race. This article examines current discourses and debates over medical mistrust, and describes the limitations of the mistrust framework for identifying and addressing the institutional change necessary to remedy racial health inequities. As numerous observers have pointed out, the mistrust discourse largely places the burden of change on historically exploited and mistreated populations, rather than on the medical institutions that committed the violations and continue the mistreatment that are often identified as sources of mistrust. However, even the analytic shift to focus on the trustworthiness of institutions narrows the scope of the issue to the relationships of medical institutions to specific communities. While the mistrust literature has made important contributions to centering and valuing Black perspectives, this framework delimits the focus to Black perceptions and behaviors rather than on medical institutions and the health care system. Whereas the predominately white analytic lens of bioethics scholarship has centered Black populations by making them the subject of study, this article draws a distinction between simply analyzing, versus meaningfully centering and deriving an analysis from the perspective of marginalized populations within scholarship. This article suggests moving beyond the mistrust framework and the assumption of white normativity to conduct the type of institutional analysis necessary for addressing racial health inequities.
Institutional Problems, Individual Solutions – The Burden on Black Physicians
New England Journal of Medicine June 3, 2021 384:2076-2078
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2103063
In this NEJM Perspective article, I discuss the concern with widespread racial inequities during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly emergent racial disparities in vaccination rates. I address one commonly proposed solution to overcoming vaccine hesitancy, arguing that it instead attempts to circumvent the problem of mistrust and actually exacerbates existing inequities within medicine. Amidst a steep crisis with a particularly devastating impact on Black communities, our solution to the acute racial inequities of the present must not exacerbate the racial inequities of the future.
Revisiting the Marginal Man: Bridging Immigration Scholarship and Mixed-Race Studies
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 2021 7(1): 26-40
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332649220933302
Immigrant and multiracial populations have both attracted attention for their significant impact on the demographic makeup of the United States. The anticipation of their continued growth raises important questions about how their increasing representation may alter the racial hierarchy. Although immigration scholarship frequently interprets intermarriage and multiracial identity as markers of assimilation, a large disconnect exists between the fields of immigration and mixed-race studies. This article bridges the gap between the two areas of scholarship by tracing their sociological origins to a shared theoretical progenitor: the marginal man. Through narrow interpretations of the resolution to experiences of marginality, the assimilation paradigm has largely failed to take into consideration the implications of multiracial identity, examining it only as transitive state assessed primarily through parental identification or within existing frameworks of immigrant identity. Based on interviews with 26 multiracial adults who have at least one immigrant parent, this study examines the meaning, content, and salience of multiracial identity for analyses of assimilation. Although much scholarship is concerned with the eroding and expanding boundaries of whiteness, this research analyzes how both part-white and nonwhite multiracial children of immigrant experiences contribute to understanding the role of multiraciality in blurring, crossing, or disrupting the boundaries that divide racial groups. The findings indicate that multiracial identity assertion was a mechanism for study participants to claim connection and belonging to multiple ethnoracial groups, rather than be rendered marginalized, distant, or partial with respect to their immigrant heritage(s).
Mixing and Matching: Sperm Donor Selection for Interracial Lesbian Couples
Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 2019 38(8): 710-724
https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2019.1655737
Special double issue on Interrogating the Intersections of Race and Reproduction in Medicine, Science, and Technology
The widespread use of assisted reproductive technologies, coupled with processes of demographic and social change, are contributing to the normalization of new family configurations that extend beyond biological kinship. Non-traditional families, increasingly prevalent due to interracial and same-sex marriages, challenge normative expectations of family resemblance between siblings, parents and children. Interviews with interracial lesbian couples about their selection of a sperm donor reveal that despite the new forms of relatedness that non-traditional families enable, within the use of reproductive technologies, biological framings of race and sibling kinship continue to structure decisions about family formation.
Desiring the Standard Light Skin: Black Multiracial Boys, Masculinity, and Exotification
Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 2019 26(1): 107-125 https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2017.1377420
Although studies of the multiracial population have long identified the connection between multiraciality and exotification, much of the focus has been on the exotification of multiracial women that are part-white. Consequently, most understandings of exotification in this literature are insufficient to account for how a broader multiracial demographic is exotified and the mechanisms of exotification that are specific to mixed-race bodies. This article analyses black multiracial boys’ experiences of exotification in Northern California. Interviews with the boys revealed how interactions around their multiraciality intimately linked perceptions of their attractiveness to their mixedness. Their physical features, behaviours and dispositions were dissected according to their multiple racial backgrounds in ways that rendered them desirably hybridised. The interaction of black masculinity with their other racialised masculinities is essential to understanding the construction of the black multiracial male as desirable, pointing to the critically important yet understudied intersection of mixedness and masculinity.
Shape Shifters: Journeys across Terrains of Race and Identity
Chapter 5: Becoming Mixed Race: Northern California and the Production of Multiracial Identities University of Nebraska Press
The fluid and contextual nature of identity has been a central theme of this section, and we have seen examples of how by circumstance, location, or intent shape shifters move across new contexts and into different identities. In this chapter, I examine instances in which these changes in context not only offered new identity choices, but also prompted new considerations of self-identification in the shape shifters themselves. What is significant about the instances of shape shifting that I explore is that they involve an emergent, malleable, and evolving racial category that is changing rapidly over the lifetime of these subjects, in ways that are being adopted unevenly across the United States. Not only is the identity category itself changing, but so is the context within which these subjects adopt, claim, and are ascribed identities that were not available to them before. I focus on the stories of a handful of multiracial Americans whose moves in location from various regions of the U.S. not only prompted shifts in how they were read, but also in their racial self-identification. Specifically, each of these shifts was from a monoracial identification to a multiracial one, and each of these individuals moved from elsewhere in the United States to Northern California.
Adolescent Identity and Schooling: Diverse Perspectives
Chapter 3: Colorblind Ideology, Multiculturalism, and Collective Identity Formation Among Mixed Race Adolescents in Northern California Alyssa M. Newman and G. Reginald Daniel Routledge
Although educational and developmental literatures have widely studied racial and ethnic identities, there is comparatively little research that specifically addresses multiracial identity. The school context, especially during adolescence, is a significant social setting for the development and display of a broad range of student identities. For mixed race adolescents this can be an especially critical time, as their friendships and associations are often taken as statements of racial identity and a “true” or “authentic” self—and within the U.S. monoracial context, identification with one racial category means an automatic and necessary dis-identification with any other category. Frequently, racial categories are seen as singular and mutually exclusive; one cannot be simultaneously both or more than one. This monoracial imperative is constraining in that an individual’s alliance, solidarity, or association with a specific racial group precludes their access to “authentic” membership in another (Daniel, Kina, Dariotis, & Fojas, 2014). This study explores student identities in the educational setting that do not conform to a dichotomous or binary—that is to say, “either/or”—monoracial imperative, but rather assert multiracial identities that violate binary understandings of race.
Located at a Northern California high school where the percentage of the “two or more races” population in the neighborhood is nearly three times the rate of the national average (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011), this research sought to determine whether or not students developed a group identity around being multiracial. Despite a demography that could allow for the potential emergence of a multiracial group identity, there were multiple ways in which the school environment itself hindered such a development. Namely, the campus promoted colorblind and multicultural ideologies that prevented students from explicitly acknowledging or recognizing race.
Alyssa M. Newman, PhD 