Racial Classification Research Articles

In the Name of Freedom

The ubiquitous image of the sprawling 19th century Southern plantation has meant that much of the research on US slave names has focused on regions below the mid-Atlantic (Desrochers 2002). The resulting lack of attention that has been given to other times and spaces has necessarily limited our collective understanding of slave naming patterns. The purpose of the current investigation is to help address this geo-temporal oversight. With that goal in mind, the present empirical study explores the naming patterns of fugitive slaves as advertised in newspapers published in New York and New Jersey between 1730 and 1790. Using the techniques of corpus linguistics, this investigation analyzed 147 runaway slave advertisements featuring 150 slave names. These onomastic exemplars comprised four name-types: first names, surnames, nicknames, and aliases. Onomastic patterns were identified using descriptive statistics as well chi-squared and Fisher’s exact tests. Special attention was paid to exploring the relationship between the runaways’ names and their reported age, gender, and racial classification. After a brief introduction to slavery in the New England colonies, this study presents the empirical results and compares them with previous findings on US slave names. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limitations and argues for more corpus-based research into slave names.

Using Onomastics to Inform Diversity Initiatives

In multiracial societies, the diversity of names in the workforce may reflect racial inclusivity. There is scant data on racial representation among Canadian physicians, prompting our analysis of naming diversity. We profiled the race and gender demographics of the names of physicians in Canadian academic radiology departments. Further, we devised a structured classification methodology using a commercial artificial intelligence and naming database to classify 1,727 names according to national origin and gender. The names were retrieved from faculty websites. A Z-test of proportions was used to compare radiologists’ name demographics to demographics from the 2016 Canadian census. In close agreement with much of the literature on gender demographics, 31.99% of names were classified as female. Names that were classified as belonging to Indigenous, Black, Latin American, and Filipino name-bearers were underrepresented. Names classified as belonging to the following groups were overrepresented: South Asian, Chinese, Arab, Southeast Asian, West Asian, and Korean. Names associated with White subjects in the corpus were proportionally represented for full names and overrepresented for given names. Faculty with full names classified as Southeast Asian, Korean, and Chinese often had given names that fell into the White category. The structured methodology showed high inter-rater reliability for race classifications. The racial disparities we observed mirrored those found in surveys of medical students, suggesting that the bottleneck occurs at the level of medical school admissions. Thus, onomastics can provide valuable data to diversity initiatives.

Gender and race classification using geodesic distance measurement

<span lang="EN-US">Gender and ethnicity classifications are a long-standing challenge in the face recognition’s field. They are key-demographic traits of individuals and applied in real-world applications such as biometric and demographic research, human-computer interaction (HCI), law enforcement and online advertisements. Thus, many methods have been proposed to address gender or/and race classifications and achieved various accuracies. This research improves race and gender classification by employing a geodesic path algorithm to extract discriminative features of both gender and ethnicity. PCA is also utilized for dimensionality reduction of Gender-feature and race-feature matrices. KNN and SVM are used to classify the extracted feature. This research was tested on the face recognition technology (FERET) dataset, with classification results demonstrating high-level performance (100%) in distinguishing gender and ethnicity.</span>

Color is Complex: How Colorism Affects Black Leaders’ Opportunities

Being Black is a factor that affects access to leadership positions, as Black leaders are often perceived as less adequate than their white counterparts. However, much of the research has not explored the impact of racial nuances on observers' perceptions about Black leaders. Due to existence bias according to differences in skin tone and phenotype within a racial group, this study aims to understand how colorism affects observers' perceptions of Black leaders' effectiveness. We posit that colorism affects the psychological distance through which people with different racial appearances are evaluated, leading to different impression formation processes and perceptions of fitness for leadership roles. Also, we explore the role of contextual patterns of racial classification and interracial contact, the race of the observer, and membership of the leader in a high-status group. Our proposition can contribute to both theory and practice in leadership, diversity, and inclusion by showing the existence of nuances in the racial categorization of Black leaders and that they affect perceptions of effectiveness. This may lead to more adequate policies of representation and inclusion.

Classifying Uruguayan maize collection to develop a core collection

Core Collections were suggested to improve germplasm utilization. A Core Collection is a subset of reduced size, chosen to represent the diversity of a collection with a minimum of redundancies. Because diversity is distributed between and within groups with different degrees of organization, accessions should be classified adequately into related groups before the selection of a Core Collection. In this research, different classification strategies for the Uruguayan Maize Collection were compared, and the best was used to select a Core Collection. The following classification strategies were compared following a multivariate approach using the available maize data base: i) racial classification, ii) geographic origin (south and north of the country), and iii) a combination of kernel type and geographic origin. The third option was considered the best classification criterion, since it takes into account two points which are closely related to the distribution of diversity: genotypic composition and geographical origin. The following five groups were identified in the collection: a) Pop, b) Floury, e) Dent, d) Southern Flint-semiflints, and e) Northern Flint-semiflints. A total of 90 accessions were selected to constitute the Uruguayan Maize Core Collection. Each group was represented in the Core in proportion to the logarithm of its size. The ranges of 17 variables in the Core were compared with those in the entire collection to verify the representativeness of the subset. On average, 91.2% of the ranges were retained in the Core, confirming its representativeness.

Genes and race in the era of genetic ancestry testing: The geneticization of identity and the social deconstruction of whiteness

AbstractThe link between racial identity and biology has long been a topic of fascination within the US popular imagination. After the completion of the Human Genome Project, this fascination has increased as journalists and others have continued to search for a genetic basis of racial classifications. Moreover, the increasing popularity of genetic ancestry testing (GAT) is spurring a geneticization of identity as individuals are encouraged to change their racial identity based on their genetic profiles, rather than their social location. Scholarship suggests white Americans are more likely to take GATs and change their identity based on results. This paper reviews the literature on links between race and genes and GAT. We argue that GAT is a racial project prompting white individuals to engage in an inverse process of constructing race, a process we call “the social deconstruction of whiteness.” That is, GATs allow white individuals to use the imprimatur of genetic science to claim alternative identities in an era where the socially constructed category of “white” is losing its salience and the history of white supremacy is becoming more widely recognized. This process could lead society from “racism without racists” and towards “white supremacy without whites.”

Birth Registration and the Administration of White Supremacy

Birth registration formed a key part of the administration of white supremacy between Reconstruction and World War II. In the allotment of Indigenous lands and the enforcement of de jure segregation by states, birth registration served an important ideological and administrative function. Because allotment policy combined property transmission with family reorganization, it made documentation of identity more important to the federal Indian Office. The Office imposed nuclear family structures on complex kin networks to establish access to land title, and it used documentation to alter family relationships to fit with American property law. During the same years, southern states used birth registration to fix racial identity in order to determine access to school, marriage, and many other benefits. Racial classification through birth registration, in other words, worked less to record the truth than to help produce it.

Regimes beyond the One-Drop Rule: New Models of Multiracial Identity

The racial classification of mixed-race people has often been presumed to follow hypo- or hyperdescent rules, where they were assigned to either their lower- or higher-status monoracial ancestor group. This simple framework, however, does not capture actual patterns of self-identification in contemporary societies with multiple racialized groups and numerous mixed-race combinations. Elaborating on previous concepts of multiracial classification regimes, we argue that two other theoretical models must be incorporated to describe and understand mixed-race identification today. One is “co-descent”, where multiracial individuals need not align with one single race or another, but rather be identified with or demonstrate characteristics that are a blend of their parental or ancestral races. The other is the “dominance” framework, a modern extension of the “one-drop” notion that posits that monoracial ancestries fall along a spectrum where some—the “supercessive”—are more likely to dominate mixed-race categorization, and others—the “recessive”—are likely to be dominated. Drawing on the Pew Research Center’s 2015 Survey of Multiracial Adults, we find declining evidence of hypo- and hyperdescent at work in the United States today, some support for a dominance structure that upends conventional expectations about a Black one-drop rule, and a rising regime of co-descent. In addition, we explore how regimes of mixed-race classification vary by racial ancestry combination, gender, generation of multiraciality, and the time period in which multiracial respondents or their mixed-race ancestors were born. These findings show that younger, first-generation multiracial Americans, especially those of partial Asian or Hispanic descent, have left hypo- and hyperdescent regimes behind—unlike other young people today whose mixed-race ancestry stems from further back in their family tree.

Geographic disparity between patients with multiple myeloma (non-Whites and Whites).

e20003 Background: People that live in rural areas experience significant health disparities from higher incidences of disease and disability, increased mortality rates, and lower life expectancies. Rural risk factors for health disparities include geographic isolation, lower socioeconomic status, limited access to healthcare specialists and sub-specialists, and limited job opportunities. Interestingly, we often see other, non-white, races experience delays in care, are under-treated, and lack of access to MM specialists. We, therefore, investigated whether there was a relationship between race and where one lives geographically. Methods: Validated real-world (RW) MM patient data was collected through HealthTree Cure Hub for Multiple Myeloma (healthtree.org). We examined the patient’s race which was either Caucasian American (White) or any other race (Black American, Asian, American Indian, East Indian, Middle Eastern, or Native Hawaiian) which was categorized as “non-White” and where they lived geographically (Rural, Urbanized Cluster, or Urban Areas). The association between race and geographic classification was compared by using a chi-squared test. Results: In this retrospective analysis of 2,687 MM patients, we compared the geographical classification of Whites (n = 2403) and non-Whites (n = 284). Our analysis revealed a significant association between the two groups and where they lived with a chi-square value of 20.455 (2, n = 2,687, p < 0.001). We found that Whites are 1.9 times more likely to live in urbanized cluster areas and 2.7 times more likely to live in a rural area compared to non-Whites. Conclusions: The results of this RW analysis identified a disparity among races and where one lives geographically. While there is strong evidence of health disparities our findings revealed that where one lives geographically is not a probable reason why non-Whites experience delays in care, are under-treated, or lack access to MM specialists.

The digital Creole

This article argues that the Creole is, at once, both a technological construct of the plantation economies of the colonized Atlantic world and a moment of interpretation, constantly negotiating time, place, and interpellations. By placing the Creole identity firmly without the borders of either racial or biological classification, this position works toward an understanding of the new social constructions afforded by the new world of online spaces. Centring the Caribbean as the engine of modernity – the New World – and referencing the role it has played in what we have come to know as cultural studies through the work of Stuart Hall, I argue that the new world of online spaces is analogous to the region in this moment – a thirdspace of limitless possibilities – and offer the logic of the digital Creole as a means of unravelling what it means to exist in a digital world.

Reading Trajectories in Elementary Grades: A Longitudinal Analysis

<p style="text-align:justify">Research shows that children's reading proficiency levels in the early grades positively correlate with students' future academic achievement. This study provides the first-ever analysis of reading achievement trajectories for a cohort of students in grades 3 to 5 in 2014–17 in Hawaii schools. Hawaii serves a diverse student population whose characteristics differ in ways often overlooked by standard US racial and ethnic classifications. Our analysis shows that Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students not only start at a lower reading proficiency than their peers in Grade 3, but the achievement gap widens as they move from Grade 3 to Grade 5. Moreover, we find a strong association between students' third-grade performance and reading achievement growth rate above and beyond all other factors in our longitudinal model. The difference in performance patterns between student subgroups across the elementary grades can serve as an accurate baseline for yearly monitoring. In light of our findings, we discuss implications for policy and practice.</p>

Abstract 541: Association Of Influenza Pneumonia With Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (aaa) Disease

Objectives: Renin-angiotensin system contributes to AAA pathogenesis. The pulmonary system regulates circulating angiotensin II and 1-7 via angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) and ACE2 activity. Pulmonary diseases including COPD and sleep apnea are associated with increased AAA risk. This study examined whether a similar association exists with influenza pneumonia (IP). Methods: Using a cohort discovery tool with IRB approval for informed consent waive, electronic health records from Stanford health system were retrospectively queried to identify patients ≥ 50 years of age with a history of IP or non-influenza pneumonia (NIP). After controlling for gender, race, and cigarette smoking, AAA prevalence and odds ratios (ORs) were calculated for patients with IP or NIP as a function of age and diabetes status. Results: We identified 935 and 6145 AAA patients in the IP (45,110) and NIP (1,993,760) cohorts, respectively. IP was associated with increased AAA prevalence regardless of sex, age, smoking, diabetic status or racial classification (excepting Native Americans, Table 1 ). After controlling for white race and male sex, AAA prevalence remained higher in IP smoking patients in most age groups regardless of diabetic status. OR for IP-associated AAA risk ranged from 1.48 to 2.31 ( Table 2 ). In white male non-smokers, AAA prevalence was also higher in IP than NIP patients, particularly in non-diabetics (OR 10.10 to 228.86, Table 3 ). Conclusions: This study suggests that influenza pneumonia is positively associated with AAA disease prevalence in older patients. Additional study is needed to determine whether this association is causal and, ultimately, whether AAA screening and surveillance protocols should be adjusted accordingly.

Abstract 251: Natural Language Processing Of Clinical Documentation To Assess Racial Differences In The Clinical Profile Of Patients Hospitalized With Heart Failure

Background: Self-reported racial classification is often used as a proxy for phenotypic differences among clinical populations. We demonstrate an approach to identify differences between Black and White individuals using clinical notes among patients hospitalized with heart failure (HF). Methods: We identified HF hospitalizations for patients at Yale and developed a word frequency embedding (TF-IDF)-based natural language processing (NLP) model on clinical notes to classify “tokens” or words from notes of Black and White individuals based on their frequency. We manually classified these tokens into clinical and non-clinical entities. We evaluated the frequency of clinical tokens successfully identified in ICD diagnosis codes and qualitatively assessed non-clinical tokens for stigmatizing language across Black and White patients. Results: There were 8798 patients (mean age 81±13y, 50% female) with a total of 14,655 unique patient encounters. Of these, 4293 were for Black patients. The NLP-based model determined Black vs White race of patients based only on notes with an AUROC of 0.92 after removing all explicit mentions of race. Of the top 80 tokens that identified Black vs White patients from notes, 53 (66%) were identified as clinical entities. The clinical tokens were underrepresented in structured ICD diagnosis for both Black and White, with a median 88% (IQR=27%, Q1=66%, Q3=94%) of Black-identifying tokens defining clinical conditions and 72% (IQR=45%, Q1=43%, Q3=89%) for White-identifying tokens. Among non-clinical tokens, there was a greater occurrence of stigmatizing words in the notes of Black patients (40% vs 32% in White). Conclusion: We demonstrate that an NLP-based approach can better define clinical differences between Black and White patients, and can be used to screen for stigmatizing language against Black and other minority groups.

MULTIPLE VIEWS

The choice of this theme is justified by the need to better understand the historical and social inequalities that permeate the daily life of the black population and stand out as immense that black peoples still experience in Brazil today. From this perspective, the research aims to identify and elucidate the racial and structural issues that are part of the construction of our society. The article will be briefly presented on the term black, its etymology, racial classification and the study of its genetics; historical analysis of blacks in Brazil and their colonization; the condition of the free black in the context of Brazilian society; History of black people who are nationals and identify themselves at different times. From this contextualization, we will go over structural racism and its contribution to violent deaths against blacks. How do black lives matter? For whom? The methodology used was the bibliography, which contains articles from magazines, books, theses and other perspectives of qualitative research in documents. In view of the research, Brazil is characterized by a conception of racism and that it persists from preconceived and proven attitudes of discrimination. Therefore, ethnic-racial prejudice exists and presents itself through racism and Brazilian cordial behavior, the Brazilian private ones, which are manifested in relationships and are manifested in supposed public tolerance, which can be called racism. It is concluded that the debate on racial prejudice is of great importance for the formation of a conscious and egalitarian society.

Wheat spike blast: genetic interventions for effective management.

The fundamental concepts of the genetics, race classification and epidemiology of the Wheat spike blast causing fungus Magnaporthe oryzae pathotype Triticum (MoT) are still evolving despite of its discovery in 1985 in Brazil for the first time. The fungus seems to defy the research progress that is being made globally by continuously evolving into pathotypes which have already overcome the much celebrated 2NS resistance in wheat lines as well as few of the initially effective fungicides. The compartmentalized i.e. two speed genome of the MoT, conferring the fungus an evolutionary advantage, has emerged as a challenge for the wheat spike blast researchers complicating its already difficult management. The airborne fungus with a range of alternative hosts is finding new geographical niches situated on different continents and is a matter of great apprehension among the nations whose food security is primarily dependent on wheat. The wheat blast outbreak in Bangladesh during 2016 was attributed to an isolate from Latin America escaping through a seed import consignment while the latest Zambian outbreak is still to be studied in detail regarding its origin and entry. The challenges in dealing wheat spike blast are not only on the level of genetics and epidemiology alone but also on the levels of policy making regarding international seed movement and research collaborations. The present review deals with these issues mainly concerning the effective management and controlling the international spread of this deadly disease of wheat, with a particular reference to India. We describe the origin, taxonomy, epidemiology and symptomology of MoT and briefly highlight its impact and management practices from different countries. We also discuss the advances in genomics and genome editing technologies that can be used to develop elite wheat genotypes resistant against different stains of wheat spike blast.

Polygenic risk, population structure and ongoing difficulties with race in human genetics.

‘The Apportionment of Human Diversity’ stands as a noteworthy intervention, both for the field of human population genetics as well as in the annals of public communication of science. Despite the widespread uptake of Lewontin's conclusion that racial classification is of ‘virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance’, the biomedical research community continues to grapple with whether and how best to account for race in its work. Nowhere is this struggle more apparent than in the latest attempts to translate genetic associations with complex disease risk to clinical use in the form of polygenic risk scores, or PRS. In this perspective piece, we trace current challenges surrounding the appropriate development and clinical application of PRS in diverse patient cohorts to ongoing difficulties deciding which facets of population structure matter, and for what reasons, to human health. Despite numerous analytical innovations, there are reasons that emerge from Lewontin's work to remain sceptical that accounting for population structure in the context of polygenic risk estimation will allow us to more effectively identify and intervene on the significant health disparities which plague marginalized populations around the world.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Celebrating 50 years since Lewontin's apportionment of human diversity’.

The background and legacy of Lewontin's apportionment of human genetic diversity.

Lewontin's 1972 article ‘The apportionment of human diversity’ described a key feature of human genetic diversity that would have profound impacts on conversations regarding genetics and race: the typical genetic locus varies much less between classical human race groupings than one might infer from inspecting the features historically used to define those races, like skin pigmentation. From this, Lewontin concluded: ‘Human racial classification … is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance’ (p. 397). Here, 50 years after the paper's publication, the goal is to understand the origins and legacy of the paper. Aided by insights from published papers and interviews with several of Lewontin's contemporaries, I review the 1972 paper, asking about the intellectual background that led to the publication of the paper, the development of its impact, the critiques of the work and the work's application and limitations today. The hope is that by gaining a clearer understanding of the origin and reasoning of the paper, we might dispel various confusions about the result and sharpen an understanding of the enduring value and insight the result provides.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Celebrating 50 years since Lewontin's apportionment of human diversity’.

Mismeasuring Diversity: Popularizing Scientific Racism in the Romanian Principalities Around the Mid-Nineteenth Century

This study explores a neglected episode in the history of Romanian encounters with racial classification theories before and during the mid-nineteenth century. The study begins with a brief historiographic discussion and illustrates the recent debates concerning definitions of the origins of scientific racism, as portrayed by Stephen Jay Gould and Nicolaas Rupke. Accordingly, this paper identifies three suggestive case studies (Iacob Czihac, Iuliu Barasch, and Dimitrie Ananescu) that might shed some light on the intellectual roots of racial classifications in Romania. Placing this investigation amongst emerging studies of the popularization of science, this paper argues that naturalists and physicians alike, trained and influenced by the German tradition of Naturphilosophie , expressed their authority in reproducing and diffusing racial classifications and gendered concepts of reproduction.

Developing real-time training dataset for human racial classification

Developing real-time training dataset for human racial classification

A biosocial return to race? A cautionary view for the postgenomic era.

Recent studies demonstrating epigenetic and developmental sensitivity to early environments, as exemplified by fields like the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and environmental epigenetics, are bringing new data and models to bear on debates about race, genetics, and society. Here, we first survey the historical prominence of models of environmental determinism in early formulations of racial thinking to illustrate how notions of direct environmental effects on bodies have been used to naturalize racial hierarchy and inequalities in the past. Next, we conduct a scoping review of postgenomic work in environmental epigenetics and DOHaD that looks at the role of race/ethnicity in human health (2000–2021). Although there is substantial heterogeneity in how race is conceptualized and interpreted across studies, we observe practices that may unwittingly encourage typological thinking, including: using DNA methylation as a novel marker of racial classification; neglect of variation and reversibility within supposedly homogenous racial groups; and a tendency to label and reify whole groups as pathologized or impaired. Even in the very different politico‐economic and epistemic context of contemporary postgenomic science, these trends echo deeply held beliefs in Western thinking which claimed that different environments shape different bodies and then used this logic to argue for essential differences between Europeans and non‐Europeans. We conclude with a series of suggestions on interpreting and reporting findings in these fields that we feel will help researchers harness this work to benefit disadvantaged groups while avoiding the inadvertent dissemination of new and old forms of stigma or prejudice.