Black Representation Research Articles

Boardroom racial diversity: Evidence from the Black Lives Matter protests

AbstractResearch Question/IssueThis paper provides evidence that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that followed the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, brought immediate changes to the US corporate boards.Research Findings/InsightsUsing a sample of S&P 500 index companies, we find that companies with higher representation of Black directors are associated with higher stock returns during the mass BLM protests. Within 1 year after the BLM protests, 10.7% of the sample firms hired at least one Black director (compared to having no Black representation on the board before the protests), and 31% of the newly appointed directors were Black. We find that companies typically add new diverse directors by increasing the board size, but there is no evidence of negative value effect or decreasing director quality.Theoretical/Academic ImplicationsWe have observed increased disclosures of racial equity topics in the proxy statements, as well as significant increase of Black director representation in the boards. In the meantime, we do not find any valuation or stock performance effects related to boardroom racial diversity 1 year after the BLM protests.Practitioner/Policy ImplicationsMass protests play an important role in shaping corporate governance responses. The finding that racial diversity can be increased at an unprecedented speed without loss in value is consistent with the view that a boost in boardroom diversity is possible under strong multichannel pressure from investors, consumers, employees, and regulators.

Respite. Quiet. A House of Dreams.

Respite. Quiet. A House of Dreams.

PSUN303 Nationwide Geospatial Analysis of Hospitalization in Diabetes Mellitus Complications

Abstract Diabetes mellitus and complications associated with the disease represent a significant source of morbidity within the United States. Substantial public health efforts have been devoted to understanding the factors that underlie poor outcomes in diabetes. The purpose of this work is to (1) determine whether there exist statistically significant geospatial disparities in the relative rate of diabetic complications in Medicare patients throughout the United States, and (2) if these exist, assess the socioeconomic, cultural, and medical attributes that distinguish communities delineated by these variations. This work utilized multiple public databases, including National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES), US Department of Agriculture (USDA), US Census, and Center for Medicare Services (CMS) data. Datasets were combined on a county level to quantify 18 socioeconomic, 22 health, and 4 diabetic management attributes of 3061 total counties in the contiguous United States. CMS Prevention Quality Indicators (PQI) #1 (Diabetes Short-Term Complications Admission Rate), #3 (Diabetes Long-Term Complications Admission Rate), and #16 (Lower-Extremity Amputation Among Patients with Diabetes Rate) were used as the main indicators of county-level diabetic control, along with the total number of practicing endocrinologists. These variables were scaled to the number of Medicare members with diabetes in each county. All variables were for the latest available year, 2019, with the exception of the number of practicing endocrinologists (from December 2021). The synthesized database was then exported to GeoDa, a geospatial analysis program, where statistically significant (p < 0.05) diabetes complication spatial hotspots, coldspots, and outliers were identified using Moran's I on a national level. ANOVA was then conducted across all Moran's I groupings with a two-tailed t-test between hotspot and coldspot groupings to identify what socioeconomic, health, and diabetic management attributes were statistically significant between complication geostructures. Geospatial visualization revealed an expansive hotspot cluster in the normalized diabetes long-term complication admission rate that encompassed the East Coast and included portions of Florida and Texas (p < 0.05). Conversely, an expansive coldspot cluster encompassed much of the West and Great Plains region. Similar geospatial patterns were observed in the short-term complication admission rate, with the caveat of a new hotspot cluster that encompassed California and the West Coast (p < 0.05). ANOVA using the identified clusters as groupings revealed differences between hotspot and coldspot clusters: Hotspots tended to have greater Hispanic (6.7% to 1.8%) and Black (10.9% to 0.6%) representation compared to coldspots. They tended to have greater population density (2877 to 124 persons/sq. mile). Hotspots also tended to have more endocrinologists per capita (3.0 to 0.87) than coldspots. Variables of interest that did not appear to differ included the percent in poverty and the percent uninsured. Presentation: Sunday, June 12, 2022 12:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.

Review: The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought, by Roger A. Sneed

Review: <i>The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought</i>, by Roger A. Sneed

A Systematic Review Evaluating Racial and Ethnic Demographic Reporting for Patients Enrolled on Prospective Phase II Clinical Trials of Proton Therapy

<h3>Purpose/Objective(s)</h3> Equitable inclusion of racial and ethnic participation in clinical trials is crucial to improving disparities in healthcare, especially for historically marginalized populations. However, a recent review noted a prevalence in underreporting of racial and ethnic demographics in published studies, with Hispanic and Black representation recorded in 10% and 38.2% of cancer drug clinical trials and representing 3.1% and 6.1% of trial participants. Proton therapy relies on clinical investigations to guide treatment protocols; yet, few publications have investigated their demographic composition. We aimed to describe the racial and ethnic demographics of patients enrolled on published phase II U.S. clinical trials involving proton therapy. <h3>Materials/Methods</h3> Published manuscripts were identified in PubMed, Embase, World of Science, and Cochrane. Phase II trials evaluating proton therapy for patients in the United States were included. For each article included, data were collected on authors, title, and publication year; clinical trial numbers were verified. Additional data included tumor site, primary institution, sample size, reported race/ethnicity data, and raw number/percentile of race/ethnicity. Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines were used for reporting. <h3>Results</h3> Overall, 970 titles were identified; 636 remained after duplicate screening; and 75 full-text articles were assessed. Ultimately, we identified 38 eligible manuscripts for inclusion with a total 2,648 patients. Only 15 (39%) of the publications reported race/ethnicity. Of these 38, 8 (21%) and 10 (26%) documented Hispanic or Black representation of trial participants, respectively. Moreover, 6 (16%) documented both Hispanic and Black representation in trial participants. Of 1,409 patients with documented race/ethnicity, 89.0% (n=1,254) were non-Hispanic white, 5.3% (n=75) were Black, and 2.2% (n=31) were Hispanic. Other and unknown race/ethnicity comprised the remaining patients (3.5%; n=49). <h3>Conclusion</h3> In this analysis, we identified underreporting of demographic data in published phase II proton therapy trials, unfortunately mirroring underreporting for cancer drug clinical trials. We also note dramatic Black and Hispanic underrepresentation across the trials in which race and ethnicity are reported. Findings highlight the urgent need to identify and address barriers to proton therapy trials for Black and Hispanic patients so that clinical trials in radiation oncology are representative of patients seen in clinical practice.

Constructing Love: Visual Representation of Blackness in the Obama Marriage

A content analysis of 346 images was employed to study differences in racial presentations of Barack and Michelle Obama between the White House and African American media. The literature on symbolic interactionism, presidential and first lady presentation, African marriage, minority media, framing, and visual representation suggested there would be differences by medium in portrayals of the president and first lady on racial variables (egalitarianism, marital, affection, racialist, ethnic/cultural, kinship, political). Findings indicate that, across White House and African American media, the couple was often presented as egalitarian and affectionate. Statistical testing indicates that African American media were significantly more likely to depict Michelle Obama with racialist elements and the Obamas as a happy and affectionate married couple than the White House. A contradictory finding indicated that the White House was significantly more likely to focus on the extended family bonds of African Americans by depicting the Obamas in the presence of other Black people. This study is important because the Obamas are the first ethnic minority couple to hold the offices of president and first lady of the United States, and this study is the first to explore the two as an African American married couple. Findings extend research on how minority media help construct reality for their audiences and have implications for new White House image management strategies of presidents and first ladies.

Review: The Congressional Black Caucus: Fifty Years of Fighting for Equality, by Sherice Janaye Nelson

Review: <i>The Congressional Black Caucus: Fifty Years of Fighting for Equality</i>, by Sherice Janaye Nelson

How granularity of data matters in understanding and accelerating racial diversity in U.S. clinical trials.

88 Background: Historically, US clinical trials have been shown to recruit disproportionately large percentages of White patients, raising concerns about the generalizability of clinical trial results to underrepresented racial minority patient populations. Because of this, the FDA has recently reiterated its guidance stating that clinical trials need to reflect the demographic distribution of the US. In this research, we sought to understand how participation of Black patients varies by therapeutic area and geography within the US. Methods: Studying patient-level clinical trial data from an industry-leading historical clinical trial data repository of over 8 million patients from 27,000 clinical trials, we assessed the racial composition of US interventional trials across indications from 2010 to 2021 which encompassed 433,822 clinical trial participants across 2,997 trials. We also analyzed participants’ racial composition within the subset of trials from three distinct therapeutic areas (i.e., oncology n = 118,194, cardiovascular n = 12,281, central nervous system n = 35,533) and distinct sites over the same period. Results: The racial distribution of clinical trial participants in the US across all therapeutic areas was 78% White, 15% Black, and 3% Asian. Within the three distinct therapeutic areas, the proportion of Black clinical trial participants varied, with oncology trials reporting 8.5% Black participants, cardiovascular trials reporting 15.3% Black participants, and central nervous system trials reporting 19.9% Black participants. Black participation also varied within a therapeutic area, depending on the indication, as well as by site, with individual sites contributing differently to the racial diversity of trials. Conclusions: Our analysis shows that US interventional trials enroll 15% Black participants, appearing consistent with the 2020 US Census, which estimates that 14.6% of Americans are Black. However, more granular analyses at the level of therapeutic area, indication and site suggest substantial variation in Black participation in clinical trials including a gap in Black representation in oncology trials vs. US Census estimates. This research suggests that aggregate estimates of racial enrollment may mask dramatic variation by other factors like granularity of disease area and geographic location. The study of historic clinical trial data may yield useful insights for accelerating diverse representation in clinical trials.

Black Canadians in theCanadian Journal of Communication: A Critical Reading of Language and Voice in Its Publishing History

Background: This article is a response to #CommunicationSoWhite—Canadian style. It probes what articles about Black Canadians have been published in the Canadian Journal of Communication’s (CJC’s) history, and what has been the focus of these articles in terms of race, racism, and colonialism.Analysis: Using critical discourse analysis, this article examines language and voice in seven articles that focus on media representation of Blackness and/or Black visibility/invisibility.Conclusion and Implications: Over a 20-year period, the CJC’s corpus on Black Canadians changed. The articles moved from simplified or stereotypical representations of Black culture to giving agency and voice to a heterogeneity of Black experiences. This article asks readers to consider how and when Black Canada will move from the margins of Canadian communication studies to the centre.

Twenty Queers of Madame Satã

FQ contributing editor Bruno Guaraná reviews the significance of the Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz’s groundbreaking Madame Satã on the occasion of the film’s 20th anniversary. Guaraná argues that Madame Satã was a film ahead of its time. While in dialogue with queer theory and queer cinema contemporaneous to it—placing it squarely within a global queer film canon—it also anticipated now-current notions of transgressive representations of nonbinary identities in Brazilian cinema. To think about Madame Satã in its original context thus means also recognizing the quantitative and qualitative leaps in media representation of queerness and blackness since its release.

Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays in Mormon Music by Michael Hicks

Reviewed by: Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays in Mormon Music by Michael Hicks Nathan Rees Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays in Mormon Music. By Michael Hicks. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2020. [x, 232 p. ISBN 9781560852865 (paperback), $17.95; ISBN 9781560853855 (e-book), $9.99.] Illustrations, bibliographic references, index. [End Page 84] Michael Hicks conceived of Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays on Mormon Music as the third in a series on music in the belief and practice of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Unlike his earlier monographs—Mormonism and Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989) and The Mormon Tabernacle Choir: A Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015)—this volume is a collection of Hicks’s essays on diverse topics spanning the early nineteenth century to the present, ranging from historical studies to personal reflections. Published by Signature Books, a Utah-based press devoted to Mormon studies, the book is aimed at readers who are already versed in Mormon history and culture. Still, the volume offers important research that brings new perspectives to contextualize Mormon music within its historical and contemporary cultural spaces. The book is div ided into three roughly chronological sections. In the first, Hicks focuses on the nineteenth century, addressing many of the same issues discussed in Mormonism in Music but adding numerous findings that he made in the intervening three decades. The section begins with “Joseph Smith’s Favorite Songs (or Not),” a chapter that explores the sundry musical forms circulating in the early LDS Church by investigating a selection of songs favored by the church’s founding prophet. Hicks creates a rich image of Smith’s musical world within contemporaneous US culture, in contexts ranging from militarism to temperance. Chapter 2 is a critical reevaluation of early Mormon music from a feminist perspective, detailing Emma Smith’s work in creating the first LDS hymnal. Emma Smith was not only Joseph Smith’s wife but also an important Mormon leader in her own right as founding president of the Relief Society, the female corollary to Mormonism’s exclusively male priesthood. Hicks uncovers the gender dynamics attending the book’s production and reception, as Emma Smith struggled to maintain institutional support for her hymnal against competing publications launched by male church leaders. Hicks explores how Emma Smith’s strategic selection of texts— and deletion of texts in a later revision—supported the intimate personal piety that she espoused, in contrast to her husband’s focus on communal religious experience. Hicks tracks this narrative up to the present, demonstrating how the current LDS hymnal, in use since 1985, bears the traces of this struggle through the erasure of Emma Smith’s imprint. In the third chapter, Hicks offers a case study of the musical eclecticism that characterized the early development of Mormon hymnody, speculating on possible musical sources for one of the church’s most popular hymn tunes, “The Spirit of God.” He convincingly argues that the tune, long assumed to have been adopted from an unknown non-Mormon source, was instead likely composed by LDS musicians by combining melodic elements of several popular hymn tunes. In chapter 4, Hicks returns to cultural-historical analysis by detailing the prevalence of blackface minstrelsy in nineteenth-century Mormonism. He shows how musical representations of Blackness paralleled developing LDS perspectives on race. Limited early openness to African Americans ended in the 1850s with the establishment of racist doctrinal pronouncements denying people of African descent leadership roles or entry into the church’s temples. In unearthing and contextualizing the presence of blackface minstrelsy beginning in early Mormonism and continuing into twentieth century Utah, Hicks makes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the history of race in Mormonism. Hicks could go further in theorizing the intersection [End Page 85] of race and music in Mormonism. His conclusions are focused more on the reasons that Mormons embraced black-face minstrelsy than on the impacts of its performance, whether in its direct effect on African American Latter-day Saints or in its broader reinforcement of racist beliefs and practices in Mormon history. The three essays in the second section address Mormon...

Searching for Brother Charles: Naming the "Black" in [Black] Horror

Searching for Brother Charles:Naming the "Black" in [Black] Horror Mikal J. Gaines (bio) Taking a wide-angle view of the current horror media landscape, it would not be an exaggeration to assert that we are in the midst of a [Black] horror boom.1 From breakthrough films such as Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017), Us (2019), and Nope (2022) to Misha Green's Lovecraft Country (2020–), various episodes of Black Mirror (2011–), Richard Shepard's The Perfection (2018), Dallas Jackson's Thriller (2018), Tate Taylor's Ma (2019), David Rosenthal's Jacob's Ladder (2019), Deon Taylor's The Intruder (2019), Kurtis Harder's Spiral (2019) (which is not to be confused with Darren Lynn Bousman's Saw reboot, Spiral [2021]), Mark Tonderai's Spell (2020), Joe Marcantonio's Kindred (2020), Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour's Black Box (2020), Justin Simien's Bad Hair (2020), Rusty Cundieff and Darin Scott's Tales from the Hood 2 & 3 (2018/2020), Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz's Antebellum (2020), Remi Weekes's His House (2020), Little Marvin's series Them (2021), Nia DaCosta's Candyman (2021) reboot, and Mariama Diallo's Master (2022), this explosion in new texts points toward what seems like a broad multimedia attempt to capitalize on an interest for horror that centers Blackness or at least prominently features Black casts and crews. Sheri-Marie Harrison has situated this upswing as part of an adjacent "New Black Gothic" aesthetic in literature, one less interested in recovery or representation than in exploring the cumulative [End Page 349] generational effects of racial violence over time.2 We might also consider how this latest cycle of [Black] horror fits into what Ibram X. Kendi has called the "Third Black Renaissance," a wellspring of dynamic new Black art across multiple mediums by creators intent upon developing nuanced portraits of Black life as it has not been depicted before.3 Yet, positioning these new [Black] horror films within either Harrison's or Kendi's frameworks becomes immediately complicated by the collaborative nature of the film medium itself and what are still deeply racialized networks of economic "greenlight" power on the industrial side. Consider, for example, that while all the horror texts I have previously named feature Black onscreen talent and in some cases Black writers, producers, and directors, others were made with predominantly white creators at the helm. I am inclined to argue, then, that while it would make sense to imagine some of this new wave of [Black] horror as aspiring to, in Kendi's terms, "escape the white gaze," to describe all these texts as likewise invested in a politics of "unapologetic blackness" would misrepresent the conditions on the ground.4 As Kendi points out, creators such as Peele, Ava Duvernay, Spike Lee, Issa Rae, and others have made opening doors to new Black talent central to their own artistic and commercial praxis, but we are still a long way off from anything approaching a level of Black agency and parity within media industries that matches the level of sustained investment Black audiences themselves have long given to film and television. Questions of authorship and creative control notwithstanding, this recent explosion in [Black] horror presents other more complex interpretive challenges, not the least of which includes whether the mere appearance of "diversity" truly alters anything for Black representation at all. In his seminal essay "What Is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?," Stuart Hall explores how battles for cultural hegemony often elide the dialectical relationship between highbrow and lowbrow, a relationship that he argues is central to understanding anything we might recognize as a coherent Black diasporic aesthetic. Building on the work of Michele Wallace, Hall asks whether the postmodern obsession with difference is, as with modernism's obsession with primitivism, "once again achieved at the expense of the vast silencing about the West's fascination with the bodies of black men and women of other ethnicities." 5 Hall goes on to say that "we must ask about that continuing silence in postmodernism's shifting terrain, about whether the forms of licensing the gaze that this proliferation of difference invites and allows, at the same time as it disavows, is not...

Jagged Harmonies of Knowledge and Black Representation in Hurston's Essays

Jagged Harmonies of Knowledge and Black Representation in Hurston's Essays

Racism and Quality of Neonatal Intensive Care: Voices of Black Mothers.

Black preterm infants are more likely to die than White preterm infants within the same NICU. Racism may lead to disparate quality of NICU care contributing to disparities in preterm infant health outcomes. The objective of our study was to understand Black mothers' perspectives of the impact of racism on the quality of care for Black preterm infants in the NICU and what might be done to address it. Using qualitative research methods, we conducted in-depth, semistructured interviews with 20 Black mothers of preterm infants in a single Level IV NICU 6 to 18 months after hospital discharge regarding experiences with disparate quality of NICU care. We developed themes iteratively and conducted interviews until thematic saturation was reached. The majority of mothers believed that racism impacted the quality of NICU care and described examples of racism in the NICU at structural, institutional, and interpersonal levels. Mothers also provided ideas for interventions that would decrease racism and improve quality of NICU care for Black families, including increased Black representation, increased peer support, and improved staff education and training. Black mothers of preterm infants experienced racism during NICU hospitalization that impacted the quality of care they received. Interventional studies directed toward mitigating these racial disparities may focus on addressing racism during the NICU period and should include input from Black stakeholders at all stages of design, implementation, and analysis.

Perceived Barriers to Serving on National Institutes of Health Scientific Review Groups Experienced by Black and African American Scientists

African American and Black scientists are awarded disproportionately fewer National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants than White scientists. Increasing Black representation on NIH scientific review groups (SRGs) likely will contribute to increased equity in funding rates because research topics of Black and African American scientists' submitted applications will be more highly valued; however, Black and African American scientists often perceive barriers that prevent them from serving on NIH SRGs. To examine perceived barriers that prevent Black and African American scientists from serving on NIH SRGs. This qualitative study used a mixed methods online approach with a convenience sample of Black and African American scientists to identify barriers to NIH grant review participation. Eligible participants were recruited online from professional organizations with primarily Black and African American membership. From February through April 2021, participants were asked to identify barriers to serving on NIH SRGs using concept mapping. Participants brainstormed statements describing barriers to serving on NIH SRGs, sorted statements into content themes, and rated statements on how true they were. Multidimensional scaling and a hierarchical cluster analysis identified content themes. Data analysis was conducted in May and June of 2021. Self-reported barriers to serving on an NIH SRG among Black and African American scientists. A total of 52 scientists participated in both phases of the study (mean [SD] age, 42.3 [8.2] years; 46 women [88.5%]). Participants provided 68 unique statements that were organized into 9 thematic clusters describing barriers to serving on NIH SRGs. Themes included structural racism, diversity not valued, toxic environment, review workload demand, lack of reward, negative affect about the review process, competing demands at home institution, lack of opportunity, and perceptions of being unqualified. Black and African American scientists reported many barriers to serving on NIH SRGs that are unique to Black and African American scientists, as well as barriers that transcend race but are exacerbated by structural racism. This study provides NIH with concrete opportunities to address realized barriers to increase inclusion of Black and African American scientists on NIH SRGs, fund more Black and African American scientists, and ultimately reduce health inequities in the US.

Nashville Opera’s One Vote Won (2020) and the Challenge of Engaged Opera Performance

In September 2020, Nashville Opera released a new opera by composer Dave Ragland and librettist Mary McCallum that brought together ‘the Women’s Suffrage Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the disenfranchisement of modern-day voters’. Set in a parallel present, One Vote Won centres sonic and visual markers of Black sorrow, rage, and joy during a year defined by police brutality and widespread protests in support of #BlackLivesMatter in the United States. This article explores Nashville Opera’s attempt to navigate the possibility of opera at the intersection of youth culture and activism. One Vote Won has been variously positioned by its creators as a nonpartisan vehicle of civic engagement; a model of Black representation in the world of opera; a record of Black history making connections to present-day social movements; and an example of ‘accessible’ opera that aims to curate new audiences through educational outreach efforts targeted at socially-conscious students. Building on Naomi André’s practice of ‘engaged musicology’ to posit an ‘engaged opera performance’ that considers the lived experience of audiences during the creation of the work, I show how the use of social media networks as both content and context for One Vote Won illustrates competing visions of operatic ‘engagement’.

Melodramatizing racialized Korea: the impasse of Black representation in Itaewon Class

ABSTRACT This article examines how Itaewon Class (Itaewon Keullasseu, JTBC, 2020) employs melodrama as a mode to recognize racial injury in the form of cathartic pathos on the character of Toni. This representational strategy renders Toni’s Blackness less legible to construct the series as quality, diverse, and progressive while failing to tackle the cultural specificity of the Black Korean experience. Despite the growing visibility of Black entertainers and the use of Blackface in Korean popular culture, which have been the subject of controversy and scrutiny, there is a dearth of scholarship that analyses the representation of Blackness in contemporary Korean media. Drawing on industrial and textual analysis, this article explores how the illegibility of Toni’s Blackness is used to obfuscate dominant representations of Blacks in the past with ties to U.S. military occupation. The cultural specificity and legibility of Blackness as a signifier of racial difference is disguised under the exploited melodramatic narrative of mixed-race children’s search for their biological father. The article also argues that Itaewon Class aims to obscure antiblackness embedded firmly in Korea’s racialized past involving Black Korean children, while calling forth racial incidents and Black victimization to envision a new modern Korea.

The stereotypical racial discursive representation of blacks: a critical discourse analysis of The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

This research attempts to analyse discursive and ideological strategies used by the narrator to highlight the representation of black in the novel The Hate U Give. The narrator describes, how have blacks been suppressed and prey of white autocracy. The subsequent stereotyped racial discrimination resulted in a great imbalance in the social order because only blacks were the recipient of most of the consequences and disparities. It caused chaos in shape of protests and brutal killing of blacks at the hands of white cops. The whites constructed ideology propagate blacks as savages and radicals. The data has been scrutinized for white’s ideological unconscious fabricated attitudes towards blacks through Norman Faircloug’s Critical Discourse Analysis. The researcher has adopted Critical Race Theory of Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (2001) and also Martinez (2014) as a theoretical and analytical framework which strengthen the analysis of negative representation of blacks in different discourses. The research has pointed discursive represented tools and whites’ idea about the differences among black and white race. It gives us how law, media reporters, police and other institutes work against black race and how they are exploited and discriminated in every walk of life just because of their black colour.

The representation of Blackness in Astronomy

The representation of Blackness in Astronomy

Demographic disparities in genomic data and clinical trials for multiple myeloma.

8043 Background: There are considerable outcome disparities among patients with multiple myeloma (MM). African-Americans have higher risk of developing MM, earlier age at diagnosis, and higher mortality compared to Whites. While outcomes have multifactorial socioeconomic etiologies, race and ethnicity (R&amp;E) correlate with genomic ancestry, and any role of genetics should be explored. This requires equitable representation in biological databases like The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Here, we characterize disparities in MM cases of TCGA and clinical trials (CT). Methods: MM incidence was obtained from North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR) for R&amp;E, sex and age ( &lt; 50, 50-64, 65+ years). Race includes White, Black, and Asian, along with Hispanic ethnicity, as TCGA MM is limited to these groups. Genes with oncogenic potential and &gt; 5% mutation were stratified by R&amp;E and age. TCGA MM cases are from USA, Canada, Italy, and Spain. On ClinicalTrials.gov, completed MM CT limited to these countries were identified. Student’s t-test and chi-square test were used to analyze disparities and gene mutations. Kaplan-Meier curve was generated to evaluate survival. Results: TCGA MM representation is in Table, calculated as (demographic TCGA cases divided by total TCGA cases) divided by (demographic incidence divided by total incidence). Race was not reported in 20% of TCGA, 4% of CT, and 3% of NAACCR. Of cases reporting R&amp;E, Hispanics are underrepresented by 26% in TCGA and 47% in CT relative to incidence, Blacks by 22% in TCGA and 41% in CT, and Asians by 40% in TCGA and 10% in CT. Whites are overrepresented, by 8% in TCGA and 7% in CT. More men are in TCGA than women, in all R&amp;E. Less than 25% of patients age &lt; 50 relative to incidence are in TCGA, in all R&amp;E. BCL7A is mutated more in Blacks age &lt; 50 (n = 20, 50%) than Whites (n = 39, 10%) (p &lt; 0.01). FAT4 is mutated in Whites age 65+ (n = 31, 10%) but not Blacks. In all ages, KRAS is mutated more in Blacks than Whites (31-35% vs. 20-25%, p &lt; 0.05). Black patients have lower survival than Whites (p &lt; 0.02). In patients age 65+, KRAS mutation is associated with 10% lower 4.5-year survival. Conclusions: Substantial disparities in Black, Hispanic, women, and age representation exist for MM cases in TCGA and CT. This stratification by R&amp;E and age offers new insight on BCL7A, FAT4, and KRAS mutation in MM. Mutation status is associated with survival in older patients. Equitable demographic representation should be pursued to improve quality of available data and access to medical resources for all populations. [Table: see text]