When Southern whites saw themselves as a different race than Northern whites,
The South’s leading writer on political economy, James B. D. De Bow, subscribed to this Norman-Cavalier thesis and helped to popularize it in De Bow’s Review. As the lower-South states seceded one after another during the winter of 1860-61, this influential journal carried several long articles justifying secession on the grounds of irreconcilable ethnic differences between Southern and Northern whites. “The Cavaliers, Jacobites, and Huguenots, who settled the South, naturally hate, contemn, and despise the Puritans who settled the North,” proclaimed one of these articles. “The former are a master-race; the latter a slave race, the descendants of Saxon serfs.” The South was now achieving its “independent destiny” by repudiating the failed experiment of civic nationalism that had foolishly tried in 1789 to “erect one nation out of two irreconcilable peoples.”
Historian James McPherson, as quoted in “What We Mean When We Say ‘Race Is A Social Construct’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates [The Atlantic]
![Whenever people write these opinions I wonder if they feel that they’re being so brave by revealing some Truth that the devil political correctness is so feverishly trying to suppress. As if critics haven’t thought long and hard about these subjects since the late 1980’s to mid-1990’s when this debate was a bit more front and center.
Pair this up with Andrew Sullivan’s thoughts on the subject, it’s also so brave. I particularly enjoy the part where he writes, “But please don’t say truly stupid things…” immediately before he says a truly stupid thing.
I’m with John Horgan on this one [Scientific American],
Why, given all the world’s problems and needs, would someone choose to investigate this thesis? What good could come of it? Are we really going to base policies on immigration, education and other social programs on allegedly innate racial differences?
You’re at Harvard, one of the finest, wealthiest and most powerful institutions in the world, you have access to resources very few other places have and the best you can come up with is this pile of feces? Congrats you suck.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/791d670cdd0598420c411e9e370524b0/tumblr_mmxj6sSsnO1qzs6yjo1_1280.png)
Whenever people write these opinions I wonder if they feel that they’re being so brave by revealing some Truth that the devil political correctness is so feverishly trying to suppress. As if critics haven’t thought long and hard about these subjects since the late 1980’s to mid-1990’s when this debate was a bit more front and center.
Pair this up with Andrew Sullivan’s thoughts on the subject, it’s also so brave. I particularly enjoy the part where he writes, “But please don’t say truly stupid things…” immediately before he says a truly stupid thing.
I’m with John Horgan on this one [Scientific American],
Why, given all the world’s problems and needs, would someone choose to investigate this thesis? What good could come of it? Are we really going to base policies on immigration, education and other social programs on allegedly innate racial differences?
You’re at Harvard, one of the finest, wealthiest and most powerful institutions in the world, you have access to resources very few other places have and the best you can come up with is this pile of feces? Congrats you suck.
(Un)Making the Mexican Diabetic: Race, Science and the Promise of Community Knowledge by Michael Montoya of the University of California, Irvine at the University of California, Berkeley on November 28, 2011. Approx ~ 1 hour, starts after 8th minute.
This talk examines the racializing science of genetic epidemiology alongside a community based urban renewal effort in the US. Both purport to address chronic disease but through radically divergent propositions. The gene based approach, now largely a case study in the history of the human genome project, illustrates the means for configuring Mexican bodies as, among other things, diabetes prone. The place based urban renewal effort promises to address the social determinants of disease. Assessing both requires a critical optimism into the making and unmaking of the diabetic Mexican.
![Making the Mexican Diabetic: Race, Science, and the Genetics of Inequality by Michael Montoya [UC Press, March 2011]
This innovative ethnographic study animates the racial politics that underlie genomic research into type 2 diabetes, one of the most widespread chronic diseases and one that affects ethnic groups disproportionately. Michael J. Montoya follows blood donations from “Mexican-American” donors to laboratories that are searching out genetic contributions to diabetes. His analysis lays bare the politics and ethics of the research process, addressing the implicit contradiction of undertaking genetic research that reinscribes race’s importance even as it is being demonstrated to have little scientific validity. In placing DNA sampling, processing, data set sharing, and carefully crafted science into a broader social context, Making the Mexican Diabetic underscores the implications of geneticizing disease while illuminating the significance of type 2 diabetes research in American life.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/f914481b7059c861d4e846a1bcc95e9b/tumblr_mft3eskMUp1qzs6yjo1_1280.jpg)
Making the Mexican Diabetic: Race, Science, and the Genetics of Inequality by Michael Montoya [UC Press, March 2011]
This innovative ethnographic study animates the racial politics that underlie genomic research into type 2 diabetes, one of the most widespread chronic diseases and one that affects ethnic groups disproportionately. Michael J. Montoya follows blood donations from “Mexican-American” donors to laboratories that are searching out genetic contributions to diabetes. His analysis lays bare the politics and ethics of the research process, addressing the implicit contradiction of undertaking genetic research that reinscribes race’s importance even as it is being demonstrated to have little scientific validity. In placing DNA sampling, processing, data set sharing, and carefully crafted science into a broader social context, Making the Mexican Diabetic underscores the implications of geneticizing disease while illuminating the significance of type 2 diabetes research in American life.
UC struggles with bias claims raised by Jews, Muslims: Some Muslim students feel their rights are being suppressed and some Jewish students think anti-Israel protests on campus have become anti-Semitic.
UC students and others — how welcome do you feel at your school?
Photo: Participants at a 2011 protest tape their mouths to illustrate what they believe is a 1st Amendment issue involving 11 Muslim demonstrators accused of disrupting a speech by the Israeli ambassador at UC Irvine. Credit: Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times
Bigotry towards Muslims and Jews exists at every level of society, college is no exception.
College is this very strange and perhaps wonderful portion of our life, for many of us it is the very first opportunity that we’re allowed to rigorously explore our identities at our leisure (ideally or rather, we get to explore at a level that is NOT simply a paragraph in your AP World History course.) Solid communities are formed, ideas are dispersed, people of differing backgrounds coalesce towards something and sometimes what’s lost is out ability to communicate with individuals who are working towards that something. With that said, I have not read the report so I cannot comment on the specifics but I’m wary of making any strong assertions outside of those I made above because the UC and Mark Yudof are run by awful people who do awful things to save face.
OOoOoh, the fucking irony. Stop getting periods over your (or more correctly, my) skin tone and focus on yourself as a person instead of a caricature. Read a fucking Ayn Rand book or something. Or do you think that typing in ALL CAPS to some “privileged whiteys” is going to do anything constructive towards racism besides convince us that you’re no fucking better?”
You demand “well-thought and perhaps persuasive” responses, but then you tell people to read the works of someone, Ayn Rand, who is non-persuasive and a very poor thinker? Hahahaha.
My friend Prof. Alexandro Gradillo and Prof. David Leonard respond to Ruben Navarette Jr.’s CNN column on Leo Manzano’s celebration. I wrote very briefly about it here.
They inquire,
Given your demand for proper respect for the nation, we assume you will join in demanding that the confederate flag be removed from all state houses; we assume you will join us in condemning those fans who wave the confederate flag at football games and NASCAR races. Ruben, we assume you would support the NAACP in its activism about the flag. Is a column in the works about that?
I also look forward to that column.
Physician and cancer researcher Olufunmilayo Olopade noticed these differences and originally assumed that they were due to genetic, race-based differences between white women and women of African origin. Recently, however, she has begun to see things differently, looking to how women of color embody the daily stresses of racism and economic deprivation. The absence of hormone receptors could be a function of environmental factors, but, seeking other explanations, Olopade has teamed up with University of Chicago biopsychologist Martha McClintock to ask a new kind of question. In a study of mice that primarily modeled the growth rate for human breast cancer, they have shown that socially stressed mice express certain genes differently in their mammary tissue. Specifically, the stressed mice demonstrate an uptick in expression for suites of genes involved in lipid metabolism and a biochemical pathway that converts sugars into energy. Both pathways contribute to breast cancer growth. The stressed mice are genetically the same as unstressed controls, but it’s not what genes you have that count so much as which genes your cells express.”
