First of all, I want to thank all of you for contributing in my discussion yesterday. I liked that you were all receptive to how I geared the class more towards a discussion of race. You raised great points, and as always, you were all very respectable and insightful.
Next, I want to explain a little bit more about why I decided to focus on race rather than gender. I said in class that Londa Schiebinger’s point was a “duh” point. She ends the piece with, “In eighteenth-century Europe, the male body remained the touchstone of human anatomy.” Times were different then; this is to be expected. She gave a great deal of examples of this, but very little explanation of the reasons or ramifications of this fact. In my presentation, I aimed to take her point, give more examples, and expand on how this notion affected and currently affects science, specifically with race. I was going to explore race and gender, as I mentioned, through hip hop videos, but I felt that the history of race in science, anthropology in particular, was important to share with you.
Lastly, I want to talk about how “White Privilege” fits into the history of racism in science that I presented. Anthropology is a discipline based on comparisons. In biological anthropology, scientists make distinctions between species, evolutionary branches, etc. based on comparisons. My 201 lab mostly worked on the notion of “if it looks like a duck, talks like a duck, it’s a duck” type of thinking. Meaning, if a bone looked like a bone from some species, and not like any other, it probably belonged to that species. Throughout anthropology’s history, both cultural and biological, comparisons are legitimate. Naturally then, even white ethnic groups have been subject to comparisons, sometimes for subjugating reasons. But the “white privilege” here is that hardly has this happened whereas Africans were only studied to assert whites as dominant. As we saw in the article and in the presentation, scientists set out just to prove that Africans were subordinate, whereas white was the norm. Whites have/had the privilege of being the norm. Yes, there are many exceptions as we brought up in class, one of these being Jews during the Holocaust who were seen as the inferior race, giving scientific legitimacy to Nazi hatred. African Americans, however, even today as we see in the Bidil case, do not even have access to the white privilege that is not being targeted for one medication just so pharmaceutical companies can make more money.
2 comments:
When I took biochemistry last year at Emory, we briefly touched the idea of differences in gene expression affecting how people respond to medications. For example, some people degrade medications more quickly than others because of the increased expression of certain enzymes and would so need a higher dose of the medication than most people. We mostly discussed these differences in the context of individuals, but BiDil was brought up as an example of new “designer” medical treatments.
I haven’t had the chance yet to talk to the professor or any students in this year’s class about whether they talked about BiDil and how it was viewed (anyone in it this year that can comment?); last year it was mentioned mostly as an advancement in drug therapy. The article about BiDil in Scientific American was an eye-opener for me—I never knew about the pharmaceutical maneuvering or the biases that exist in approving the drug solely for African-Americans. While the pharmaceutical company’s reason for demanding the drug’s special status is easy to understand—greed is nothing new—it surprises me that more people in the medical field haven’t been asking these kinds of questions about BiDil. I think a lot of it returns to people not even being aware of their own biases and misconceptions when it comes to race.
Anyway, I will try to talk to my biochem professor to see how BiDil was handled this year and post another comment about it.
Thank you so much for looking into this! Please let me know what you find out. I think it's a really interesting case. My anthropology professor from last year was really excited by it as one of his interests is race in science. He, however, seemed to think that the general response to the medication wasn't as bad as Scientific American seemed to think. The general public didn't really understand the problem with marketing a drug towards and only for one demographic...maybe that's the real problem.
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