The Assisted Reproduction of Race

Camisha A. Russell

Description

The use of assisted reproductive technologies (ART)—in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, and gestational surrogacy—challenges contemporary notions of what it means to be parents or families. Camisha A. Russell argues that these technologies also bring new insight to ideas and questions surrounding race. In her view, if we think of ART as medical technology, we might be surprised by the importance that people using them put on race, especially given the scientific evidence that race lacks a genetic basis. However if we think of ART as an intervention to make babies and parents, as technologies of kinship, the importance placed on race may not be so surprising after all. Thinking about race in terms of technology brings together the common academic insight that race is a social construction with the equally important insight that race is a political tool which has been and continues to be used in different contexts for a variety of ends, including social cohesion, economic exploitation, and political mastery. As Russell explores ideas about race through their role in ART, she brings together social and political views to shift debates from what race is to what race does, how it is used, and what effects it has had in the world.

Acknowledgements

Introduction: From What Race Is to What Race Does

Overview

Assisted Reproductive Technologies

Critical Philosophy of Race

The Debate over the "Reality" of Race

Nature, Culture, or Politics?

Description of Chapters

1. Reproductive Technologies are Not "Post-Racial"

Beyond the "Bioethical" Approach

Whose Progress?

The "Problem" of Infertility

Reproducing Inequalities

Race and the "Natural"

Conclusion

2. Race Isn't Just Made, It's Used

Race as Technology

Heidegger's Essence of Technology

Foucault's Focus on Technologies

Conclusion

3. A Technological History of Race

Backdoor to Eugenics?

The Technological Science of Race

Kant's Scientific Concept of Race

Race as Envisioned and Purposive

Race as Producible and Produced

Race, Heredity, and Eugenics Proper

A Note on Heidegger

Conclusion

4. "I Just Want Children Like Me"

Putting Race to Work

Race, Blood, and American Kinship

Denying Common Origins—The American Polygenists

Discouraging Intimacy and Disallowing Kinship

Separation After Slavery

The "Blood" in our "Genes"

Conclusion

5. Race and Choice in the Era of Liberal Eugenics

The Neo-Liberal Regime of Truth

Technologies of the Self

The Personal and the Political in Assisted Reproduction

Technologies of the Self as Technologies of Race

Conclusion

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la psychologie
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Sperm donation
• Polygenism
• Intersectionality
• Egg donation
• Liberal eugenics
• Whiteness
• Social constructivism
• Infertility
• Segregation
• Neoliberalism
• Privatization
• Études des sciences et technologies
• Blanchitude
• United States
• Social
• Foucault
• Martin Heidegger

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 06 décembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253035936
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE ASSISTED REPRODUCTION OF RACE
THE ASSISTED
REPRODUCTION
OF RACE
Camisha Russell
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2018 by Camisha Russell
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Russell, Camisha A., author.
Title: The assisted reproduction of race / Camisha A. Russell.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018019397 (print) | LCCN 2018041360 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253035912 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253035820 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253035905 (pb : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Medical ethics. | Genetics-Moral and ethical aspects.
Classification: LCC R724 (ebook) | LCC R724 .R864 2018 (print) | DDC 174.2-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019397
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19 18
For Mom,
who knew it all along,
even if she couldn t come
this far.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: From What Race Is to What Race Does
1 Reproductive Technologies Are Not Post-Racial
2 Race Isn t Just Made; It s Used
3 A Technological History of Race
4 I Just Want Children Like Me
5 Race and Choice in the Era of Liberal Eugenics
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I HAVE MANY people to thank from the early phase of this work. The influence of my academic mentors remains visible in the final product. Robert Bernasconi set high expectations but also did everything he could to ease the way. Without him, I would never have attempted to address the history of race, and without his expert advice, it would not be a history worth reading. Sarah Clark Miller was the person with whom I first began to elaborate the contours of the project as it appears today. She also provided much needed emotional support. If memory serves, she also originated the title. Susan M. Squier wrote the first book Sarah and I read together on the topic of assisted reproductive technologies, Babies in Bottles , and it was in the course of a seminar with Susan that I first came to the idea of race as technology. Nancy Tuana helped me frame this project within the larger field of bioethics and lent the endeavor not only her personal support but the formidable aid of the Rock Ethics Institute, of which she was director. I am grateful to the Rock Ethics Institute for both its intellectual support and its financial support in the form of supplemental fellowship during the 2009-2010 academic year, when I began to write this work. I offer my gratitude to the Woodrow Wilson Foundation as well, whose generous Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship supported me during the 2012-2013 academic year.
Many people and institutions were also instrumental in the subsequent phases of this book. Dee Mortensen of Indiana University Press has been the best editor for which a first-time author could hope, proving enthusiastic and supportive from our first exploratory meeting, through the reader reports, and all the way to that final push to finish the final draft. I was tremendously fortunate to spend the two years after graduate school on a University of California President s Postdoctoral Fellowship, which provided mentoring, encouragement, and the freedom to focus exclusively on my research and writing. My thanks to David Theo Goldberg and his assistant Arielle Read for hosting me in their UC Humanities Research Institute during that time. I am also grateful to Colorado College as a whole, and the philosophy department in particular, for the Riley Fellowship that followed my time in California and provided still more space in which to finally complete the manuscript.
With respect to the quality of the book, my sincere thanks to Margret Grebowicz and my anonymous second reader, both of whom evinced strong support for the project while suggesting that I strengthen my voice, along with a few other crucial changes. However, my deepest gratitude on this front is reserved for my friend and colleague Laura Beeby, who went through the entire manuscript several times and offered invaluable perspective on how to carry out the final revisions. I probably could have finished the book without her, but you would be reading a lesser version.
On a personal level, I am grateful to my partner, Rebecca Saxon, who had to live with me during most of this process. Her love and faith nourish and sustain me. Together we now raise a son, Addae, who came along in the middle of this whole thing and who lights up both our lives. It is fitting that Addae s feet and Rebecca s hand, along with my own hand, grace the cover of this book. For the artistry of that photograph and for her generous donation of the rights to it, I sincerely thank Anastassia Pronksy of B+N Photography in Mississauga, Ontario.
You will also see both my parents in this book and, in the background, both their parents as well. Thanks to my father for sharing the story of the places in which they grew up and the challenges of their interracial courtship and marriage in 1970s Wyoming. Thanks to his parents and sister and my mother s sister for attending their wedding. Thanks to my dad as well for his appreciation of the value of higher education and heartfelt declarations of pride.
Ultimately, I owe the greatest debt to my mother. I have a distinct visual memory of a gathering she had in her home for some friends during our last year together-the year she was dying of cancer. In the memory she is holding a glass of wine. One of her friends has just asked me what my book is about, and I am trying to offer a nonacademic, friendly description of the project. It s nothing my mother has ever heard before-though we spoke often and at length, it was always more about how I was doing than the content of my academic writings. I just have one question, she says when I ve finished. How is this different from the way people have always controlled who can have children with whom? She is, after all, a white woman who married a black man very much against her own mother s wishes. I am the product of that union. It s not different, I tell her, feeling flushed. Just continuous. And then she nods her acceptance. Okay. It was an important point and connection for my work that I have never forgotten since. Though she did not live to see this book finished, let alone the birth of her grandchild, she was there when I started, and I know that her unconditional love and the inner strength that grew from it underlie all of my accomplishments, up to and including this one.
THE ASSISTED REPRODUCTION OF RACE
Introduction: From What Race Is to What Race Does
In 2002, I was working as a Peace Corps volunteer in a village in the Central Region of Togo, West Africa. I d been there for a year and a half when my father came to visit. My mother had visited a few months earlier, around Christmastime. I took my father to a middle school where I d been working. The principal brought us to talk to the troisi me class (roughly ninth grade), and we introduced my father to the students and then asked them if they had any questions.
One boy raised his hand. How is it that Camisha is white, but her father is black, like us? he asked. To my surprise, though I grew up black in the United States, I had been white since arriving in Togo. I was still getting used to it. I opened my mouth to answer, but the principal raised his hand to stop me, indicating that he would take this one.
You remember when Camisha s mother came to visit? he asked. The students nodded. She was short and white. The students nodded again. My mother, though she always imagined herself to be 5 6 was in fact 5 2 . My father is 6 6 . I am 5 9 , which is pretty tall by Togo standards. And her father, the principal continued, is tall and black. The students nodded again. I too thought things were going well.
So you see, the principal concluded, she got her father s height and her mother s skin.
I once heard someone joke at a conference, Academics are the only ones who keep asking what race is; everybody else already knows. Apart from very young children or people living within ethnically homogenous and truly isolated populations, I suspect this is true. As my above story illustrates, however, what exactly constitutes knowledge of race or correct racial classification most certainly differs around the world. In the United States, the majority opinion is that I am black or mixed race; in Togo, West Africa, the majority opinion is that I am white.
Nevertheless, most people definitely know something about race, and it probably bears a reasonable resemblance to what the others around them know. In fact, it is the difference between what any North American who hears my story knows about race and what the middle-school principal in Togo knew that gives my story its punch line. (It always gets great laughs at parties.) As Paul Taylor puts it, if a culture distinguishes and categorizes people using methods that appeal in part to such things as the way people look, then we might say of that culture that it has a concept of race. 1
Still, when writing on the topic of race, there is a temptation to put the word in scare quotes, to make sure that everyone understands that what I mean by race isn t what Adolf Hitler meant or what courts and legislators meant in the Jim Crow South