Hello Colleagues,
I would like to thank you all for your very illuminating comments on this topic. I am first author on the paper with Raj Bhopal and Peter Aspinall, which Raj shared as the motivation for his original post, and I would like to share a few thoughts on this conversation. I am a philosopher of medicine and a mixed-race person, so my interests in mixed-race and mixed-ethnicity health are filtered through both of those lenses (along with the fact that I am an American...).
As a philosopher, I am struck by the fact that the case of mixed-race and mixed-ethnicity health is unusual in that such populations are quickly growing but we know so very little about these populations' health statuses and health needs. As has become even clearer over the course of this online conversation, we do not even know which questions we should ask in order to understand those needs better (whether/how to focus on ancestry, identity, lived race, blended cultural practices, etc.). We are ignorant about even the nature and extent of our ignorance. Some of the challenges, as Neil points out, are analogous to the problems faced by people (particularly of certain ages) on the autism spectrum, in that mixed people do not fit easily into the institutional structures and even concepts used in our existing systems. So, as a philosopher, I find it worthy of study that mixed-race and mixed-ethnicity health perplex us at such a fundamental level that we are ill-equipped to know how to proceed.
As a person of mixed-race ancestry/identity, I find it sad and frustrating that I and fellow mixed people are, in a sense, a cluster of heterogeneous and invisible minority populations. I find it inaccurate and reductive to think of myself as just an additive combination of Purépecha indigenous Mexican and European. That sort of reductive thinking (e.g. Barack Obama is either just a Black man since minority identity somehow trumps majority identity, or perhaps is equal parts Black man and White man) commits one to ignoring the complexities of holistic mixed race experiences. It is especially disheartening to read studies that surely sampled significant numbers of mixed-race and mixed-ethnicity people, but see the data excluded or the mixed people funneled into single race or ethnicity categories (e.g. just treating Barack Obama's data as "Black" data).
I have found all of your comments to be very fascinating and helpful, especially since Raj, Peter and I are discussing next steps for our work on mixed-race and mixed-ethnicity health. Reading your comments inclines me toward seeking to organize a conference on mixed-race and mixed-ethnicity health, since it seems that additional sharing of ideas and coordinating of efforts would be helpful in overcoming these challenges...
Many Thanks,
Sean
Sean A. Valles
Assistant Professor
Lyman Briggs College and Dept. of Philosophy
Michigan State University
Holmes Hall
919 E. Shaw Lane, Room W25-C
East Lansing, MI 48825
(517) 884-0592
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http://www.msu.edu/~valles
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