Quotes About Race

Biologically, there is one human race. Race applied to human beings is a political division: it is a system of governing people that classifies them into a social hierarchy based on invented biological demarcations.

Slaveholders were willing to overwork pregnant slaves at the expense of the health of both mother and child.

For the years 1995 to 2004, a search of research awards in the National Institutes of Health database using the term genetics identified 21,956 new grants (including 181 cross-indexed by the term race), while only 44 new grants were indexed by the terms racism or racial discrimination .56 When the NIH launched a new center to study population health, it was originally named the Center for Genomics and Health Disparities—the environmental component was completely missing from the title.

A black man in San Diego who developed hypertension because of exposure to toxic chemicals lost half of his disability award after a doctor reported that blacks are genetically prone to hypertension.

Thinking on this issue tends to fall into two camps: either race is a social category that has nothing to do with the biological causes of disease, or race is a biological category that causes differences in disease. Both approaches fail to grasp the way in which race as a social grouping can affect health—because of different life experiences based on race, not because of race-based genetic difference.

The greater the percentage of blacks living in a neighborhood, the higher the neighborhood death rate, regardless of neighborhood income level.52 It is the neighborhood that makes people unhealthy, not the susceptibility of black people living there. The rate of death is higher for all residents, including whites, who live in predominantly black neighborhoods.

Consider a 2005 study by Princeton sociologists Devah Pager and Bruce Western finding that whites just released from prison fared better in the New York City job market than blacks with identical résumés but no criminal record.

There is less genetic variation in the entire human race than in a typical wild population of chimpanzees.

race was presumed to be an essential biological category. This is not a happy-ending tale of science overcoming racism.

Laurence G. Paquin Middle School, a school for pregnant girls and girls who already have babies, became the first Baltimore school to implement a pilot program to provide Norplant in its clinic. All but five of the 350 students at the school are Black. Although other contraceptives are touched on in counseling sessions, the girls are urged to try Norplant.

Because the children of two people from different races were fertile, Buffon's rule meant that all human beings belonged to the same species.

The American legal system is rooted in this monstrous combination of racial and gender domination. One of America's first laws concerned the status of children born to slave mothers and fathered by white men: a 1662 Virginia statute made these children slaves.3

So let me be clear: race is not a biological category that naturally produces health disparities because of genetic differences. Race is a political category that has staggering biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people's health.

Euginicists considered Southern Blacks to be especially unfit to breed based on a theory of "selective migration," which held that the more intelligent Blacks tended to migrate to the North, leaving the less intelligent ones behind. Selective migration was thought to explain the embarrassing finding that Blacks from Northern cities had scored higher on the army intelligence tests than some groups of Southern whites.

The language of eugenics did more than legitimate birth control. It defined the purpose of birth control, shaping the meaning of reproductive freedom. Birth control became a means of controlling a population rate rather than a means of increasing women's reproductive autonomy. Birth control in America was defined from the movement's inception in terms of race and could never be properly understood apart from race again.

She, like other whites in the birth control movement, saw the role of Black leaders and health professionals as facilitating their organizations' efforts among the Black population. They incorporated Blacks in their advocacy to help raise funds and to give legitimacy to the movement's projects in Black communities. But Black members of advisory councils were not invited to participate in national planning, nor were they allowed to manage the clinics that served Black patients.

A year later Matthew Rees, writing for the New Republic, similarly defended Norplant incentives on the ground that the current threat to children in our inner cities makes it an option that the morally serious can no longer simply dismiss. (Our inner cities and the underclass, of course, are another way of referring to the Black urban poor.)

Louisiana state representative and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke proposed paying women on welfare $100 a year to use [Norplant]. Duke's bill was an attempt to fulfill his campaign promise to enact concrete proposals to reduce the illegitimate birthrate and break the cycle of poverty that truly enslaves and harms the black race.

Dr. C, chief of surgery at a northeastern hospital, for example, gave Corea his opinion that "a girl with lots of kids, on welfare, and not intelligent enough to use birth control, is better off being sterilized." " 'Not intelligent enough to use birth control,;' " Corea added, "is often a code phrase for 'black' or 'poor.

For my parents, Iris and Robert Roberts, who taught me that there is only one human race.

Although most people on welfare are not Black, many Americans think they are. The American public associates welfare payments to single mothers with the mythical black welfare queen, who deliberately becomes pregnant in order to increase the amount of her monthly check. The welfare queen represent laziness, chicanery, and economic burden all wrapped up in one powerful image.

Race is not a biological category that is politically charged. It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one.

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

He had had a terribly therapeutic yell at his prisoners and was now feeling quite relaxed and ready for a little callousness. The prisoners sat in Poetry Appreciation chairs—strapped in. Vogons suffered no illusions as to the regard their works were generally held in. Their early attempts at composition had been part of a bludgeoning insistence that they be accepted as a properly evolved and cultured race