To be eligible
Are. they. serious.
Wat?
If they’re not really, literally, materially women then the study will be worthless.
It’s slightly more complicated with “Black” because that’s not yes or no (aka “binary”) the way female or male is. Many many enslaved people in the US were partly white thanks to the genial custom by which owners and overseers were free to rape the enslaved women and girls whenever they felt like it. Looking at you Thomas Jefferson.
Anyway. What in hell is the point of doing such a study if you’re going to render it worthless by including men who pretend to be women?
The American Cancer Society said Tuesday that it is seeking participants for what may be the largest national study of its kind, one that aims to solve the mystery of why Black women have the lowest survival rate of any racial or ethnic group in the US for most cancers.
…
The Voices of Black Women study hopes to recruit at least 100,000 Black women from 20 states and the District of Columbia to follow for 30 years. The study is concentrating on these areas because they’re where 90% of US Black women between the ages of 25 and 55 live.
Twice a year, the study will ask participants about lifestyle factors, medical history and experience of racism to determine what might affect someone’s risk of cancer and dying from cancer.
To be eligible, participants must identify as Black and women, be between the ages of 25 and 55, and not have a history of cancer, with the exception of basal or squamous cell skin cancer. More information on joining the study is available on the society’s website.
Ok let’s follow that link. Now let’s click on “eligibility” in the menu. Behold what we see.
VOICES of Black Women is enrolling people who:
- are biologically female or identify as a woman.
- identify as Black.
- do not have history of cancer (except basal or squamous skin cancer).
- are between the ages of 25 and 55 years.
- live in one of our study enrollment states. Enrollment is open across 20 states and Washington D.C.
Are in fact women or pretend to be.
Well what’s the point then???? What in flaming hell is the point? You’re kneecapping your own study so why do it?
We can click on “What is the definition of woman?” and get
In this study, a woman is defined as an individual who is biologically female (assigned female sex at birth) and/or self-identifies as a woman. Our primary goal is to understand the lived experiences of Black women residing in the United States and how these experiences may impact the development of cancer and other diseases.
Then why are you inviting men to participate? You abject dribbling fools.
So you actually have to be the given age? It isn’t enough to identify as 32? And for that matter, haven’t we seen that it isn’t okay to identify as black? (I would agree with that, but then I also believe it isn’t okay to identify as a woman if you are not.)
Well that’s what I was talking about when I said “It’s slightly more complicated with “Black” because that’s not yes or no.” I probably should have said it’s a lot more complicated. I think most American Black people have some white ancestors, mostly for the horrific reasons I hinted at (slavery–>legalized rape). Some American White people have some Black ancestors. “Black” and “White” aren’t yes or no the way female and male are. Identifying as is more reasonable with race than it is with sex.
Surely they should apply the same definition of “black women” as is used in the claim “[b]lack women have the lowest survival rate of any racial or ethnic group in the US for most cancers”; maybe they’re planning on excluding the data from the men and white people who enroll, or using them in a control group, but are trying to avoid the consequences of not validating self-ID e.g. losing funding?
The creeping scope of the genderization of material reality: it’s becoming taboo to even speculate about material factors that might lead to increases in cancer rates among Black females. We are seeing Black women die at alarmingly higher rates than other people, and the new rules may prohibit us from doing work that could save them.
Yes, social or “lifestyle” factors such as geography and “experience of racism” can have an impact on “risk of cancer and dying from cancer.” But they’re not the only possible factors. All kinds of medical conditions affect people of different sexes and racial backgrounds at different rates — cancer notoriously among them.
Now that we’re not allowed to acknowledge the material, categorical differences between men and women, or Black and non-Black genetic /genealogical ancestries, we’re not allowed to even speculate anymore about material causes of disease that might be related to these differences. It would probably be futile to even attempt to get funding for such studies in the current political climate.
Lysenkoism is back with a vengeance.
The black thing isn’t meaningful in any case; I expect the results are considerably different for ADoS than they would be for say, Nigerians. “Black” means something specific in the American context but immigration increasingly muddles it. The women/men binary is only muddled if you’re a goblin.
What is ADoS?
It’s a newer acronym “American Descendents of Slavery”; people finally figured out that there’s a significant difference between recent *actually* African-Americans and the “Black” hybrids that are descended from chattel slaves and European colonists (with a bit of “Indian” mixed in).
@Blood Knight,
That’s interesting about ADoS. (That’s a term I hadn’t heard before.)
I’m curious about Black vs black. I don’t think I ever really knew why everyone started capitalizing it. It seems a recent thing, though maybe I just didn’t notice until recently. I’ve just sort of gone along with it, the way one does when one suddenly sees everyone doing something, like that old Candid Camera gag where they hired extras to ride elevators turned around with their backs to the door, and people who got on the elevators followed the cue and did the same. I guess because it seems a small enough thing that I’d rather not risk seeming petty over it. But it’s now dawned on me that I don’t know the whole story behind it, or even if there’s much debate about it. I googled and read an article or two, but as with so much online these days, when you don’t know the political biases of the authors you don’t know how to take what you read. I trust the people here far more than anywhere else online.
Is the capital B just a tic of academia, a natural drift, like the way [B]lack “bodies” came to replace “Black people” in certain branches of the humanities, or the way “flavour” became “flavour profile” among chefs and Food Network reality game show contestants, or how “pair of jeans” became the singular “jean” in fashion circles (as in, “she pairs the top with a classic jean“)? A kind of natural language creep that reveals an underlying insecurity about one’s in-group credentials? Or is there much more solid ground to it?
I hope I’m not tossing a grenade into a quiet room here. Just curious and open to hear whatever. It seems this is as good a place as any to ask, given we’ve had to type the word a lot in this thread.
No not tossing a grenade, or if you are it’s the kind of grenade we all relish.
What I think I’ve gathered about the capital B is that it is new and it is normative. If I remember correctly the idea is that it’s more respectful and more political, both of which make sense to me. I tend to use it, but I also tend to feel a bit silly doing so, like Tina Trend-follower, if you know what I mean.
I’ve understood the capital B to be a parallel to other national or ethnic designations, like Irish, French, Jewish, and Kurdish.
Except it isn’t exactly national or ethnic.
It’s an idea rooted in the 1960s, invented by people who have only the most tenuous connection to that era. The United States is more diverse than ever and racial categories are not frozen in time. My step brother’s wife is “black” but looks Italian or possibly Indian; what race is their kid supposed to be? Is this “majority minority” made up of Blacks and Latinos like the “Great Replacement” people seem to think or is it something entirely different, as much miscegenation as it is immigration?
It’s a product of 2020’s Summer of Love and Mostly Peaceful Protests. The NYT wrote a piece about it at the time.
Thanks for that.
I’ll admit that having protesters march up and down my street and threaten to break my puppy’s neck might have made me hypervigilant, but it’s nevertheless interesting how much of what stuck in my mind from that six+ month period seems to have faded into haze for most. It just goes to show how significant attentional focus is in memory formation. If I hadn’t heard gunshots nearly every night, my attention would likely have been elsewhere and my memory would have been populated differently.