The Tarrytown Meetings

Topics: Race-based medicine; ancestry testing; forensic DNA; equity and access to technologies; biobanks; neo-eugenic ideologies; racial categorization of gamete donors.

The Session: An assessment and strategy discussion of the racial justice concerns raised by reproductive and genetic technologies, and by the biopolitics they engender. Where do racial justice and civil rights organizations, scholars concerned with race, legislators and policy makers of color stand on issues raised by these technologies? What policy and educational tools (e.g., race impact assessments; statements of principles for research) do we have to deepen and extend these discussions? What are the most productive ways to frame these issues in the Obama era? What useful initiatives are in order?

Topics: Race-based medicine; racial categories in biomedical research; the role of race and racism in assisted reproduction; forensic DNA; equity and access to technologies; biobanks; DNA ancestry testing; racial implications of prenatal and pre-implantation genetic screening; neo-eugenic ideologies; racial categorization of gamete donors.

The Session: An assessment and strategy discussion of the justice concerns raised by reproductive and genetic technologies, and by the biopolitics they engender. How can we distinguish appropriate and inappropriate uses of racial categories in genetic contexts? How can we confront the ways in which genetic discourses and products revive biological thinking about race? Where do racial justice and civil rights organizations, scholars concerned with race, legislators and policy makers of color stand on issues raised by these technologies? What policy and educational tools (e.g., race impact assessments; statements of principles for research) do we have to deepen and extend these discussions? What are the most productive ways to frame these issues in the Obama era?

Questions to Focus Discussion:

• What features do the technologies that each of the presenters referred to in their remarks have in common? What other common themes arise from the presentations?

• What is the danger or set of dangers we identified? Why should the public be concerned about the ways in which the technologies are being developed and used?

• What concrete steps can we take to prevent the dangers we foresee?

• What seem to be the incentives - structural, commercial, intellectual - for introducing racial categories into these diverse contexts? How might we constructively engage and/or modify these incentives?