The Assisted Reproduction of Race

by Camisha Russell

In 2009, I was just starting to outline what would become my first book, The Assisted Reproduction of Race. I wanted to expand some earlier work on all the ways race matters to people using reproductive technologies and on the effects the idea of race has on assisted reproductive technology (ART) practices. I was thinking about the past, present and future of race; how the ideas of race and reproduction were co-constituted during the Modern period; what the future of the race idea might be given the growth of genetic science. I had this idea to think about race as technology. The work felt like a natural culmination of my scholarly interests and trajectory, but it didn’t feel personal. Yet.

Less than a month from the day I jotted my outline into a notebook, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. She’d always been healthy and wasn’t a smoker, so it came as a shock. I moved home to the Seattle area to help her through the chemotherapy.

One afternoon, my mom had some friends/co-workers over as a goodbye party. She was leaving her second, part-time job at the local library. One of them asked me, the philosophy graduate student, about what I was working on. I tried to give a brief and user-friendly description. My mother had never heard this before. We talked all the time, but more about how I was doing than the content of my academic writings.

“I just have one question,” she said. I remember her holding a glass of wine. “How is this different than the way people have always controlled who can have children with whom?”

She was a white woman born and raised in Wyoming who married a black man in the 1970s. I’m the product of that union.

The question made me nervous. My mother tended to listen more than she talked, so when she did say something, you knew it meant something. I wanted to get the answer right.

“It’s not different,” I ventured. “Just continuous.”

She nodded her acceptance. “Okay.”

But things were not okay, really. Less than a year later I was flying to Wyoming to bury her ashes in the family cemetery plot. And that’s where I learned what her question really meant.

After we interred the ashes, members of my aunt’s church fed us in the cemetery’s reception room. My mother’s cousin, Judy, approached me. She was kind and easy to talk to. Judy’s mother, my mom’s Aunt Lois, had often looked after my mom and her siblings while my grandmother was at work. Judy, being about a decade older than my mom, did her fair share of babysitting as well.

The conversation took a sudden shift.

“When your mother was going to marry your dad,” she began, unprompted, “I remember she called up my father [my mom’s Uncle Mark] and asked him if he would give her away. And he said that he would. And he told my mom, ‘Lois, you don’t have to come if you don’t want to, but I’m going to stand by that girl.’”

(He didn’t actually do that, though. I don’t know why. My mother walked herself down the aisle.)

Judy said some other things, but I didn’t take them in. I had just learned, for the first time, that my mother’s parents didn’t attend her wedding.

(My parents divorced when I was two. We never spent much time looking at wedding photos.)

In retrospect, there was a sentence. A sentence I’m sure I heard more than once, but not often, not from my mom but from my dad. It went something like: “Well, you know, your mother’s parents didn’t really approve of us getting married, but they got over it once you were born.”

As far as I can remember, Dad never said it in an angry way. Mom just never talked about it.

In the months after the memorial, I spoke to select friends and relatives to learn more without stirring too much up.

In a letter to my mother’s sister, my mother’s mother had explained that she opposed my mother’s plans to marry my father because the scandal of it all would surely send my (apparently rather sickly) grandfather, Ike, to an early grave. Yet, a couple weeks after the wedding, my uncle was back in Gillette sitting in the kitchen with Ike when Ike turned to him and said, “I talked to Babe [the family’s nickname for my mom] and they’re doing all right.” In fact, during the first years of the marriage when my grandmother and mother were not speaking, Ike made a habit of calling my mother on Sundays while his wife was in church.

By all accounts, it was my birth in 1978 that restored the relationship between my mother and grandmother. My mother took me to Gillette after I was born (without my father) and we visited every summer after that. My grandmother loved me just as she did every other grandchild and my mother never said a word to me against her.

Had I known about the story at the time, I might have experienced a bit of déjà vu at seventeen, when my first serious boyfriend, as white as nearly everyone else in my high school, informed me that it wasn’t that his parents didn’t like me or had a problem with me being black, it was just that they worried about how other people might react to our relationship.

(We kept dating.)

These moments of parental disapproval didn’t put a stop to interracial reproduction. My parents had me and, about twenty years after high school, that first boyfriend donated sperm so that my wife and I could have a child. But that disapproval is part of a larger social context in which certain romantic and reproductive relationships are encouraged and others are not.

Assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) may seem like a “brave new world” in their apparent defiance of natural limitations, but that new world was imagined and built by (and comes to be inhabited by) people from our existing world. Despite the starkness of the choice one faces when presented with a “race/ethnicity” drop-down menu as the very first filter in a donor database on a sperm bank website, that choice, as I assured my mom, isn’t a new one.

It’s easy to dismiss this choice when the intended parents in question chose a donor that matches their physical characteristics, including their race, and perhaps explains, if asked, that they “just want a child who looks like us.”

It’s just as easy to decry as racist a woman whose lawsuit against a sperm bank for inseminating her with the wrong sperm seems to be motivated primarily (or at least significantly) by the fact that the child born was half black, prompting the expense of an unanticipated move from the family’s 98% white neighborhood to somewhere the child would feel less isolated.

We live in a culture that encourages us to judge parents for their choices, or even just their circumstances. We live in a culture that encourages us to see racism as the problem of ill-intended or unenlightened individuals.

It’s easy, but it’s not very interesting.

What makes the race-based practices around reproductive technologies interesting, at least to me, is the light they can shine on the way race works and the work that it does in our sociopolitical system. Moreover, ARTs are essentially technological interventions that are supposed to imitate, assist, or improve upon the “natural” process of reproduction. Decisions about race in ART practices are thus constructed in terms of how race is thought to work “naturally.” Looking at how these decisions are framed and taken can therefore reveal a lot about how the concept of race is understood and used.

On the one hand, if we think of ARTs as medical technologies, we might be surprised by the importance people using them place on race – given the scientific evidence that race lacks a genetic basis. If, on the other hand, we think of ARTs as interventions that make babies and parents (as technologies of kinship), the importance of race may not be so surprising after all.

The US has a 350-year history of drawing family lines on the basis of racial classifications. Under chattel slavery, the law dictated that a child produced by a (likely nonconsensual) sexual union between a slave woman and her white owner bore a kinship relationship only to its mother, thus rendering the child a slave. The relationship between this child and its biological father was a property relationship rather than a family one. And once slavery ended, laws against interracial marriage proliferated. Every US state in which blacks amounted to at least 5 percent of the population eventually enacted an antimiscegenation law. These laws serving to establish or disestablish bonds of kinship based on race have been crucial to the creation and maintenance of US racial hierarchy.

The idea of race, within these laws, can be understood as a political technology. 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. In other words, race is both constructed and constructive.

Thinking about race technologically also helps to shift our focus from debates over what race is (or whether it exists), to what race does (how it is used and the effects the idea of race has in the real world). In the world of assisted reproduction, one finds a political technology being harnessed for personal (and indeed intimate) use. It is a constitutive feature of ARTs that they enlist people, instruments, and techniques (and often genetic material) outside of or beyond the intended parent(s) in the process of reproduction. In this context of uncertainty, race, ethnicity, and culture appear as resources available to fertility patients in their construction of naturalizing narratives, which help to disambiguate various contributors to the child’s birth and to name particular people as the child’s “true” parents.

The Assisted Reproduction of Race offers an extended discussion of the role race has played in contemporary ART practices. It shows how ideas of infertility are racialized, how race ideas contribute to global inequality in phenomena like reproductive tourism, and how race is used to place boundaries on what can or should be done with ARTs. It looks at the way race has underlain American notions of kinship and argues that this history allows fertility patients to use ideas of race to shore up their connections to their intended children. It argues that, in the current era of liberal eugenics, where race is portrayed as just another feature to be chosen as an expression of one’s personal identity, the privatization of racial identities is used to depoliticize continuing structural inequalities. It also considers the possibility that contemporary ARTs and the eugenics movements of the early twentieth century are deeply connected by a technological worldview that seeks to solve social problems by mastering and manipulating nature.

The book is dedicated to my mother, and if she were still here today, she would have read it cover to cover. She might not have followed all the Heidegger and Foucault (though I wouldn’t have put it past her to surprise me), but she definitely would have gotten it.

Camisha Russell received her PhD in Philosophy from Penn State University in 2013. Her primary research and teaching interests are in Critical Philosophy of Race, Feminist Philosophy, and Bioethics. Her first book, The Assisted Reproduction of Race (Indiana University Press, 2018), considers the role of the race idea in practices surrounding assisted reproductive technologies and argues for the benefits of thinking of race itself as a technology. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon.​