Flying While Black

Flying While Black:
Border Control, DNA and the Case of the Lips
by Simone

After tracing his maternal ancestry in 2005 through genealogical DNA testing, or personal genomics, and finding his ancestral links to the Mende and Temne peoples of Sierra Leone, actor Isaiah Washington attested to his “rebirth” saying he believes that “DNA will finally become the tool to bridge the gap between our brothers and sisters who have been lost.” Earlier this year, now “DNA-branded” [see note at end on this term] as Sierra Leonean, Washington was sworn in as a citizen of that country. Citizenship by way of mitochondrial DNA.

But what about the role of DNA for our brothers and sisters who have been stranded or detained abroad? Enter “the lips case”.

On May 21st 2009, Somali-born Canadian citizen Suaad Hagi Mohamud attempted to board a flight out of Nairobi to return home to Toronto, after a three-week visit to Kenya. Upon inspecting her passport, Dutch KLM airline authorities claimed that her lips looked different than that observed in her four-year-old passport photo, branded her an “imposter” and not the rightful holder of the passport that she presented. Mohamud was detained overnight in the airport. Two Canadian High Commission officials met with her the following morning, told her “you are not Suaad” and confiscated her passport. Mohamud was held in the airport for four days until she was released on a bond, tasked with proving her identity within a two-week time frame.

Canadian High Commission officials did not accept Suaad’s ID cards and she was charged with using a false passport, impersonating a Canadian and with being in Kenya illegally. Subsequently she was jailed by Kenyan authorities from June 3rd to June 11th, facing possible deportation to Somalia. While Mohamud was in limbo in Kenya, Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon was quoted on July 24th as saying, “there is no tangible proof” that Mohamud is Canadian and that “all Canadians who hold passports generally have a picture that is identical in their passport to what they claim to be.”

It wasn’t until Mohamud requested DNA testing through a motion filed before the Canadian Federal Court by her attorney in Toronto, and then had that test conducted on August 10th 2009 that charges against her were dropped. Mohamud’s DNA was compared to that of her Canadian born son, confirming her identity with a probability of 99.99%. She was issued an emergency passport and she boarded a plane to Amsterdam to make her way home to Toronto arriving on August 15th. This DNA verification not only proved who she said she was, but, apparently, determined her citizenship status as well. This case raises the question of “who can be abandoned by the state and by what technological means? and “will this case be used to argue for even more surveillance by way of a genomic encoded passport?”

Read the Full Essay @ Racism Review

The Black Body as Intellectual Property: The Case of Henrietta Lacks

In 1951, white doctors took a poor black woman’s cervical cells without her knowledge and used them to revolutionize DNA research. Private groups have made millions since. Her family, on the other hand, didn’t make out so well.

Henrietta Lacks and Her Cancer Cells
by Amy Alexander

What are we to do with the waves of pain, humiliation and outrage that flood from the pages of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks?

Not that I blame the author for the high emotions this story elicits. Rebecca Skloot did her job, and she did it expertly. As was the case with Harriet A. Washington’s award-winning Medical Apartheid (2007), Skloot connects the tributaries of scientific exploitation, identifies the patterns of medical abuse and calls them for what they are: a slow, inexorable tide of institutionally sanctioned injustice that has swamped generations of black Americans.

While the general terrain covered by Skloot has already been charted (by Washington and other journalists), the signal accomplishment of The Immortal Life is its excavation of hospital and medical records on Henrietta Lacks and its exhaustive interviews with her surviving family members. Skloot braids that compelling stream into a fluid accounting of the nascent history of cell research in America, creating in the end a riveting narrative that is wholly original.

In short, we learn the stunning news that in 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a poor, undereducated 31-year-old black woman from a small Virginia outpost, unwittingly “donated” cancerous cells that eventually spawned a molecular cottage industry—and aided hundreds of breakthroughs in scientific research on cancer and other diseases.

The dime-sized slices of Lacks’ doomed cervix were taken, without her consent, by a doctor assigned to treat her. Over the ensuing decades, those core cells replicated, “like crabgrass,” according to George Gey, a prominent Johns Hopkins geneticist quoted by Skloot in the book.

To the gleeful amazement of Gey—who first discovered the replicating, hearty properties of poor Henrietta Lacks’ cells—those bits of tissue became the molecular Rosetta stone that would revolutionize DNA research. Since then, they have seeded numerous biotech companies. And during the past half-century, some of these for-profit outfits have made millions of dollars by marketing the “HeLa” cells born from Henrietta Lacks’ body.

Meanwhile, Lacks’ heirs, like many workaday African Americans who came of age at the tail end of Jim Crow, blew through the window of economic prosperity that opened between World War II and the end of the civil rights era, only to find it slammed shut in the Reagan era. The surviving Lackses have struggled to find jobs, get good educations, stay out of jail and—fundamentally—keep their heads above water.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root