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661 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (2015)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0661 and id is 1 raw text is: Biological Determinism and Racial Essentialism: The Ideological Double Helix of Racial Inequality By W. CARSON BYRD and MATTHEW W. HUGHEY In August 2012, nine months after being arti- ficially inseminated using a sperm donation from the Midwest Sperm Bank of Downers Grove, Illinois, a white Ohio woman named Jennifer Cramblett gave birth to a racially mixed and healthy baby girl named Payton. Despite the triumph, the woman soon filed a wrongful birth suit in Cook County Circuit Court, alleging that the sperm bank gave her sperm vials from an African American donor instead of a white donor, which in turn caused personal injuries ... pain, suffering, emotional distress and other economic and non-economic losses (Circuit Court 2014, 8). The lawsuit states that they now live each day with fears, anxieties and uncertainty about her future and Payton's future (Circuit Court 2014, 6). The supposed racial mismatch between par- ent and child in Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank reveals the presence of two powerful belief systems that haunt both the popular imagination and stalk the scientific landscape: the notions of biological determinism (that race is genetically inherited) and racial essen- tialism (that group-based biology maps to basic social behaviors). Together, biological determinism and racial essentialism form the ideological double helix that intertwines to shape beliefs about race and inequality and influence the theoretical approaches, analytic strategies, and interpretations taken by scholars W Carson Byrd is an assistant professor of pan-African studies, associate director of the Center on Racial Inequality, and affiliate faculti in tl Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Researc(h at tLe LUniversity of Louisville. His research examines race and educational inequalityi, particularly in relation to black stulents' experiences in higher education; theoretical and neth- odological approaches used in the study of racial preju- dice and racism; and racial health disparities. His work has appeared in the Du Bois Review, Equity & Excellence in Education, and Ethnic and Racial Studies, among other publications. DOI: 10.1177/0002716215591476 ANNALS, AAPSS, 661, September 2015 S

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