Bidil, Blackbird, and Black Niche Marketing: Race vs Racism

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A browser for blacks, a heart drug for blacks. Where do we draw the line between the salience of race to social life and racism?

The creation of the Blackbird technology smells of the racial controversy around the marketing of Bidil--a heart medication--as a black drug. Admittedly, the issues surrounding Bidil are a bit more complex. Steven Epstein states:

Having failed to demonstrate the drug’s efficacy in the overall population, BiDil’s manufacturers reinvented it as an “ethnic drug” and tested it only on African Americans.

Nonetheless, both of these instances clearly capture the capitalistic economic aspects of niche marketing and the implicit (and explicit) acceptance of attitudes that blacks are a monolithic group--whether it be the presumption that all blacks have the same physiological makeup or that all blacks seek the same kinds of information.

But to what extent are they evidence of racism? Before I go any further, I must define how I use the term racism. According to the United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, racism as measured by racial discrimination is:

any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life. [emphasis added]

Under this definition, the distinctions made by 40A and NitroMed are not evidence of racism, since they do not nullify or impair the "recognition, emjoyment, or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms..." If someone can think of ways they do, please let me know.

Still, the distinctions made by 40A and NitroMed do reflect race as a "fundamental organizing principle of social relationships" (Omi and Winant 1984/1989). In so doing, Blackbird and Bidil fit squarely within Omi and Winant's theory of racial formation. Ironically, these products extend the concept of racialization--"the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group"--to non-human objects.

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