Paper short abstract:

This paper explores tensions in Brazilian policy for sickle cell disease (SCD). The policy addresses SCD typologically, locating it in blackness, while also producing the public goods of education and treatment. How does a policy based on “bad science” offer promise and peril to its constituency?

Paper long abstract:

Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) is often ascribed to African ancestry, however it is a marker for ancestry in a geographic location where malaria is or was prevalent. In 2006, the committee that developed the Brazilian National Health Policy for the Black Population (NHPBP) chose SCD as their "flag to demand health rights." Subverting its biological underpinnings, activists in collaboration with the State have constructed SCD as directly and exclusively tied to African ancestry and the black Brazilian body. I argue that in this instance, these actors used "bad science" - reductive, typological classifications - to create a public good as manifested in increased awareness, free distribution of pharmaceuticals, and better health outcomes for a segment of Brazilian citizenry.

The arguments made to justify the inclusion of SCD within the NHPBP linked race, culture, and genetics. This linkage, at least between race and genetics, has long been made for SCD—historically believed to only manifest in Africans and those of African descent before it became understood as a molecular disease. The use of "bad science" in this context harkens back to the racial science of the 19th and early 20th century. The policies of nation-states that stemmed from this time period were created to limit and control "the boundaries of inclusion and citizenship," often of those considered non-white (El-Haj, 2007). In this present-day translation, we observe activists and health policy makers' "commitment to race as a molecular attribute" (El-Haj 2007) in the creation of routes to access and citizenship for Afro-Brazilians.