Cochineal, a red dye from bugs, moves to the lab

Carminic acid is a bright, natural coloring used in some cosmetics and foods. It’s traditionally sourced from ‘farming’ an insect on acres of prickly pears. Today, scientists are moving to engineer it in microbes.

By Brittney J. Miller

An average trip to the grocery store can yield a cartful of colorful foods. Bright among the rainbow are the reds, lending hues to products such as raspberry jam, canned cherries, strawberry licorice and red velvet cake. Often, their source is a certain small insect.

Cochineal bugs — oval-shaped scale insects around 0.2 inches long — are harvested and turned into the natural dyes cochineal extract, carmine and the pure pigment carminic acid. They have been used to color food, textiles and cosmetics for centuries.

Today, though, traditional labor-intensive harvesting methods are under strain due to rising demand, and prices for the natural pigment have increased. So some scientists are exploring genetic engineering to produce carminic acid in what they hope could be a cheaper, faster and more sustainable way. The efforts, though experimental right now, could also appease those who want non-animal sources of the colorants in their foods, these scientists say.

“It has the potential for a paradigm shift for the production of that compound,” says synthetic biologist Rasmus J. N. Frandsen of the Technical University of Denmark.

The story of carminic acid traces back thousands of years to bright red Phoenician garments colored by a crushed scale insect of the  Kermes genus. Hues harvested from the bug’s cousin from the Americas,  Dactylopius coccus, graced scarlet goods during the reigns of the Mayan and Aztec empires. In the 1500s, Spaniards documented widespread cochineal harvesting in the New World along with the preparation and trade of the dye. Entranced by the bold color, they shipped dried insects by the ton back to Europe to replace the drabber dyes then in use there.

The scarlet spread across the world like wildfire: It funded empires, stained religious garb and was showcased in masterpiece paintings — becoming a precious commodity rivaling silver and gold.

Use of carminic acid in its various forms in textiles and art waned with industrialization and development of synthetic dyes in the mid-1800s, says biomedical dye chemist Dick Dapson of the Biological Stain Commission, which tests and certifies dyes. But the pigment continued to color food, drugs and cosmetics to enhance their appearances. Between 1967 and 2009, the US Food and Drug Administration gradually approved cochineal extract and carmine for such purposes, and these cochineal insect derivatives still add color to various yogurts, cakes, candies, beverages and meats.

Use of a bug extract in food shouldn’t alarm, says University of Guadalajara biotechnologist Liberato Portillo Martinez, who has studied cochineal insects for decades. The amount of insect remaining in the pigment is minuscule — and besides, he adds, many food products are deemed safe and  approved for sale even if they contain small amounts of whole or fragmented insects.

Today, Peru is the largest commercial producer of the D. coccus cochineal insect, followed by countries such as Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Spain’s Canary Islands. Many aspects of production remain the same as they were thousands of years ago. Workers start by rearing the bug on its plant of choice, the prickly pear (also known as the pear cactus or nopal) of the  Opuntia genus. The insects are dried and sold to processors, who extract carminic acid, which makes up around 20 percent in dry weight of the cochineal insect’s body.

Mills the size of phone booths grind the bugs to powder. Then the powder is paired with salts to isolate carmine — the commonly sold product of cochineal insects that’s 50 percent to 60 percent carminic acid.

With current harvesting methods, an estimated 70,000 bugs are needed to produce one pound of dried insect and a fifth of a pound of carminic acid. “It is time-consuming labor, but there is something funny about it: If you start working with cochineal, you fall in love with it,” Portillo Martinez says.

The use of carminic acid from cochineal insects has fluctuated over time. The rise of synthetic dyes, which were  cheaper to produce, caused a decline in use of cochineal insects starting in the mid-1800s. But from around the 1970s, health concerns about these synthetics began to mount — stemming from reports of a link between the colorings and  hyperactivity in kids, as well as some cell and animal studies suggesting that certain dyes may raise risk of  cancer. This prompted the eventual ban of some of them, such as Red 2 and Red 4. Dyes of natural origin, like carminic acid, began to grow more popular as a result, Dapson says.

Synthetic dyes are still widely used in American foods, and there are growing numbers of vegans, vegetarians and animal-rights activists who don’t want to inadvertently eat an insect product like carmine. Some studies have reported allergic reactions to cochineal dye in a small proportion of people due to residual insect molecules — but at levels no higher than for other common allergens, Frandsen says.

Still, overall global demand for carminic acid  is projected to increase as industries source it for coloring sweets, drinks, jams and meats. This, along with climbing costs of labor, is straining the cochineal industry. In Peru, the price per ton of carmine dye rose 40 percent between  2013 and  2019.

“Habitat for cacti is limited, growth of both host and parasite are slow, and extraction procedures are woefully inefficient,” Dapson says. “Improvements in extraction and purification have been made, but they don’t address the core problem, which is production of the insects.”

Biochemical challenges

In recent years, researchers have turned to metabolic engineering — the manipulation of natural cellular reactions to yield desired products — to see if they can devise a sustainable solution to the production bottleneck as well as to address concerns about animal additives and allergies. The idea is to biosynthetically manipulate metabolic pathways inside microbes to create carminic acid.

And there are other possibilities: “In addition to making the carminic acid, we will be able to make a bit of change in the carminic acid as well. We could do better colors and maybe better biological activity,” says microbial engineer Yong-Su Jin of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who wrote about emerging  genetic technologies in producing food colors and flavors in the 2022  Annual Review of Food Science and Technology.

But there are challenges. For one, carminic acid has a complicated structure: a central three-ring structure called anthraquinone to which a glucose molecule and a few other chemical groups are attached. That makes it difficult to synthesize in large amounts, says industrial chemist David Bott of the Society for Chemical Industry.

Scientists still don’t even know the full biochemical pathway that cochineal insects use to make the compound, Frandsen says. And so, almost a decade ago, his team decided to start with the structure of the end product — carminic acid — and figure out how to reverse-engineer it with enzymes from known biochemical pathways.

“Take a rocket, for example,” he says. “You don’t know how it works, but you can see that it flies, right? How do we get the different parts? What should be combined to get this?”

Frandsen and colleagues began by predicting the needed starting ingredients and biochemical steps, as well as enzymes to catalyze those steps. They devised eight potential biochemical pathways that might create carminic acid and tested several hosts to do their genetic engineering in, eventually settling on a well-studied fungus called Aspergillus nidulans. It was easy to analyze yet complex enough to provide the key chemical ingredients for the reactions.

Through trial and error, the team created the three-ring core of carminic acid after deleting some genes from the fungus (to disable competing biochemical pathways) and adding several others (one from a plant and two from bacteria) that provided the appropriate enzymes. This core was then processed by an unknown enzyme already in Aspergillus to produce an intermediate structure called kermesic acid.

Finally, addition of a gene from the cochineal insect itself provided an enzyme that converted kermesic acid into carminic acid. When the fungus was engineered with all these genes, the broth in which it was growing turned red, and tests confirmed the presence of the dye in the broth and in the fungus.

The team’s paper, published in 2018, provided proof of principle that a microbe could be engineered to make carminic acid. But the efficiency of the reaction was nowhere near high enough to consider large-scale manufacturing, Frandsen says. And because one of the enzymes remained unknown, it would be hard to optimize production.

“It was a long struggle with lots of things that should work in theory, but which did not in the real world,” he says. “The truth about synthetic biology is that it is very early days, and results are often presented as, ‘We just did it and it was easy,’ while the reality is way different.”

A 2021 study by another team devised an alternate biosynthetic pathway for carminic acid, this time introducing  genes into the well-known bacterium  E. coli, chosen for its ease of manipulation and potential for large-scale manufacturing. The work differed in its approach from the 2018 work in a number of ways and also reported how much of the compound was produced, says metabolic engineer  Sang Yup Lee of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, senior author of the work.

Among other things, the scientists were able to build a biosynthetic pathway in which every step was known (unlike the Aspergillus work with its unknown fungus enzyme). For the last step in the pathway, they used an enzyme from a plant instead of one from the cochineal bug. When the process still wasn’t producing carminic acid, the team conducted computer modeling studies to predict structural changes in some of the enzymes that would enhance the efficiency of the biosynthetic pathway. Then they introduced those changes by making precise mutations in the genes.

Finally, starting with glucose — which can be produced from renewable biomass — they successfully produced carminic acid.

While the scale of the experiment was tiny, the scientists calculated that if it were scaled up, and assuming production of 5 grams of carminic acid per liter, growing the engineered E. coli for five days in a 100,000-liter fermenter could produce as much carminic acid as cochineal bugs growing on prickly pear pads would produce on a hectare (almost 2.5 acres) of land in a year.

Frandsen says the two studies show that it’s possible to create novel biosynthetic pathways without directly copying the pathway used in nature (although he’d still like to uncover the biochemical processes that the cochineal insects use to make carminic acid). “Both show that synthetic biology has a great potential for the future,” he says.

There is still a lot of work to do before the process could be scaled up to industrial levels, the scientists add. Researchers need to fiddle with the amounts or efficiency of the various enzymes engineered into the microbes to optimize the production of carminic acid and reduce the amounts of undesired byproducts. Nonetheless, Frandsen and Lee say that companies are already taking interest, although they would not disclose names.

Making carminic acid this way could quell consumer concerns about animal products and possible allergies, but some may still balk over fears about genetically modified foods. Still, Lee says, “we hope that consumers around the world who care for the environment and health … will actively consume food and cosmetics containing microbially produced carminic acid. With our additional effort and time, we think we can get there in the near future.”

As for those prickly pear cacti in their plantations, ready to be fed to sucking cochineals to fatten them before their demise — Portillo Martinez reckons they’ll stick around to some extent regardless, due to long-standing local traditions.

“There are many, many areas that use the cochineal,” he says. “I think its production will remain. Maybe not the amount we have now — but I think it will remain.”

Brittney J. Miller (@ BrittneyJMiller) is a science journalist from Florida who loves writing about the world around her.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

To understand American politics, you need to move beyond left and right

There’s a more sophisticated way to understand how Americans divide themselves politically. Torsten Asmus/ iStock / Getty Images Plus

Graham Wright, Brandeis University and Sasha Volodarsky, Northeastern University

Are Americans really as politically polarized as they seem – and everybody says?

It’s definitely true that Democrats and Republicans increasingly hate and fear one another. But this animosity seems to have more to do with tribal loyalty than liberal-versus-conservative disagreements about policy. Our research into what Americans actually want in terms of policy shows that many have strong political views that can’t really be characterized in terms of “right” or “left.”

The media often talks about the American political landscape as if it were a line. Liberal Democrats are on the left, conservative Republicans on the right, and a small sliver of moderate independents are in the middle. But political scientists like us have long argued that a line is a bad metaphor for how Americans think about politics.

Sometimes scholars and pundits will argue that views on economic issues like taxes and income redistribution, and views on so-called social or cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage, actually represent two distinct dimensions in American political attitudes. Americans, they say, can have liberal views on one dimension but conservative views on the other. So you could have a pro-choice voter who wants lower taxes, or a pro-life voter who wants the government to do more to help the poor.

But even this more sophisticated, two-dimensional picture doesn’t reveal what Americans actually want the government to do – or not do – when it comes to policy.

First, it ignores some of the most contentious topics in American politics today, like affirmative action, the Black Lives Matter movement and attempts to stamp out “wokeness” on college campuses.

Since 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency while simultaneously stoking racial anxieties and bucking Republican orthodoxy on taxes and same-sex marriage, it has become clear that what Americans think about politics can’t really be understood without knowing what they think about racism, and what – if anything – they want done about it.

‘Racial Justice Communitarians’ have liberal views on economic issues and moderate or conservative views on moral issues; some Black evangelicals supported Barack Obama but were troubled by his support for same-sex marriage. Charles Ommanney/Getty Images

Recently, some political scientists have argued that views on racial issues represent a third “dimension” in American politics. But there are other problems with treating political attitudes as a set of “dimensions” in the first place. For example, even a “3D” picture doesn’t allow for the possibility that Americans with conservative economic views tend to also hold conservative racial views, while Americans with liberal economic views are deeply divided on issues related to race.

A new picture of American politics

In our new article in Sociological Inquiry, we analyzed public opinion data from 2004 to 2020 to develop a more nuanced picture of American political attitudes. Our aim was to do a better job of figuring out what Americans actually think about politics, including policies related to race and racism.

Using a new analytic method that doesn’t force us to think in terms of dimensions at all, we found that, over the past two decades, Americans can be broadly divided into five different groups.

In most years, slightly less than half of all Americans had consistently liberal or conservative views on policies related to the economy, morality and race, and thus fall into one of two groups.

“Consistent Conservatives” tend to believe that the free market should be given free rein in the economy, are generally anti-abortion, tend to say that they support “traditional family ties” and oppose most government efforts to address racial disparities. These Americans almost exclusively identify themselves as Republicans.

“Consistent Liberals” strongly support government intervention in the economy, tend to be in favor of abortion rights and pro-same-sex marriage and feel that the government has a responsibility to help address discrimination against Black Americans. They mostly identify as Democrats.

But the majority of Americans, who don’t fall into one of these two groups, are not necessarily “moderates,” as they are often characterized. Many have very strong views on certain issues, but can’t be pigeonholed as being on the left or right in general.

Instead, we find that these Americans can be classified as one of three groups, whose size and relationship to the two major parties change from one election cycle to the next:

“Racial Justice Communitarians” have liberal views on economic issues like taxes and redistribution and moderate or conservative views on moral issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. They also strongly believe that the government has a responsibility to address racial discrimination. This group likely includes many of the Black evangelicals who strongly supported Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, but were also deeply uncomfortable with his expression of support for same-sex marriage in 2012.

“Nativist Communitarians” also have liberal views on economics and conservative views on moral issues, but they are extremely conservative with respect to race and immigration, in some cases even more so than Consistent Conservatives. Picture, for instance, those voters in 2016 who were attracted to both Bernie Sanders’ economic populism and Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants.

“Libertarians,” who we find became much more prominent after the tea party protests of 2010, are conservative on economic issues, liberal on social issues and have mixed but generally conservative views in regard to racial issues. Think here of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who think that the government has no business telling them how to run their company – or telling gay couples that they can’t get married.

Three groups of Americans have a difficult time fitting in with either of America’s two major parties. Ronda Churchill/AFP via Getty Images

Five groups – but only two parties

These three groups of Americans have a difficult time fitting in with either of the two major parties in the U.S.

In every year we looked, the Racial Justice Communitarians – who include the largest percentage of nonwhite Americans – were most likely to identify as Democrats. But in some years up to 40% still thought of themselves as Republicans or independents.

Nativist Communitarians and Libertarians are even harder to pin down. During the Obama years they were actually slightly more likely to be Democrats than Republicans. But since Trump’s rise in 2016, both groups are now slightly more likely to identify as Republicans, although large percentages of each group describe themselves as independents or Democrats.

Seeing Americans as divided into these five groups – as opposed to polarized between the left and right – shows that both political parties are competing for coalitions of voters with different combinations of views.

Many Racial Justice Communitarians disagree with the Democratic Party when it comes to cultural and social issues. But the party probably can’t win national elections without their votes. And, unless they are willing to make a strong push for promoting “racial justice,” the Republican Party’s national electoral prospects probably depend on attracting significant support from either the economically liberal Nativist Communitarians or the socially liberal Libertarians.

But perhaps most importantly, these five groups show how diverse Americans’ political attitudes really are. Just because American democracy is a two-party system doesn’t mean that there are only two kinds of American voters.

Graham Wright, Associate Research Scientist, Maurice & Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, Brandeis University and Sasha Volodarsky, Ph.D. Student in Political Science, Northeastern University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Polymers promise a more flexible artificial retina

Organic semiconductors can link up with brain cells to send and receive signals. They may find a use in sight-restoring prostheses. 

By M. Mitchell Waldrop

It’s not the most common cause of blindness. That dubious distinction goes to diabetes, followed by maladies such as cataracts, glaucoma and macular degeneration. But for the one person in 4,000 afflicted with the genetic disorder retinitis pigmentosa, it is devastating — a slow, inexorable death of the rod and cone cells that serve as the eye’s light detectors. Night vision is the first to go, usually in childhood. Then comes the gradual loss of peripheral vision, even in daylight. By age 40 or so, people with the condition are typically left with only a small, central patch of vision, as if they are looking at the world through a straw.

The good news is that this particular form of blindness leaves an opening for technology. Two types of artificial retinas have already been approved for human use. And new work suggests a way for those retinas to one day get much better.

The key point is that retinitis pigmentosa targets the rod and cone cells almost exclusively. The disease does minimal damage to the retina’s many other neurons, which process signals from the rods and cones and convey the results to the optic nerve. So in principle, fixing vision is just a matter of going in through the very back of the eye, where the ravaged rods and cones originally formed a layer just 100 micrometers thick, and replacing them with a device that will generate electrical pulses in response to light. Pulses from various points on the device can then communicate with the retina’s surviving neurons in a natural way.

Existing retinal prostheses require silicon or metal implants that are comparatively thick and completely rigid, a combination that the sensitive retinal tissue does not like at all, says physicist Guglielmo Lanzani of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Milan. “Over time,” he says, “inflammation is followed by fibrosis” — scarring, which can reduce the artificial retina’s already limited effectiveness.

So instead, as Lanzani and his IIT colleagues explain in the recent Annual Review of Physical Chemistry, their group is investigating a different kind of retinal prosthesis made from semiconductive polymers, a class of carbon-based plastics that can conduct electricity in much the same way that silicon microchips do.

These polymers are best known for their use in some types of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays, the richly colored screens found in millions of smartphones. But the materials also show promise for a new generation of cheap, flexible, lightweight solar cells. And they show even more promise as soft, flexible bioelectronic interfaces to living tissue — “one of the emerging and very exciting applications of organic semiconductors,” says Carlos Silva, a physicist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. These applications include drug delivery and biosensors.

Because semiconductive polymers bend and flex like natural tissues, Lanzani says, “they are biocompatible.” In tests in the lab and in animals, the polymer retina seems to coexist with them quite happily, with no adverse reactions at all.

Just as important, adds IIT neuroscientist Fabio Benfenati, semiconducting polymers can get the physiology right. When light hits the polymer sheet, he says, it triggers a localized pulse of electrical activity about 80 to 100 micrometers across. Because this is roughly comparable to the spacing of rod and cone cells outside the densely packed fovea, where the eye’s visual acuity is the highest, the polymer prosthesis would allow a resolution akin to a person’s natural peripheral vision.

And because the sheet can be engineered to deliver its electrical pulses as a flow of ions, it can pass signals to the surviving retinal neurons in a way that they recognize: Ion flows are neurons’ native language. “Even though the mechanism is probably different from what is occurring in nature,” Benfenati says, “what we do is very biomimetic.”

A light-sensitive polymer

Carbon-based polymers such as rubber, nylon and polyester are usually thought of as insulators, preventing electricity from flowing out of wires or other metal parts. But in the 1970s, chemists established that certain polymers could conduct electricity quite well — and better still, could function as semiconductors like silicon. By 2000, when work in this area won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, the field was flourishing.

Today, there are a number of semiconducting polymers that might be suitable for an artificial retina, but the IIT group has focused on P3HT, short for poly(3-hexylthiophene-2,5-diyl), a material widely used in photovoltaic cells. In 2007, recalls Lanzani, as part of an effort to develop a more accurate device for measuring colors, he and his physicist colleagues showed that P3HT could be engineered to respond to light in much the same way as green-sensitive human cone cells. And shortly thereafter, he says, “I heard about people building an artificial eye for robotics, including a retina-like detector, and I thought, ‘The best place for a retina is in the eye — the real eye!’”

This artificial retina idea became concrete when he met Benfenati at the coffee machine during an institute meeting. “Fabio was excited,” says Lanzani — and as a neuroscientist, he knew how to work with living neurons.

Joining forces, their teams showed in 2011 that neurons cultivated on a film of P3HT would indeed make connections with the polymer. What’s more, the neurons responded to electrical impulses from the polymer in the same way they would to nerve impulses from a rod or cone cell. Then in 2013 they showed that retinas taken from a strain of rat with dysfunctional rod and cone cells would connect to the polymer in the same way, and would have a similar response to impulses. That was a confidence-booster, says Benfenati. “It’s one thing to have a cell growing onto a surface and getting a very tight contact,” he says, “and another thing just to put preformed tissue in contact.”

Independently, as it happens, K.S. Narayan and his team at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, India, were getting similar results using a polymer blended with P3HT. But since then, the two teams’ paths have diverged somewhat. Narayan’s group has been carrying out laboratory studies with photoreceptor-free retinas obtained from chick embryos to get a very precise understanding of how the polymer and the retinal neurons interact. “We are interested in biophysics,” he says — “how neurons get excited when we introduce these artificial polymers to replace the receptors.”

Lanzani and Benfenati, in the meantime, have moved on to testing their polymer prosthesis in the retinas of living animals. A crucial factor in this work has been their partnership with Grazia Pertile, says Benfenati. Not only is she head of the ophthalmology department at the Sacrocuore Hospital in Verona, Italy, he says, and one of the most skilled retinal surgeons in Europe, “she is very interested in basic research, as well.”

In 2017, Pertile and colleagues succeeded in implanting a full prosthesis in the eyes of living rats from a strain that has a genetic defect analogous to retinitis pigmentosa. After a month’s healing time, the pupils of these once-blind rats were contracting in response to light exactly like those of healthy rats, and their once-dormant visual cortex was abuzz with renewed activity. It’s impossible to know what the rats were actually experiencing, but they showed every sign of being able to see again.

The team has now embarked on the multiyear road toward human experimentation. To prepare the way, Pertile has been developing techniques to implant the polymer retinal prosthesis in pigs, whose eyes are similar to people’s in both size and visual acuity, while others on the team have been refining the prosthesis itself.

“We’re taking the time,” says Lanzani, “in order to have the best architecture before going to humans.”

M. Mitchell Waldrop is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

Bring the Family Together with Breakfast for Dinner

Despite busy lives and full schedules, finding time for regular meals with loved ones encourages connections and conversations that can benefit mental and physical well-being. Gathering your family, friends, coworkers or neighbors at least once a week to spend time together over a meal provides opportunities to decompress and socialize.

If you’re looking for a little delicious inspiration, the American Heart Association recommends scheduling one night per week to create a recurring tradition and enjoy favorites such as breakfast for dinner. Recipes like Egg, Avocado and Black Bean Breakfast Burritos; Huevos Rancheros; and Southwestern Quinoa and Egg Breakfast Bowls from the Healthy for Good Eat Smart initiative, nationally supported by Eggland’s Best, are perfectly suited for sharing while making time to destress at the dinner table.

In fact, according to a study by “Canadian Family Physician,” regular meals at home with loved ones can reduce stress, boost self-esteem and make everyone feel connected with mealtime conversations that allow a chance to unplug and unwind.

Meals don’t have to be elaborate for a successful evening together. Despite the perceived effort involved with preparing a meal, research published in “Preventive Medicine” shows those who have frequent meals with others, particularly parents with their children, may improve social and emotional well-being.

In addition to the mental and emotional benefits of meals with loved ones, eating together can also encourage healthier choices when better-for-you recipes are on the menu. Dining as a group can provide inspiration to try heart-healthy recipes that include the wide variety of vegetables, fruit, whole grains and healthy protein sources recommended by the American Heart Association to help prevent heart disease and stroke.

To find recipe ideas, conversation starters and more tips for mealtime, visit heart.org/together.

Huevos Rancheros

Servings: 4

Salsa:

• 1 teaspoon canola oil
• 1/2 cup diced yellow onion
• 1/2 cup diced poblano pepper, seeds and ribs discarded
• 1 small fresh jalapeno pepper, seeds and ribs discarded, minced
• 1 1/2 teaspoons minced garlic
• 1 can (14 1/2 ounces) no-salt-added crushed tomatoes
• 2 tablespoons water
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Huevos Rancheros:

• 1 teaspoon canola oil
• 4 large eggs
• 4 corn tortillas (6 inches), warm
• 1 can (15 1/2 ounces) no-salt-added black beans, rinsed and drained
• 1/4 cup shredded low-fat Mexican cheese blend
• 1 small avocado, quartered and sliced
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro (optional)
• 1 medium lime, cut into four wedges (optional)

1. To make salsa: In medium saucepan over medium heat, heat oil, swirling to coat bottom. Cook onion 2 minutes, or until almost soft, stirring frequently. Cook poblano and jalapeno peppers 2 minutes, stirring frequently. Stir in garlic. Cook 1 minute. Stir in tomatoes, water and salt. Bring to boil. Reduce heat to low. Simmer 5 minutes. Remove from heat. Cover to keep warm.
2. To make huevos rancheros: In medium nonstick skillet over medium heat, heat oil, swirling to coat bottom. Cook eggs 3-4 minutes, or until whites are set and edges are fully cooked.
3. Place one tortilla on each plate. Top each tortilla with beans and one egg, being careful not to break yolk. Gently top each egg with warm salsa, cheese and avocado slices.
4. Sprinkle each serving with cilantro and serve with lime wedge, if desired.

Egg, Avocado and Black Bean Breakfast Burritos

Servings: 4

• Nonstick cooking spray
• 1 1/3 cups liquid egg whites
• 1 can (15 1/2 ounces) no-salt-added black beans, rinsed and drained
• 4 whole-wheat tortillas (6 inches, lowest sodium available)
• 2 medium avocados, sliced
• 1/4 cup hot sauce or salsa (lowest sodium available, optional)

1. Lightly spray large skillet with nonstick cooking spray. Heat over medium heat.
2. In skillet, stir egg whites constantly with rubber spatula to scramble. Cook until eggs are almost set. Add beans, stirring until combined and heated through.
3. Microwave tortillas on high 45 seconds. Transfer to work surface.
4. Spread egg mixture in center of each tortilla. Top with the avocado and hot sauce, if desired.
5. For each burrito, fold two sides of tortilla toward center. Starting from closest unfolded side, roll burrito toward remaining unfolded side to enclose filling. Transfer with seam side down to plates.

Southwestern Quinoa and Egg Breakfast Bowls

Servings: 4

• 1/4 cup uncooked quinoa, rinsed and drained
• 2 medium tomatoes, chopped (about 2 cups)
• 1 cup no-salt-added frozen corn, thawed
• 1/2 medium avocado, pitted and diced
• 1/4 cup chopped green onions
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro (optional)
• nonstick cooking spray
• 4 large eggs
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• red hot-pepper sauce, to taste (optional)

1. Cook quinoa according to package directions. Remove from heat.
2. Spoon quinoa into four bowls. Top each with tomatoes, corn, avocado, green onions and cilantro, if desired.
3. Lightly spray large skillet over medium-high heat with nonstick cooking spray. Crack eggs into skillet. Sprinkle eggs with salt and pepper. Cook, uncovered, 3-4 minutes, or until egg whites are set but yolks are still runny. Using spatula, carefully transfer one egg sunny side up into each bowl. Sprinkle with hot sauce, if desired.

SOURCE:
American Heart Association

Inside the adolescent brain

This challenging phase of life may get a bad rap, but it’s also full of opportunity. A developmental neuroscientist shares what she’s learned from studies on young people’s risk-taking behavior, reasoning and more.

By Tim Vernimmen

Adolescence is often portrayed as a period of struggle and friction, filled to the brim with exhilarating ups and depressing downs. Young people’s behavior tends to be stereotyped as self-absorbed and impulsive. But how accurate is this picture, and what might explain it?

Developmental neuroscientist Eveline Crone, based at Erasmus University Rotterdam, has studied adolescents, defined by researchers as people aged 10 to 24, for more than 20 years. She has gradually expanded her interest from the study of the many changes happening in adolescent brains to include her study subjects’ own views and experiences. This has helped to enrich her earlier findings on how young brains learn, produce emotions, process rewards and account for the perspectives of other people. It also provides new inspiration for adults trying to help them.

To study adolescents, Crone visualizes their brain activity while they are engaged in various tasks and games on computer screens: ones designed to assess behaviors and attitudes toward things like risk and reward, how they think about and are influenced by others, and more. She supplements these studies with other methods such as surveys and youth panels — and, these days, consults young people for their input from the moment the study is designed.

In an article in the 2020 Annual Review of Psychology, Crone and her colleague Andrew Fuligni of the University of California, Los Angeles, explore how adolescents feel and think about themselves and others, and stress that far from being either/or, both are inextricably intertwined. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you get interested in studying adolescents, and how have your views evolved over time?

When I started to study psychology, I was interested in the way people think and make decisions, and I started to realize that you can answer these questions if you understand how they got there. That is how I got interested in development: I wanted to understand the pathways to becoming an adult.

Nowadays, I am much more interested in adolescence because of the promise of a new generation — I find it intriguing how every new generation of adolescents reinvents itself and society. Initially, my participants were really my subject, something I studied to understand the mechanism, but that has completely changed. From what I’ve learned, I feel I’ve become an advocate for young people.

When you started your research career, your own adolescence was a recent memory. Now it is rather more distant. How do you think that has affected your views on this phase of life?

We know from history that there has always been this view of adolescents as troublemakers. I am at an age now where I really start to see the differences between generations, and I do sometimes find myself rolling my eyes as well. But then I catch myself and think: OK, this is just how young people think or respond.

A recent example during the pandemic was that students would never put on their cameras when I was teaching. That was not nice for me, but then I have had to rethink and remind myself of research by Harvard psychologist Leah Somerville showing that in mid-adolescence, people are more embarrassed when they have to look at themselves on a screen, or if they have the idea that others are looking at them. So there are explanations for how they behave.

But — and this is what I also tell people when I give talks for a general audience — it may be good to know that some patterns of behavior are the same for everybody. Still, I’m not saying that means adolescence is easy, either for adolescents or parents!

Many people have found themselves wondering what is going on in adolescent brains. But how do you actually study it?

I originally trained as an experimental psychologist, so I was trained to develop experimental approaches that tap into certain mental processes. We ask people of various ages to perform a certain task — they respond to questions presented on a screen — and, using a brain imaging tool called fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), we can look at activity patterns in the brain.

For example, you could think of a task where you make a choice alone or while friends are watching you, and we can look at the patterns of activity in the brain during each scenario and compare them. Using such an approach, we have explored a range of behaviors and responses — what happens when adolescents have to wait before receiving a reward, are thinking about themselves or others, or deciding whether or not cooperate, share with or give to others.

Because our experiments are designed to investigate very specific behaviors, it becomes less realistic, but it allows us to disentangle particular processes. Then we try to understand the same process by using surveys, talking to youth panels and using interventions to see if we can change a behavior. The idea is that if you approach the question in all these different ways, the advantages of one method compensate for the disadvantages of another.

Which brain regions have been found to change in adolescence, and what is the result?

I have always been intrigued by the prefrontal cortex, one of the latest brain regions to evolve as well as one of the last to develop as we grow up. It is important for rational thought, working memory, future planning and reasoning. Studying this region for more than 20 years using fMRI brain scans, we’ve observed that the maturation of the prefrontal cortex underlies key cognitive milestones that are important for reasoning.

Reasoning develops while we are growing up. Young children are a bit more focused on explorative trial-and-error learning. But the older we get, the more we consider strategic motives, and think about the consequences of our actions for ourselves and others, now and in the future. We rely more on cognitive strategies; we are far more inclined to rationalize — we can’t even control it. The primary emotions speak less, because adults more easily control their emotions.

Our team has studied the role of a certain reward region in the brain, the ventral striatum, in relation to risk-taking behavior, often using an online gambling task in which participants could win or lose money for themselves, their best friend or a disliked person. While only a small percentage of adolescents gets in trouble through extreme risk-taking, we see that the ventral striatum becomes more active for all adolescents when a risky choice — for example, a risky bet that will yield a lot of money if they win — results in rewards for themselves, or when risky choices are made in the presence of friends.

We also discovered that this response is seen for rewards that benefit their friends, their parents or other people that are close to them, suggesting adolescents are also sensitive to benefits for others.

The activity of these regions peaks in mid-adolescence and decreases when we get older. But that finding is very sensitive to how we design the experiment, so it is not always found. To me, that is a supercool scientific puzzle: Why is it that sometimes, adolescents do not show this peak in sensitivity to things that are rewarding, whether it’s risk-taking or helping others? I like variance, because it suggests you can make changes to give young people the opportunity to grow up successfully. Adolescence may be a time in life when social experiences really matter and have long-lasting effects on people’s kindness and how they feel connected to others.

To many people, adolescent behavior seems unnecessarily impulsive. Do you think this has an important function, or could it be simply a side effect of some necessary steps in brain development?

Usually, I think this is beneficial to young people. It can really help adolescents to go out there and seek new experiences. It’s a huge transition from being a child and being totally dependent on your parents, to all of a sudden distancing yourself from the rules of the house to find your way out there. There must be a kind of trigger for that. But of course, some risk-taking is too dangerous, and that, I think, is a side effect of the helpful, adaptive function of risk-taking that propels teens into adulthood.

In your review, you focus on the parts of the brain that allow us to think about ourselves and others. It turns out these are largely the same ones — was this a surprise to you?

The social brain network, four regions in the brain that are consistently active when you think of social situations, is very robustly found across hundreds of studies. One of these areas, the medial prefrontal cortex, is also strongly engaged when you think about yourself, so this region appears to be involved in both.

We really expected that self- and other-processing could be separated. But it turned out that every time, the same region of the brain was activated whether adolescents got an assignment to think about their own traits, to think about others or to think about what other people think of them — it was the same area over and over again.

Now I don’t think that they can be disentangled anymore. You constantly reflect on yourself when you interact with others, and when you interact with others, it has an effect on how you feel about yourself.

The medial prefrontal cortex is more active in adolescents than in adults, and some studies even show a peak in activity. The big question is why. We think it might reflect an increased use of strategizing which, as I’ve explained, the prefrontal cortex is involved in. But it’s also possible that there is more introspection, that adolescents spend more time thinking about themselves.

Another brain area that is part of the social brain network, the temporoparietal junction, specifically becomes active when you switch your perspective between yourself and others. We did some research in adolescents with a history of delinquent behavior and found that the temporoparietal junction showed less variation in activity across different social situations in adolescents with a history of delinquency, compared with others. One potential explanation is that they are not as successful in switching from their own perspective to others’. But there are many other reasons this could be, so it is good to be modest in this respect.

That, to me, was somehow a hopeful message: This is something we can possibly train people to be better at — you can learn to take the perspective of others. Well-adjusted people tend to do that automatically.

How might your research help us to reduce frictions between adolescents and adults?

My research has made me rethink the assumption of adolescents being troublemakers, because it just didn’t fit the data. We have demonstrated such a strong feeling of purpose and meaning in adolescents. They feel a fundamental need to contribute in a positive way.

I no longer think it should be our goal to always have complete understanding between generations. I don’t think it’s possible. And I think that’s a good thing. Historically, we have seen many examples where the younger generation shapes society in ways that may not always align with the norms of previous generations. But this planet is theirs for the future, so they should have a say in what they find important.

The climate debate is a good example; young people have very different ideas about sustainability and take part in demonstrations for a healthier planet. I believe their voice is important here, even when it is uncomfortable for the older generations.

For interventions, research shows that ones thought up by adults to help adolescents often don’t work. Young people should have the space to develop new ideas and put them in practice themselves. That is something I have also learned over time — if adolescents can invent their own approach, it is much more likely to work.

So the question for adults is: How can we provide optimal opportunities for young people to develop and become socially engaged individuals? The way you do it is very important. You should engage young people when designing programs and take their opinions seriously.

How might this research inspire parents, for whom this is often also a complicated time?

Research has shown that being too strict or too loose is not helpful. Adolescents need guidance as well as opportunities to explore. That is not my own research, but I think it makes a lot of sense. The important thing is that we know from brain imaging that brain activity can change, and that it matters what you do as parents. Because the brain is especially plastic in adolescence, there is a window of opportunity to provide support and help adolescents grow into the best versions of themselves. Young people still find the opinions of their parents very important.

How do adolescents themselves tend to respond to your research, and how might it help them?

Young people are intrigued by seeing the brain in action — it makes them excited about science. But it depends on what story you tell: When you say to adolescents that their brains are more receptive to risk-taking, that might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I always hope that with my work, they’ll feel empowered.

It’s good to understand where your emotions or thoughts are coming from, to know that you can use this period to find out who you are, and that it’s OK if this takes time and if it’s difficult sometimes. If you know that this is a time of larger fluctuations in mood, it can help you to understand that this is part of growing up, that it can be useful, and that it will get better.

We’ve followed adolescents during the pandemic, and we see that negative feelings kept increasing, even when regulations were loosened, and positive feelings kept decreasing. One explanation was that they couldn’t imagine their futures — having a dot on the horizon and knowing where you are going — because everything was so unpredictable, no one knew how long the pandemic would last. Some have suffered immensely.

Adolescents made a big sacrifice to help the older generations, and I think for a good reason. But I do believe that when we get older, we don’t remember just how important that time of your life is — how it may impact how you’ll live your life, how you feel connected to other people and whether you feel the government is there for you. During the pandemic and the resulting restrictions, many young people felt they were not being taken seriously.

If they say that they find it important to have a safe space to talk about their mental health, we should support that. I hope my research will help adults to see the opportunities of adolescence. Young people are the future — we should invest in them, to help them to become caring and responsible citizens.

The teen brain: Mysteries and misconceptions

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Studying adolescent behavior

Here are examples of approaches taken by Eveline Crone and colleagues as they study brain and behavior in youth.

Risk-taking: Since creating truly risky situations in the lab is not an option, risk-taking is often studied using a task in which adolescents blow up a virtual balloon on the computer screen by clicking the mouse. Every click earns them more money but one too many may burst the balloon and make them lose it all. Risk-taking also can be assessed through online gambling games that involve betting on coin tosses, in which riskier bets would yield more money. Questionnaires are also used.

Attitudes toward self and others: Adolescents can play games either to win money for themselves or for others and their approach toward risk under each circumstance can be compared. In other tasks, they can be asked to indicate the extent to which a series of statements apply to them — in their own opinion and that of their peers.

To explore which brain regions are active during tasks, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans can be done simultaneously. To assess changes in thinking and behavior as adolescents grow older, groups of subjects can be assessed at different time points, sometimes along with a measure of sex hormone levels to gauge where they are in puberty.

— Tim Vernimmen

Tim Vernimmen is a freelance science journalist based near Antwerp, Belgium. His own adolescence theoretically ended in 2010.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. 

Boy Scouts of America can now create $2.4 billion fund to pay claims for Scouts who survived abuse – a bankruptcy expert explains what’s next

The alleged sexual abuse that led to this settlement occurred from 1944 through 2016. Newsday LLC via Getty Images

Marie T. Reilly, Penn State

On April 19, 2023, the Boy Scouts of America declared that it has exited its bankruptcy case after clearing one of the last legal hurdles in its way. Some insurance companies and sex abuse claimants objected to the Boy Scouts’ plan to pay claimants, but the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the plan can go ahead anyway while the insurers’ appeal is pending. It’s now possible to begin the process of paying at least US$2.45 billion to resolve about 82,000 claims against the Boy Scouts and affiliated entities asserted by people who allege that they were sexually abused as children over the past 80 years.

The Boy Scouts operate through the national organization known as the BSA, which includes hundreds of separate but affiliated organizations known as local councils, and faith-based or civic groups called chartered organizations. Because these troop-sponsoring nonprofit organizations across the country are responsible for ensuring the safety of children in scouting, all of them faced child sexual abuse claims.

The BSA filed for bankruptcy in February 2020 to halt the hundreds of lawsuits that were then pending in state courts. More than two years later, the BSA reached an agreement with many of its insurers, all of the local councils, some of the chartered organizations and roughly 85% of all sex abuse claimants on a plan to pay claims.

The Conversation asked Marie T. Reilly, a Penn State law professor who studies bankruptcy cases involving child sex abuse claims against Catholic dioceses, to explain what this means.

What happens next?

The plan the court approved in the BSA’s bankruptcy case will create a settlement trust to process and pay sexual abuse claims.

Two retired judges and a committee made up of lawyers who represent sex abuse claimants will administer the trust, which will be the largest sexual abuse compensation fund ever established in the U.S. It will operate independently of the BSA.

The trust will take over responsibility for all claims against the BSA. All parties that contribute to it will be relieved of their liability.

Where will the money come from?

The BSA will contribute to the trust property estimated to be worth $220 million. Local councils will contribute about $515 million in cash, property and money obtained from their insurers. Chartered organizations, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Roman Catholic and Methodist churches, schools and other affiliated institutions, will also contribute and receive a release from liability for claims.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, still sometimes called the Mormon Church, used to participate in the Boy Scouts but severed ties to it in 2018. It will contribute $250 million.

Insurance companies that issued policies covering the BSA will contribute about $1.6 billion. The trustee of the settlement trust has the authority to sue the insurance companies that have not agreed to the settlement to try to get more money to pay claims.

How much money will survivors get and when will payments begin?

People who have filed sex abuse claims have three options:

1) Accept a $3,500 payment based on the information already submitted about their claim in the bankruptcy case. About 6,700 survivors have already elected this option.

2) Submit additional information and have the trustee determine the amount based on agreed-upon factors, including the severity of the abuse.

3) Sue in state court and have a jury determine the amount.

Payments will not start to flow until the trust determines the payment amount of each claim. If the fund is not big enough to pay every claim in full, the trust will reduce the amount of each claim to reflect the estimated shortfall.

It’s hard to say how long it will take to process the nearly 75,000 claims that have not elected the $3,500 option.

Among other things, the trust will need to hire and onboard staff and to set up secure systems to gather and evaluate personal information from tens of thousands of people.

This is likely to be both expensive and slow.

How will this settlement affect the Boy Scouts?

The Boy Scouts face an uncertain future after the bankruptcy case.

The organization’s revenue depends on membership dues, contributions from its troop sponsoring organizations, product sales, service fees and donations. And the dues are lower because of a sharp decline in membership. The BSA now has a little more than 1 million members across the country – about half as many as in 2019.

Trying to convert some of the Boy Scouts-owned properties into cash to meet the organization’s obligations under the bankruptcy plan is complicated. It may take years to accomplish, dragging out the timeline.

Local councils are already selling property to raise the cash they need to make the contribution to the fund.

For example, a local council in New Jersey is selling its land in the Pocono Mountains to pay its share of the contribution to the compensation fund.

Local residents are concerned that the pristine land, estimated to be worth $4 million, will end up lost to developers.
The same controversy is unfolding regarding the sale of local council property in Connecticut.

The U.S. Forest Service estimates that 6,000 acres (24 square kilometers) of open space are lost every day to other uses. Local Boy Scouts councils own a significant portion of open space in the U.S., and much of it may be lost.

The Deer Lake Boy Scout Reservation in Killingworth, Conn., is among the many properties nationwide being sold by local councils. AP Photo/Pat Eaton-Robb

Are there precedents for this?

Catholic organizations have resolved liability for child sexual abuse in bankruptcy cases with plans that are similar to the BSA’s. But the scale of the Boy Scouts’ case in terms of the number of claims and the size of the settlement trust fund is much larger than any case involving a single diocese, or any other nonprofit organization bankruptcy case.

Marie T. Reilly, Professor of Law, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Arab Americans are a much more diverse group than many of their neighbors mistakenly assume

Zoe Sahloul, executive director of the New England Arab American Organization, center, celebrates Eid-al-Fitr in Maine. Joel Page/Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

Yasmin Moll, University of Michigan

Marking April as Arab American Heritage Month – a time to learn about the history, culture and contributions of our nearly 4 million strong community – is gaining traction across the country.

In 2022, Joe Biden made history as the first U.S. president to recognize the month, which he did again in 2023. States such as Illinois and Virginia have passed legislation to make the celebration an annual event, and dozens more have commemorated it.

This recognition is important, given the simplistic ways Arabs are often portrayed in American culture. From TV stations to entertainment media, people of Arab descent are often stereotyped as violent, oppressed or exotic. Nevertheless, as an anthropologist who studies religious and racial dynamics in Arab societies, I am concerned that as the celebration of “Arab American heritage” becomes more mainstream, the diversity and complex stories of Arab Americans’ many different communities may be papered over. In short, Arab Americans are not a monolithic group.

Arab Christians

In 2023, Arab American Heritage Month overlaps with the second half of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. For many in the United States, this overlap seems natural, given how often Islam is conflated with Arab identity. But just as most Muslims around the world are not Arab, not all Arabs are Muslim.

While the 22 countries that make up the Arab League all have Muslim majorities, Christian communities predate Muslim ones in the region. Indeed, Christianity began in the Middle East, with the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, which is revered as Jesus’ birthplace, an important pilgrimage stop for Christians from all over the world. During the first significant wave of Arab immigration to the U.S. in the late 19th century and early 20th century, families more often than not were Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian Christians.

Many Arab immigrants to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century were Syrian. Bain News Service/Library of Congress

Today, most Americans of Arab descent identify as Christian. While the Arab community in the greater Detroit area, a short drive from where I live and work, is majority Muslim, that sets it apart from many other Arab communities in the U.S.

Arab American Christians are themselves diverse, identifying as Protestants and Catholics, and with a variety of Eastern Christian traditions, such as Antiochian and Coptic Orthodoxy.

Furthermore, some sects of Christianity have become intertwined with specific ethnic identities. For example, some Coptic Christian Egyptian Americans refuse the label “Arab,” even if they grew up speaking Arabic at home or learn the language to connect with their family roots. This refusal is often rooted in Copts’ collective experiences of marginalization in Egypt, where they face many restrictions, including on repairing and building churches.

From Mizrahi Jews to Shiite Muslims

Just as Christianity is an integral yet complex part of Arab heritage, so is Judaism. Arab Jews, often called Mizrahi Jews, have existed since ancient times and helped shape Arab heritage through their philosophical, poetic and political contributions across centuries.

To be sure, Israel’s establishment and its occupation of Palestinian territories has complicated Arab Jewish identities, with new forms of antisemitism becoming more common within many Arab communities. Still, there is growing interest among scholars and Arab American Jews themselves in learning more about this history, as well as the Jewish background of beloved pan-Arab celebrities such as Layla Murad, an iconic midcentury Egyptian actress.

The San Francisco Bay area for generations has been home to the Egyptian Jewish Karaite community. Karaites reject the authority of the rabbinic oral tradition used by more mainstream branches of Judaism such as Reform, Conservative and Orthodox groups in the U.S. Here in the U.S., as in Egypt, members struggle for recognition as a religious minority within a religion that is itself a minority, Judaism.

Arab American Muslims are not a monolithic group, either. Over half identify as Sunni, 16% as Shiite and the rest with neither group, according to a 2017 Pew poll. Of course, the diversity of beliefs and practices within Sunnism and Shiism, the largest two branches of Islam, are themselves present within Arab American Muslim communities as well.

Members of the Fordson High School boy’s basketball team in Dearborn, Mich., home to a large Arab American community. Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Finally, many Arab Americans identify with no religion at all, or with other faiths beyond the Abrahamic traditions.

Many nations, one box

Arab heritage not only includes a variety of religious traditions, but encompasses a wide range of ethnic and racial identities. It is difficult to make generalizations about Arabs, whose skin tone, facial features, eye colors and hair textures embody the rich histories of human migrations and settlements that characterize western Asia and northern Africa.

The U.S. census erases this internal diversity, however, by categorizing Arabs and other Middle Easterners as “white.” Arab American advocacy groups have long argued that the form’s categories do not reflect the actual experiences of the vast majority of Arab Americans, who are not treated as white in their everyday lives. And Arab identities in the U.S. are becoming only more complex, given the diversity of national backgrounds reflected in the more recent waves of Arab immigration from the 1960s to today.

Complicated identities

Asking that Arabs check the box as “white” also marginalizes Black Arabs. The term Afro Arab is growing as a term of self-description for Black Arab Americans seeking to make space for their multifaceted identities and heritage. Black communities are a part of every Arab country, from Iraq to Morocco.

These dual identities are still fraught, given the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism within some Arab communities, which often stems from the legacies of the trans-Saharan and Ottoman slave trades. An estimated 15% of Tunisians, for example, are descendants of enslaved Black people from sub-Saharan Africa. Tunisia abolished slavery in 1846, two decades before the U.S., yet it passed a law prohibiting racial discrimination only in 2018, making it the first Arab country to do so. Still, Tunisia’s president recently provoked outrage after he gave a racist speech targeting African migrants and Black Tunisians.

Around the world, Black Arabs have consistently criticized such racism, especially after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S., which sparked a regional reckoning with anti-Blackness.

Tunisians demonstrate against racism during a protest in Tunis on Feb. 25, 2023. Hasan Mrad/DeFodi Images via Getty Images

As the Sudanese-American museum curator Isra el-Beshir put it, “I am an African person, who speaks Arabic and who as a result of speaking Arabic has Arab cultural tendencies. But I do not racially identify as an Arab. It’s still murky territory for me that I am trying to navigate.”

500-year journey

In her historical novel “The Moor’s Account,” which won the Arab American Book Award in 2015 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Laila Lalami recounts the experiences of Al-Zammouri, more commonly known as Estebanico. Based on true accounts, Lalami narrates how he was enslaved and brought to current-day Florida by 16th-century Spanish colonizers. Al-Zammouri’s name reflects his Moroccan hometown: Azemmour, a city famed for its ocean breeze. His identity – Black and Arab; Muslim, then Catholic – reflects the complexity of the Arab world while bringing to light the complex origin stories of America itself.

Ideally, heritage month celebrations will create more opportunities to reflect on stories like Al-Zammouri’s, which portray how rich and diverse Arab American identity is – really, many different identities rolled into just two words. If heritage months are an opportunity to celebrate the diversity of America, the diversity of the Arab community itself should not be overlooked.

Yasmin Moll, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.