The organization People Against Race Classification is seeking the scrapping of the race-classification question in the official form completed when donating blood. They say race classification for blood donation serves no medical purpose.
The group visited the offices of the Western Cape Blood Services in Cape Town to demand that the requirement to state your race be reviewed.
A sore topic for some in a country still grappling with the effects of institutionalized racism. PARC says it takes offence that blood donors must state their race in the confidential donor questionnaire of the Western Cape Blood Service.
They say the Blood Service has no obligation to report on the race of a blood donor. They want the race block on the blood donation form removed.
“On the 13th of March, the PARC visited the head offices of the Western Cape Blood Services to enquire on the use of the race criteria on the blood donation form when you donate blood. We envision South Africa without any race criteria on any forms, race is not scientific, it’s a social construct,” says Glen Snyman, Founder People Against Race Classification.
In a letter earlier this year addressed to the CEO of the Western Cape Blood Service, the NGO says there’s no medical requirement to explain which blood was donated by what race group.
“The reasons why we ask these questions and why we specifically ask the race question is for medical reasons, it is important for us to look at rare blood types, there’s multiple rare blood types, we use the A.B.O. blood type system but there are people that have multiple transfusions so there’s complexities involved here and sometimes certain rare blood types can be found in certain ancestral groups and that is the reason why we ask that on our donor questionnaire,” says Marike Carli, Spokesperson: Western Cape Blood Service.
They are, however, looking at bringing an option on the form where donors will have an option not to state their race.
“It’s astonishing, it’s a false concept how can you use a false concept but no academic scientific or biological foundations as a tool to measure something, its indefensible, its scientifically flawed , biologically implausible, that’s why we call on those who use it as a criteria to remove it and to use other methods, it’s a very lazy research tool to use race as a proxy for compatibility of blood, blood does not have any race,” says Prof Usuf Chikte, Emeritus Professor in Health Systems and Public Health: Stellenbosch University.
He says countries like the UK, Canada and New Zealand are among those that have long removed the race classification criteria from their blood donor registry.
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