In late February, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an episode of its JAMA Clinical Reviews podcast titled, “Structural Racism for Doctors—What Is It?” In an accompanying tweet, the journal offered this eye-popping teaser: “No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care?” The answer, they promised, was in JAMA’s “user-friendly podcast,” a …
Tag Archives: Race
The ‘truth’ about ALS: Reconciling bias, motives, and etiological gaps
This article is part of the series: Reworking the Cognitive Bias
In February of 2019, I was giving a talk in New Haven, Connecticut. My paper was an overview of my research, titled “Is It a ‘White Disease’? ALS, Race, and Suffering in St. Louis, MO.” I closed with an ethnographic vignette from a key informant, Tyrell, whose brother had died from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) three years prior, after being …
Web Roundup: Covid-19, Racial Justice, Immigration, Climate Justice, Reproductive Justice, or “How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics”
As I was thinking about the task of reviewing the anthropological, bioethical, and/or STS implications of the past month of news, my mind kept returning to the introduction of Laura Briggs’ recent book How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump. In Briggs’ introduction, she finds “reproductive labor” is necessary to both biological reproduction …
How Medicare For All Challenges our Ideas of Black Deservingness
The contemporary debate over healthcare in the United States revolves around an unstated but somewhat widely understood notion of what people deserve. The question of “deservingness” is particularly important when we hone in on the demographics of the American populace and think critically about who is currently underserved by the current medical system in the U.S., and who stands …
Why we must go beyond focusing on the ‘overrepresentation’ of racialized people in HIV criminalization
This article is part of the series: Medico-Legal Borderlands
…
We can trace an unbroken record of injustice back through generations, to our grandfathers and our grandmothers, our great-grandfathers and to those before them. We can trace them back to the time when a label was put on our people, legitimate victim. Other people learned that they could victimize us and nothing would happen because the laws, your laws, did
Creating Bodies, Creating a Nation: How the Idea of the Straight, White, Muscular Male Body Shaped America
Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 224 pages.
1.
When Michelle Obama launched the “Let’s Move” campaign in 2010, it triggered a backlash by conservatives anxious about the so called “nanny state” interfering unduly in the private sphere. The campaign was a national initiative “dedicated …