Race and Medicine

As an authentic, exquisitely detailed case study of the consequences of racism in American life, this book should be read by everyone who worries about the racial meanings of government policy and social practice in the United States. -The New York Times Book Review

Doctors have always absorbed the racial stereotypes and folkloric beliefs about racial differences that permeate the general population. Within the world of medicine this racial folklore has infiltrated all of the medical sub-disciplines, from cardiology to gynecology to psychiatry. Doctors have thus imposed white or black racial identities upon every organ system of the human body, along with racial interpretations of black children, the black elderly, the black athlete, black musicality, black pain thresholds, and other aspects of black minds and bodies.

When Damon Tweedy begins medical school, he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working-class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. The recipient of a scholarship designed to increase black student enrollment, Tweedy soon meets a professor who bluntly questions whether he belongs in medical school, a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his career. Making matters worse, in lecture after lecture the common refrain for numerous diseases resounds, “More common in blacks than in whites.”

Breathing Race into the Machine brilliantly tracks the remarkable story—lasting to the present—of how ‘correcting for race’ in measures of lung capacity became unremarkable scientific practice. This eye-opening account demonstrates that precision technologies and statistical techniques that supposedly measure biological differences accurately can mask racial myths and wreak devastating consequences for black people’s health and legal rights. Essential reading for everyone concerned about the impact of race on science and technology."—Dorothy Roberts, University of Pennsylvania

"It's difficult to overstate the significance of this book. Its account of hygiene as the means for establishing 'biomedical citizenship' in the Philippines under U.S. rule is carefully crafted and powerfully argued. Sympathetically deconstructing the assertiveness and delusions of white colonial medical practitioners beset by the specters of native bodily excess, Warwick Anderson shows how race and biology defined civic identities in the colony and the metropole alike. A path-breaking work on imperial medicine, it is certain to attract a wide readership."--Vicente L. Rafael, author of "The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines"

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"How race and class affect health is demonstrated by a single statistic: Black women are 40 percent more likely to die from breast cancer than white women, though they develop it at the same rate... The Death Gap cites the three B’s – beliefs, behavior and biology – as the wrong explanations for health and life expectancy differences."
-- Eve Ottenberg, Truthout

In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.

“There are many authors, of course, who have written about the people and problems of Appalachia who don’t have eugenicists for pen-pals and mentors. Some of them even anchor frank discussions of social problems within moving personal stories. Otis Trotter’s Keeping Heart, a memoir about growing up poor, sick, and black in Appalachian Ohio springs to mind.”—Elizabeth Catte, The Boston Review

What is it like to be a black person in America today? The voices of middle class African Americans captured in this book will surprise those who think the era of racial discrimination is past. The Many Costs of Racism is a vivid account of the mental, physical health, and economic effects of everyday racism for Black Americans--and of racism's high costs for all Americans. The Many Costs of Racism is a vivid and startling account of the mental and physical health effects of racism. Drawing on well documented studies, it vividly portrays the damage done to individuals, families, and communities by stress from workplace discrimination. It shows the strong connection between discrimination and health problems, describing these as costs above and beyond the economic trials of discrimination. The book is an ideal text, accessible to students in sociology, law, psychology, and medicine.

"Precarious Prescriptions forges vital new terrain in the study of race, medicine, and public health in the U.S. and its borderlands. The book’s carefully crafted essays explore the relationships between medicine, health, and lived experience in such diverse locales and settings as Hawai’i, pre-revolutionary Texas, the Mexican-American borderlands, and the Salish Sea. By so doing Precarious Prescriptions expands our understandings, not just of medicalized ‘race’ and ‘racisms,’ but of medicine itself, in all of its colonizing and liberatory implications. This is vital reading indeed." —Jonathan M. Metzl, author of The Protest Psychosis

Troublesome Science provides one of the most lucid expositions in the scientific literature of how taxonomies of human populations have developed―and most important, the authors use this explication to take us on a fascinating 200,000-year journey to demonstrate the flaws in any attempt to use a genetic boundary for racial categories. -- Troy Duster, Chancellor’s Professor at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Backdoor to Eugenics