Reckoning with histories of medical racism and violence in the USA

What is it about?

The killing of Eric Garner in 2014 at the hands of the New York Police Department and the footage that circulated of his death after he was put in a chokehold elevated the phrase “I can’t breathe” to a protest chant for those in the fight against structural racism worldwide. Its repetition by George Floyd in Minneapolis, MN, USA, in 2020 and by others in anti-racism protests amid the COVID-19 pandemic has deepened the salience of these words. While much public health research has shown that racism is a fundamental determinant of health outcomes and disparities, racist policy and practice have also been integral to the historical formation of the medical academy in the USA.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

In sum, racism has not just been incidental to the history of American medicine, and much medical practice around the world, but entrenched in it. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W E B Du Bois begins the book by asking “How does it feel to be a problem?” Du Bois reframed the conversation of racial difference not from the perspective of those seeking explanations for supposed racial inferiority but from the perspectives of those subjected to racism. In this work and in his earlier study The Philadelphia Negro (1899), Du Bois introduced structural explanations for racial inequalities in health outcomes not rooted in specious beliefs about the biological inferiority of Black people but in the environmental, political, and socioeconomic circumstances that lead to ill health, prefacing latter 20th-century discussions on the social determinants of health. While education and history lessons give us awareness of the legacies of racism, we must also denaturalise our beliefs that racial differences are materialindicatorsofsignificantbiologicalandphysiological differences. We must resist the re-biologisation of race. When we allow for racist assumptions to go unquestioned and the structures that allow the perpetuation of racist inequalities to go uncontested, we allow them to persist. Only when we consider racism and racial inequality to be persistent and implicit in our norms of practice and the ordering of society and not the exception, can we effectively begin to confront this issue.