Anti-Racism and Healthcare

Among the 154 medical schools in the United States, Morehouse School of Medicine stands out for its formidable success in improving its surrounding communities. Over its history, Morehouse has become known as an institution committed to community engagement with an interest in closing the health equity gap between people of color and the white majority population. Describing the philosophical, cultural, and contextual grounding of the Morehouse Model, they give concrete examples of it in action before explaining how to foster the collaboration between community-based organizations and university faculty that is essential to making this model of care and research work.

Essentials of Health Justice examines the social and structural determinants of health, systems of care for underserved populations, health equity, social justice and health policy. Unlike other texts of its kind, Essentials of Health Justice uniquely focuses on the legal, structural, and justice issues underlying health disparities; the adequacy of current safety net programs and legal protections affecting the health of vulnerable populations; health policy, law and system design focused on achieving health equity; and concrete strategies for bringing about change to promote health justice. Essentials of Health Justice can serve as a stand-alone text or supplement for a range of undergraduate, graduate, law, public health, medical, nursing and other health professions courses.

The Science of Health Disparities Research is an indispensable source of up-to-date information on clinical and translational health disparities science. Building upon the advances in health disparities research over the past decade, this authoritative volume informs policies and practices addressing the diseases, disorders, and gaps in health outcomes that are more prevalent in minority populations and socially disadvantaged communities. Contributions by recognized scholars and leaders in the field--featuring contemporary research, conceptual models, and a broad range of scientific perspectives--provide an interdisciplinary approach to reducing inequalities in population health, encouraging community engagement in the research process, and promoting social justice.

One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black Americans.

Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. The Beauty in Breaking is the poignant true story of Harper's journey toward self-healing.

The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women.

In Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer, science studies scholar Lundy Braun traces the little-known history of the spirometer to reveal the social and scientific processes by which medical instruments have worked to naturalize racial and ethnic differences, from Victorian Britain to today.

Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge-a tradition that continues today within some black populations.

Hine examines the professionalization of black nurses through institutional developments in hospitals, training schools, and nursing organizations. Comparing and contrasting this growth to white counterparts, she explores barriers of race and gender stereotyping.

This groundbreaking book by the acclaimed Dorothy Roberts examines how the myth of biological concept of race--revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases--continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly "post-racial" era.

What happens to black health care professionals in the new economy, where work is insecure and organizational resources are scarce? In Flatlining, Adia Harvey Wingfield exposes how hospitals, clinics, and other institutions participate in "racial outsourcing," relying heavily on black doctors, nurses, technicians, and physician assistants to do "equity work"--extra labor that makes organizations and their services more accessible to communities of color.

Drawing on extensive historical research as well as interviews with former members of the Black Panther Party, this text argues that the Black Panther Party's focus on health care was both practical and ideological. The Black Panther Party's understanding of health as a basic human right and its engagement with the social implications of genetics anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race.

Black & Blue is the first systematic description of how American doctors think about racial differences and how this kind of thinking affects the treatment of their black patients.

How the female body has been racialized for over two hundred years. Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn't about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.

Offers an innovative plan to eliminate inequalities in the American health care and save the lives they endanger Over 84,000 black and brown lives are needlessly lost each year due to health disparities: the unfair, unjust, and avoidable differences between the quality and quantity of health care provided to Americans who are members of racial and ethnic minorities and care provided to whites.

Gender, Race, Class, and Health examines relationships between economic structures, race, culture, and gender, and their combined influence on health.

From race-based pharmaceutical prescriptions and marketing, to race-targeted medical "hot spotting" and the Affordable Care Act, to stem-cell trial recruitment discourse, Subprime Health is a timely examination of race-based medicine as it intersects with the concept of debt.

In the United States, black women are over three times more likely to perish from pregnancy-related complications than white women; their babies are half as likely to survive the first year. Many black women experience policing, coercion, and disempowerment during pregnancy and childbirth and are disconnected from alternative birthing traditions. This book places black women's voices at the center of the debate on what should be done to fix the broken maternity system and foregrounds black women's agency in the emerging birth justice movement.

Reproducing Race, an ethnography of pregnancy and birth at a large New York City public hospital, explores the role of race in the medical setting.

A troubling study of the role that medical racism plays in the lives of black women who have given birth to premature and low birth weight infants.

Nefertiti Austin shares her story of starting a family through adoption as a single Black woman.

A warm, wise, and urgent guide to parenting in uncertain times, from a longtime reporter on race, reproductive health, and politics In We Live for the We, first-time mother Dani McClain sets out to understand how to raise her daughter in what she, as a black woman, knows to be an unjust--even hostile--society.

"Battling Over Birth: Black Women and the Maternal Health Care Crisis reveals hard truths- powerful findings on the role of racism, coercion, inadequate prenatal care, the pressures undermining breastfeeding and the lack of access to alternatives to a broken maternal health-care system as key threads of black women's birth experiences." -Kimberly Seals Allers, MS, author, The Big Letdown

Though the origins of asylums can be traced to Europe, the systematic segregation of the mentally ill into specialized institutions occurred in the United States only after 1800, just as the struggle to end slavery took hold. In this book, Wendy Gonaver examines the relationship between these two historical developments, showing how slavery and ideas about race shaped early mental health treatment in the United States, especially in the South.

An unapologetic exploration of the Black mental health crisis--and a comprehensive road map to getting the care you deserve in an unequal system.

Even The Rat Was White views the history of psychology from all perspectives in the quest for historical accuracy. Histories and other background materials are presented in detail concerning early African-American psychologists and their scientific contributions, as well as their problems, views, and concerns of the field of social psychology.