Day of Absence 2016: Carolyn Prouty – Race-Based Medicine: What It Is And Why It’s a ProblemPosted in Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, United States, Videos on 2016-05-12 01:22Z by Steven |
Day of Absence 2016: Carolyn Prouty – Race-Based Medicine: What It Is And Why It’s a Problem
The Evergreen State College Productions
Olympia, Washington
2016-04-06
There is no biological basis for race; it is a socially constructed concept. Nonetheless, the structural nature of racism in society manifests itself in different health outcomes for peoples identified as different races, both as the health effect of experiencing racism, and interactions of people of color within the American health care system. Historically, it is clear how biology and anthropology have been misused in explaining differences between groups of humans, and these patterns have helped to reveal unexamined biases of researchers. Yet current uses of genetics in medical practice and research still follow some of these same erroneous paths, for example, confusing ancestry with race, conflating socio-economic conditions with race, and substituting common (and readily recombined) superficial hereditary traits such as skin color and hair shape as proxies for more substantive genetic markers. In this session, we will outline these ideas from biology, medicine, and sociology, beginning with Dorothy Roberts’ TED talk, “The Problem with Race-Based Medicine”, and investigate their applications in current and future practice. We’ll spend time in small group and larger group discussions, as we deconstruct the biology of race, expose some structural biases of American medicine and examine the implications of race-based medicine.