Race, Bioethics, and Public Health Project

Compiled by Roberto Sirvent, JD, PhD

           The “Race, Bioethics, and Public Health” project aims to provide an online resource library for students, researchers, practitioners, and other members of the community working at the intersection of bioethics, public health, and racial justice. The online archive offers a representative sample of scholarly and popular literature not commonly included in traditional bioethics curricula. By centering the perspectives of communities most impacted by structures of domination, the “Race, Bioethics, and Public Health” project draws primarily from the fields of Black feminism, Africana studies, decolonial thought, queer of color critique, and critical ethnic studies. Readings examine topics ranging from reproductive justice, clinical ethics, and access to health care to environmental justice, biopolitics, artificial intelligence and other medical technologies.

Reproductive Justice

• Barclay, Jenifer L. “Mothering the ‘Useless’: Black Motherhood, Disability, and Slavery.”  Women, Gender, and Families of Color, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Fall 2014)
• Cole, Haile. “Reproduction on Display. Black Maternal Mortality and the Newest Case for National Action.” Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research & Community Involvement 9, no. 2 (2018).
• Davis, Dána-Ain. Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth
• Edu, Ugo Felicia. “Aesthetics Politics: Negotiations of Black Reproduction in Brazil.”  Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, 32 (8), 2019
• Edu, Ugo Felicia. “When Doctors Don’t Tie: Hierarchical Medicalization, Reproduction, and Sterilization in Brazil.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 32(4), August 2018
• Farfán-Santos, Elizabeth. “Undocumented Motherhood: Gender, Maternal Identity, and the Politics of Health Care.” Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, Volume 38, 2019
• Barbara Gurr, Reproductive Justice: The Politics of Healthcare for native American Women
• Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
• Ivy, Nicole. “Bodies of Work: A Meditation on Medical Imaginaries and Enslaved Women.”  Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 18, 2016 - Issue 1
• Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery
• James, Joy. “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft, and the Captive Maternal”
• Knight, Kelly Ray. addicted.pregnant.poor
• Krause, Elizabeth L. and Aline C. Gubrium. “‘Scribble Scrabble’: Migration, Young Parenting Latinas, and Digital Storytelling as Narrative Shock.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 33(3), April 2019
• Ocen, Priscilla. “Punishing Pregnancy: Race, Incarceration and the Shackling of Pregnant Prisoners.” California Law Review. 100, 2011.
• Owens, Deirdre Cooper. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology

• Owens, Deirdre Cooper. “Black Maternal and Infant Health: Historical Legacies of Slavery.” American Journal of Public Health. 2019 October.

• Oparah, Chinyere; Linda Jones; Dantia Hudson; Talita Oseguera; and Helen Arega. Battling Over Birth: Black Women & The Maternal Health Care Crisis in California

• Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

• Ross, Loretta et al., eds. Radical Reproductive Justice

• Ross, Loretta J. and Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction
• Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil
• Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics Vol. 17, No. 2, Culture and Countermemory: The “American” Connection (Summer, 1987),
• Turner, Sasha. Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica
• Weinbaum, Alys Eve. The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History

Clinical Ethics

• Banner, Olivia. Communicative Biocapitalism: The Voice of the Patient in Digital Health and the Health Humanities
• Banner, Olivia. “Structural Racism and Practices of Reading in the Medical Humanities.” Literature and Medicine, Volume 34, Number 1, Spring 2016
• Banner, Olivia; Nathan Carlin; and Thomas R. Cole. Teaching Health Humanities
• Benjamin, Ruha. “Informed Refusal: Toward a Justice-based Bioethics.” Science, Technology, & Human Values, 23 June 2016
• Briggs, Charles L. and Clara Mantini-Briggs. Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice
• Chamberlin, Christopher. “Racism is Structured as a Language: Sexual Difference and the 1943 Detroit Race Riot.” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 239-259 (2019)
• Debnam, Jewell. “Mary Moultrie, Naomi White, and the Women of the Charleston Hospital Workers’ Strike of 1969.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 18:1 (Jan-March 2016).
• Diedrich, Lisa. Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness
• Dotson, Kristie. “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression.”  Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy, Volume 28, 2014.
• Gibson, Nigel C. and Roberto Beneduce. Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics
• Hogarth, Rana A. Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840
• Holloway, Karla FC. Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics
  • Related: “Private Bodies, Public Texts: A Salon in Honor of Karla FC Holloway (Video)”
• Kidd, Ian James. “Epistemic Injustice and Illness.” Journal of Applied Philosophy, 08 Feb. 2016.
• Kidd, Ian James. “Epistemic Injustice and Illness Bibliography”
• McKay, Ramah. Medicine in the Meantime: The Work of Care in Mozambique
• Mckiernan-González, John. Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942
• Pandolfo, Stefania. Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam
• Patton, Cindy. Rebirth of the Clinic: Places and Agents in Contemporary Health Care
• Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
• Pitts, Andrea J. “Cruel and Unusual Care and Punishment: Epistemic injustices in correctional health care.” APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Medicine, 14(1):6–9, 2014.
• Pitts, Andrea J. “Examining Carceral Medicine through Critical Phenomenology.” IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, Volume 11, Number 2, Fall 2018
• Pitts, Andrea J. “White Supremacy, Mass Incarceration, and Clinical Medicine: A Critical Analysis of U.S. Correctional Healthcare.” Radical Philosophy Review, Volume 18, Issue 2, 2015
• Rojas Durazo, Ana Clarissa. “Medical Violence Against People of Color and The Medicalization of Domestic Violence.”
• Townes, Emilie M. Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health Issues and a Womanist Ethic of Care
• Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

Community Health and Access to Health Care

• Batza, Katie. Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s
• Blanchard, Jessica W., Simon Outram, Gloria Tallbull, and Charmaine D. M. Royal. “‘We don’t need a swab in our mouth to prove who we are’: Identity, resistance, and adaptation of genetic ancestry testing among Native American Communities.” Current Anthropology, 60(5), 2019.
• Braithwaite, Ronald L., and Sandra E. Taylor. Health Issues in the Black Community
• Braun, Lundy. “Theorizing Race and Racism: Preliminary Reflections on the Medical Curriculum, American Journal of Law and Medicine.” 18 Dec. 2017
• Bulgin, Dominique, Paula Tanabe, Monika Asnani, and Charmaine D. M. Royal. “Twelve tips for teaching a comprehensive disease-focused course with a global perspective: A sickle cell disease example.” Medical Teacher, 41(3), 2019.
• Coe, Cati. The New American Servitude: Political Belonging among African Immigrant Home Care Workers
• Green, Laurie B.; John Mckiernan-González; and Martin Summers, (Eds.). Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America
• Ehlers, Nadine  and Leslie R. Hinkson. Subprime Health: Debt and Race in U.S. Medicine
• Farmer, Paul, and Nicole Gastineau Campos. “Rethinking Medical Ethics: A View From Below.” Developing World Bioethics 4(1):17-41 · June 2004.
• Fett, Sharla M. Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations
• Hagan, Ampson. “How Medicare For All Challenges our Ideas of Black Deservingness.” Somatosphere, 27 May 2019
• Moore, Natalie. “Study: New South Side Trauma Center Closing Racial Gap In Emergency Care.” WBEZ Chicago, 8 March 2019.
• Mundel, Erika and Gwen E. Chapman. “A decolonizing approach to health promotion in Canada: the case of the Urban Aboriginal Community Kitchen Garden Project.” Health Promotion International, Volume 25, Issue 2, June 2010
• Nelson, Alondra. Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination
• Nuriddin, Ayah. “Psychiatric Jim Crow: Desegregation at the Crownsville State Hospital, 1948–1970.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 74, Issue 1, January 2019
• Raudenbush, Danielle. “‘I Stay by Myself’: Social Support, Distrust, and Selective Solidarity Among the Urban Poor.” Sociological Forum, Volume31, Issue 4, December 2016
• Rusert, Britt. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture
• Stallings, Erika. “This Is How the American Healthcare System Is Failing Black Women.” Oprah Magazine, 1 Aug. 2018.

Prisons, Policing, and Premature Death

• Advancement Project. “We Came to Learn: A Call to Action for Police-Free Schools”
• American Public Health Association. “Addressing Law Enforcement Violence as a Public Health Issue”
• Alves, Jaime Amparo. The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil
• Armah, Esther A. “From I Can’t Breathe to I Can’t Grieve: Black Grief Matters.” Warscapes, 19 July 2019
• Ben-Moshe, Liat; Chris Chapman; Allison C. Carey. Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada
• Berger, Dan; Mariame Kaba; David Stein. “What Abolitionists Do.” Jacobin, Aug. 2017
• Escobar, Martha D., Captivity Beyond Prisons: Criminalization Experiences of Latina (Im)migrants
• Dixon, Ejeris, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Eds.). Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
• Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
• Hwang, Ren-yo. “Deviant Care for Deviant Futures: QTBIPoC Radical Relationalism as Mutual Aid against Carceral Care.” Transgender Studies Quarterly, (2019) 6 (4).
• INCITE! (ed.). Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology
• Kojo Koram (ed.), The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line
• Ritchie, Andrea J. Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color
• Samudzi, Zoé. “Policing the Borders of Suffering.” Jewish Currents, 21 June 2019.
• Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
• Stanley, Eric A. and  Nat Smith (Eds.). Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, Second Edition
• Transformharm.org: A Resource Hub About Ending Violence
• Vergara-Figueroa, Aurora. Afrodescendant Resistance to Deracination in Colombia: Massacre at Bellavista-Bojayá-Chocó
• Warren, Calvin. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation

Structural Racism and Mental Health

• Bailey-Fakhoury, Chasity and Donald Mitchell, Jr.. “Living Within The Veil: How Black Mothers with Daughters Attending Predominantly White Schools Experience Racial Battle Fatigue When Combating Racial Microaggressions.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race (2018)
• Colbert, Soyica Diggs; Robert J. Patterson; Aida Levy-Hussen (Eds.). The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture
• Coleman, Monica. Bipolar Faith: A Black Woman’s Journey with Depression and Faith
• Evans, Stephanie Y.; Kanika Bell; and Nsenga K. Burton. Black Women’s Mental Health: Balancing Strength and Vulnerability
• Gutiérrez y Muhs, Gabriella; Yolanda Flores Niemann; Carmen G. Gonzalez; and Angela P. Harris.  Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia
• Hanna, Karen B.. “Living Beyond Survival: 11 Tips for Women of Color in Academia”
• Morris, Monique. Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
• Pickens, Therí Alyce. Black Madness :: Mad Blackness
• Schalk, Sami. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction
• Wun, Connie. “Against Captivity: Black Girls and School Discipline Policies in the Afterlife of Slavery.” Educational Policy, 2016, Vol. 30(1)
• Zambrana, Ruth Enid. Toxic Ivory Towers: The Consequences of Work Stress on Underrepresented Minority Faculty

Environmental Justice

• Beitsch, Rebecca. “Small Town vs. Big Pollution: Black Residents Allege Environmental Racism.” Pew, October, 2018.
• Broeck, Sabine. “Inequality or (Social) Death.” Rhizomes, Issue 29 (2016)
• Fernández, Belén. “Iraq, 15 years on: A toxic US legacy.” Middle East Eye, 18 March 2018.
• Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock
• Krupar, Shiloh R.. Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste
• Kwate, Naa Oyo A. Burgers in Blackface: Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now
• Lutz, Catherine and Andrea Mazzarino (eds.). War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
• Polk, Khary Oronde. Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898–1948
• Raudenbush, Danielle T.  “I Stay by Myself”: Social Support, Distrust, and Selective Solidarity Among the Urban Poor.” Sociological Forum, 2016
• Reese, Ashanté M. Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C.
• Santana, Déborah Berman. “Resisting Toxic Militarism: Vieques Versus the U.S. Navy.” Social Justice, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2002.
• Strings, Sabrina. Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
• Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership
• Race, Neighborhoods, and African American Health Lab (RNA Lab)
• Sanders, Barry. The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism
• Wright, Willie Jamaal. “As Above, So Below: Anti‐Black Violence as Environmental Racism.” Antipode, Sept. 2018.

Biopolitics

• Adjepong, Anima. “Voetsek! Get[ting] lost: African sportswomen in ‘the sporting black diaspora’.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 2019
• Archibald, Jo-Ann;  Jenny Lee-Morgan; and Jason De Santolo. Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology
• Bost, Darius. Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence
• Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
• Cheng, Jih-Fei; Alexandra Juhasz; and Nishant Shahani (Eds.). AIDS and the Distribution of Crises
• Cheng, Jih-Fei. “El tabaco se ha mulato: Globalizing Race, Viruses, and Scientific Observation in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Vol. 1 (1), 2015
• Choy, Catherine Ceniza. Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History
• Ehlers, Nadine and Shiloh Krupar. Deadly Biocultures: The Ethics of Life-Making
• Hatch, Anthony Ryan. Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America
• Heinrich, Ari Larissa. The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West
• Heinrich, Ari Larissa. Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body
• Holmes, Seth. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States
• Horton, Sarah Bronwen. They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields: Illness, Injury, and Illegality among U.S. Farmworkers
• INCITE! (ed.). The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
• Knadler, Stephen. Vitality Politics: Health, Debility, and the Limits of Black Emancipation
• Livingston, Julie. Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic
• Murphy, Michelle. The Economization of Life
• Nyong’o, Tavia. “The unforgivable transgression of being Caster Semenya.”  Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Volume 20, 2010 - Issue 1
• Spade, Dean. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law
• Visperas, Cristina. “The Able-Bodied Slave.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 2019
• Wisecup, Kelly. Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures
• Zogas, Anna. “Special Issue: Immigrant Workers, Structural Vulnerability, and Occupational Injury.” Somatosphere, 21 Jan. 2019

Artificial Intelligence and Medical Technologies

• Benjamin, Ruha. Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life
• Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
• Braun, Lundry. Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics
• Hatch, Anthony Ryan. Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America
• Crowley-Matoka, Megan. Domesticating Organ Transplant: Familial Sacrifice and National Aspiration in Mexico
• Nelson, Alondra. The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome
• Roberts, Dorothy. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century
• Torres, Jada Benn. “Race, Rare Genetic Variants, and the Science of Human Difference in the Post‐Genomic Age.” Transforming Anthropology, 27 (1), 19 March 2019.
• Vora, Kalindi and Neda Atanasoski. Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures

Additional Scholarly Journals to Consult:

Disability and the Global South

 Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness

Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health

Antipode

Helpful Twitter Feeds to Follow:

Dr. Keisha Ray

Dr. Alondra Nelson

Dr. Ugo Edu

Dr. Ruha Benjamin

Dr. Dorothy Roberts

Ayah Nuriddin

Erika Stallings

UCLA Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health

Dr. Samuel Roberts

Dr. Michael Yudell

Community Organizations and Affinity Groups

• American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) Race, Culture/Ethnicity Affinity Group
  • Faith E. Fletcher, PhD, MA (Chair of RACE Affinity Group) Anne Simpson, MD (Co-Chair of RACE Affinity Group) Jennifer McCurdy, PhD(c) (Communications Chair of RACE Affinity Group)
• UCLA Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health (Dr. Chandra Ford, Founding Director)
• The Icarus Project
• No More Martyrs
• Assata’s Daughters
• Survived and Punished
• Critical Resistance
• California Coalition for Women Prisoners
• Sylvia Rivera Law Project
• Black and Pink
• TGI Justice Project
• Resources on Sex Trades Support (Courtesy of Big Door Brigade)
• Black Alliance for Just Immigration
• Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB)
• Ujimaa Medics
• The HIV League
• Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund
• National Queer & Trans Therapists of Color Network
• AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACTUP) Oral History Project