The murder of George Floyd in 2020 renewed attention to racial injustice across multiple systems, including health policy and health care. Seminal books on the history of medical racism by leading Black feminist scholars, including Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington (Washington 2006) and Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts (Roberts 1997), received long-overdue attention by researchers in health policy, medicine, and public health. In Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States, science and technology scholar Anne Pollock assembles contemporary cases of anti-Black racism across US institutions to illustrate how institutional racism remains ever-present, building upon generations of Black health inequities. Pollock explains her motivation as twofold: first, drawing on her experience teaching health disparities to undergraduate students for more than a decade, Sickening serves as a textbook for teaching about racism and health; second, she incorporates theoretical contributions from multiple fields throughout the...
Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States
Michelle Ko is an associate professor of health policy and management at the University of California, Davis. Her work addresses different areas of racism, health, and policy, including broad elements of structural racism, such as how residential segregation and racism in community violence and law enforcement affect health, aging, and the health care safety net. She also examines institutional racism within academic medicine and health services research and its consequences for workforce diversity, equity, and inclusion. She is a past chair of the AcademyHealth Disparities Interest Group and a former codirector of the UC Davis Center for Health Workforce Diversity.
Michelle Ko; Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States. J Health Polit Policy Law 1 October 2023; 48 (5): 821–824. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/03616878-10640241
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