Featured image: The Young Lords, with the mobile chest X-ray unit they seized in 1970 to check the Puerto Rican population in East Harlem for tuberculosis.

See also Cross Cultural Solidarity’s resource page, Race and COVID-19.

BOOKS

Roland Anglin, Jeffrey Dowd, Karen M. O’Neill, & Keith Wailoo (editors): Katrina’s Imprint: Race and Vulnerability in America.

W. Michael Byrd & Linda A. Clayton: An American Health Dilemma: Race, Medicine, and Health Care in the United States, 1900-2000.

John Dittmer: The Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care.

Jim Downs: Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Simon Finger: The Contagious City: The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia.

Vanessa Northington Gamble: Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement, 1920-1945.         

Laurie B. Green, John Mckiernan-González, & Martin Summers (editors): Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America.

Rana A. Hogarth: Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840.

Susan E. Lederer: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War.

Catherine Lee, Alondra Nelson, & Keith Wailoo (editors): Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History.

Jenna M. Loyd: Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963–1978.

Dayna Bowen Matthew: Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care.

David McBride: Caring for Equality: A History of African American Health and Healthcare.

John Mckiernan-González: Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942.

Jonathan Metzl: Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland.

Jonathan Metzl: The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease.

Jamila Michener: Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics.  

Natalia Molina: Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939.    

Alondra Nelson: Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination.

Alondra Nelson: The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome.  

Deirdre Cooper Owens: Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology.

Susan M. Reverby: Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy.

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

Dorothy Roberts:Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century.

Angela Saini: Superior: the Return of Race Science.

Londa Schiebinger: Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.

Nayan Shah: Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

David Barton Smith: Health Care Divided: Race and Healing a Nation.

David Barton Smith: The Power to Heal: Civil Rights, Medicare, and the Struggle to Transform America’s Health Care System.

Susan L. Smith: Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women’s Health Activism in America, 1890-1950.

Martin Summers: Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation’s Capital.

Damon Tweedy M.D.: Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine.

Keith Wailoo:

• Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health.
• Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America.
• How Cancer Crossed the Color Line.  

Thomas J. Ward Jr.: Black Physicians in the Jim Crow South, 1880–1960. 

Harriet A. Washington: Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.

Dagmawi Woubshet: The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS.

ARTICLES

Joel Achenbach: Life expectancy improves for blacks, and the racial gap is closing, CDC reports.

Diane Alexander & Janet Currie: Is it who you are or where you live? Residential segregation and racial gaps in childhood asthma.

Marcella Alsan & Marianne Wanamaker: Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men.

American Journal of Public Health: Unveiling the Black Panther Party Legacy to Public Health.

Jacob Anderson-Minshall: What’s At The Root of the Disproportionate HIV Rates for Black Men?  Fifty percent of black gay men may become HIV-positive in their lifetime, but the cause is not what you think.

George Aumoithe: The racist history that explains why some communities don’t have enough ICU beds: Our struggles with covid-19 stem from decades of policy choices.

Kathleen Bachynski: American medicine was built on the backs of slaves. And it still affects how doctors treat patients today.  Doctors must grapple with this racist history to improve our medical care.

Mary T. Bassett: Beyond Berets: The Black Panthers as Health Activists.  

DeNeen L. Brown: ‘You’ve got bad blood’: The horror of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.

Rory Carroll: Guatemala victims of US syphilis study still haunted by the ‘devil’s experiment’.

Center for Disease Control & Prevention: HIV and African Americans.

Darnel Degand: Black Women Doctors in the World of Comics.   

W.E.B. Du Bois: Can a Colored Woman be a Physician?

Elizabeth Evens: Why it’s shocking to look back at med school yearbooks from decades ago: They offer jaw-dropping examples of the sexism and racism that shaped professional cultures.

Audrey Farley: How dismantling welfare continues the legacy of eugenics:  Cuts to the social safety net — often framed as tackling “dependency” — are intertwined with population control.

Ashley Farmer: The Black Freedom Struggle, Healthcare Activism, and the Affordable Care Act.

Sharla M. Fett & Deirdre Cooper Owens: Black Maternal and Infant Health: Historical Legacies of Slavery.    

The Foundation for AIDS Research: HIV and the Black Community: Do #Black(Gay)Lives Matter?.

Marita Golden: African Americans are more likely than whites to develop Alzheimer’s. Why?

John Hamilton: Neuroscience Has A Whiteness Problem. This Research Project Aims To Fix It.

Celeste Henery: Black Women’s Suicide and a Call for Radical Friendship.

David Herzberg and Matthew R. Pembleton: While government cracked down on illegal drugs, Big Pharma hooked millions on opioids: The racist roots of the opioid crisis.

Celeste Henery: Black Women, Police Violence, and Mental Illness.           

Celeste Henery: Why Black Women Can’t Breathe.

Margaret T. Hicken: University researcher links obesity to individual effects of discrimination.

Carolyn Y. Johnson: This could be the real reason black doctors make less money than white doctors.

Carolyn Y. Johnson: Racial inequality even affects how long we wait for the doctor.

Dr. Alden Landry: Why We Need More Minority Doctors. 

Catherine Lee: ‘‘Race’’ and ‘‘ethnicity’’ in biomedical research: How do scientists construct and explain differences in health?  See more academic articles by Lee here.

Barron H. Lerner: ‘Three Identical Strangers’: The high cost of experimentation without ethics: For decades, American scientists pushed for progress without regard for human subjects.

Jonathan Metzl: many articles at his personal website.  Here are articles either by or about Metzl:

• What is the Role of Psychiatry After Ferguson
• Terminal Whiteness
• White Men Keep Killing Themselves With Guns. The NRA Is Making It Worse.
• Supporting Trump is killing white America: The President’s policies are reducing white-working-class life expectancy.

Jamila Michener:

• The politics and policy of racism in American health care.           
• How Unstable Medicaid Programs Discourage Recipients From Engaging With Politics (interview.)
• The Medicaid Patchwork (interview.)         

Natalia Molina:

• Borders, Laborers, and Racialized Medicalization: Mexican Immigration and US Public Health Policy in the Twentieth-Century.
• Forced Sterilization of Mexican-Americans: When U.S. Lawmakers Took a Page from the Nazi Playbook. Some believed they could improve the U.S. population by controlled breeding.

Alfonso A. Narvaez: THE YOUNG LORDS SEIZE X‐RAY UNIT.                

National Cancer Institute: Examples of Cancer Health Disparities.

Alondra Nelson: many articles and interviews at her personal website:

• The Black Panthers Versus the Medical Industry.           
• How Not To Talk About Race And Genetics.
• How African Americans Use DNA Testing to Connect With Their Past.
• Interview with Alondra Nelson.

Rob Picheta: Black newborns more likely to die when looked after by White doctors.

Darryl Robertson: The Black Panther Party and the Free Breakfast for Children Program.

Dan Royles: Race, Homosexuality, and the AIDS Epidemic. 

Dan Royles: Black Gay History and the Fight Against AIDS.

Ezelle Sanford III: Civil Rights and Healthcare: Remembering Simkins v. Cone (1963).    

Ezelle Sanford III: Review of The Power to Heal: Civil Rights, Medicare, and the Struggle to Transform America’s Health Care System.

Tom Simonite: A Health Care Algorithm Offered Less Care to Black Patients: A study shows the risks of making decisions using data that reflects inequities in American society.

David Barton Smith: The Politics of Racial Disparities: Desegregating the Hospitals in Jackson, Mississippi.

Kylie M. Smith: How bigotry created a black mental health crisis: Racism has led to misdiagnosis, incarceration instead of treatment.

Sandhya Somashekhar: The disturbing reason some African American patients may be undertreated for pain.

Suicide Prevention Resource Center: Racial and Ethnic Disparities.

Sunshine Behavioral Health (many resources here): Mental Health Issues Facing the Black Community.

Theresa Vargas: Guinea pigs or pioneers? How Puerto Rican women were used to test the birth control pill.

Linda Villarosa: Why America’s Black Mother’s and Babies are in a Life or Death Crisis.  The answer to the disparity in death rates has everything to do with the lived experience of being a black woman in America.   

Linda Villarosa: America’s Hidden H.I.V. Epidemic: Why do America’s black gay and bisexual men have a higher H.I.V. rate than any country in the world? 

Keith Wailoo: The Pain Gap: Why Doctors Offer Less Relief to Black Patients.     

Tiffany Walker: “National Negro Health Week”: 1915 to 1951.    

Pamela Wible: Her story went viral. But she is not the only black doctor ignored in an airplane emergency.

Christopher Willoughby: Blackface is just a symptom of American medicine’s racist past:  The study of medicine is rife with racist assumptions and experiments that still shape health outcomes today.

Christopher Willoughby: How Black Activists Sought Healthcare Reform: A New Documentary.

Nche Zama: What a Cardiothoracic Surgeon Sees When He Sees George Floyd.

VIDEOS & PODCASTS

Color Lines: Why the Young Lords Took Over Lincoln Hospital.     

Margaret T. Hicken: Sickened by Systems.

Jonathan Metzl: In discussion with Tim Wise;  discussing his book Dying of Whiteness on PBS; Lecture: A New Paradigm for Race & Racisms in Medicine;  on CSPAN: Racial Resentment and Impact on Public Health; on The Open Mind: A Vote Against Life Expectancy.

Alondra Nelson:

• The Social Life of DNA: racial reconciliation and institutional morality.
• Genetics and Ethics in the Obama Administration.
• Genetic Ancestry and Race.
• More African-Americans Are Learning Their Roots With Genetic Testing.

NPR:

• The Complicated Relationship Between Puerto Rico And U.S. Mainland. (About medical experimentations on Puerto Ricans.)
• 50 Years Ago, Medicare Helped To Desegregate Hospitals.

For more resources on systemic racism, visit the systemic racism section of the website.