Towards the Abolition of Biological Race in Medicine: Transforming Clinical Education, Research and Practice

Towards the Abolition of Biological Race in Medicine: Transforming Clinical Education, Research and Practice

Racism, not race, causes health disparities. This truth, powerfully realized in Dorothy Roberts' Fatal Invention, guides our work. Our working group’s founding members are medical students and masters students, two of us women of color and three of us members of the Freedom School, united by a common goal: to place justice and anti-racism at the center of our practice of medicine. We have studied and inquired further via medical schools and the Freedom School about how the misuse of race and racism in medicine targets our own communities and women of color.

Therefore, we...

Towards the Abolition of Biological Race in Medicine and Public Health: Transforming Clinical Education, Research, and Practice

Noor Chanha
Bernadette Lim
Madeleine Kane
Brenly Rowland
2020

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The use of biological race in medicine is an unchallenged, outdated norm throughout clinical education, research, and practice. Medicine largely frames racial health disparities in terms of biological difference and individual behavior, despite evidence that social and structural factors generate and perpetuate most health issues. In particular, racism, a structure and ideology that oppresses and limits resources to minority groups, is rarely discussed in clinical health and the health sciences as a meaningful determinant of health outcomes. Racial...