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 seek to advance scholarship on racial justice by bridging together existing work on race with our growing, first-hand knowledge of clinical education, research, and practice.We aim to amplify voices, mostly of women of color, already providing essential critiques of the use of biological race in healthcare, and to further bridge the gap between critical race theory and medicine. Our responsibilities to our patients, to our communities, and to advancing justice demand we make this call.
