Full Description
There is a persistent gap in life expectancy between Black people and their white counterparts in the United States. It is a direct result of structural racism within American society and has nothing to do with genetic differences. In past eras, scientific racism sought to shift the blame to the supposed physical inferiority of people of African descent. Even today, medicine labors under false beliefs derived from nineteenth-century racial thinking, harming patients who are not of European descent.
Why Black People Die Sooner is a powerful and rigorous examination of the ways racism shapes health and disease. Joseph L. Graves Jr. demonstrates that the medical profession still fails to grasp basic facts about race, tracing how deep-rooted falsehoods have perpetuated the disparity between Black and white lifespans. He equips readers with the tools to dispel the fallacies and errors of racialized medicine, including an understanding of evolutionary biology and human biological variation. Graves also debunks common misconceptions about race and health on topics such as high blood pressure, sickle cell disease, the microbiome, infectious diseases, and cancer. Why Black People Die Sooner closes by offering a sweeping vision for dismantling medical racism, from professional training to clinical practice through biomedical research. Timely and bracing, this book reveals why medicine keeps misunderstanding race—and how we can make it change.
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Medicine Has Always Gotten Race Wrong
Part I. Why
1. Racial Injustice Causes Health Injustice
2. Don't Blame It on Pandora
3. There Is No Slavery Gene: Debunking the Myths of Hypertension
4. Race and the Microbiome
Part II. Harm
5. Infectious Disease Strikes Unevenly: The Poor Die More
6. Bad Blood: The Racialization of Sickle Cell Anemia
7. Cancer Is Unfair
8. Race and Epigenomics: Nobody Knows the Trouble We've Seen
9. How Algorithms Can Hurt
Part III. How to Fix It
10. Precision Medicine
11. Doing the Work to Change Medical Minds
Conclusion: Building a World Where We Can All Live Well
Notes
Index
