“Anti-Blackness, Bioethics, and Public Health: 200 Introductory Resources for Community Study”
Writers, artists, community organizers and scholars have all contributed their analysis of the resource documents listed, below, and how they might be useful in assessing anti-Black structures around the world.
“We hope the list helps communities explore questions that are not traditionally discussed.”
This resource list is a place to start for those interested in the relationships between anti-Blackness, bioethics, and public health. Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic brought more attention and interest to the racism of the medical industrial complex. Unfortunately, however, it remains too common for scholars and practitioners to study issues of health and medicine without interrogating the way that anti-Blackness structures our world. The resource list below offers perspectives from writers, artists, community organizers, and academics who offer their thoughts on the ways that anti-Blackness, bioethics, and public health intersect. The list, while sizable, is not meant to be exhaustive. Nonetheless, we hope it helps communities explore theories, cases, and questions that, for whatever reason, are not traditionally discussed in conversations around bioethics and public health.
(Hyperlinks are included for each resource)
- “Racism Didn't Kill George Floyd. Anti-Blackness Did”
- Anti-Blackness and School Safety
- “Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica”
- Policing and Public Health
- “Reckoning with histories of medical racism and violence in the USA”
- Audre Lorde and Crip-of-Color Critique
- Sex Education and HIV Prevention Programs by Garifuna Immigrant Communities
- “Medical Apartheid”
- Policing of Black Girls in School
- “Racial Capitalism and COVID-19”
- Justice for Kayla Moore
- “Black Girls Don't Get to Be Depressed”
- Ethics of “Vaccine Nationalism”
- “Black Feminist Ecological Thought: A Manifesto”
- Coronavirus and Neo-Colonialism in Colombia
- “Hungry, Shackled, and Grieving: What Prison Is Like for Pregnant People”
- U.S. Education Systems and Public Health
- “Breonna Taylor was briefly alive after police shot her. But no one tried to treat her”
- Black Women and the U.S. Health Care System
- “The Dangerous History of Immunoprivilege”
- Physical, Psychic, and Spiritual Healing Practices by Native South Africans
- “Black Trans Sex Workers in Colombia”
- “Sanctions Kill: The Devastating Human Cost of Sanctions”
- Labor Strikes and Health Justice
- “Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too: The Politics of Emergent Afrocentric Ecowomanism”
- “The Architects of Abolitionism”
- A Conversation on Karla FC Holloway’s book, Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race,
Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics
- “My Mother Is Busy Getting Ready to Die”
- France’s Extortion of Haiti
- “Making the Case for Reproductive Revolution”
- Charleena Lyles and #SayHerName
- “The Able-Bodied Slave”
- Abolish the Anti-Black Medical Industrial Complex
- “Black Studies: In the Wake”
- Black Women Radical Self-Defense and the Pathologization of Black Mothers' Political Action
- Denise Ferreira da Silva’s “Black Feminist Poethics”
- “Dionne Brand: On narrative, reckoning and the calculus of living and dying”
- Anti-Blackness in Canadian Health Care
- “From I Can’t Breathe to I Can’t Grieve: Black Grief Matters”
- Polluting Black Communities
- “Pathologizing the Crisis: Psychiatry, Policing, and Racial Liberalism in the Long Community Mental Health Movement”
- Oakland Power Projects: Resources for Anti-Policing Health Workers
- “When a Black Man’s Heart Was Transplanted Without Consent”
- Mutual Aid and Health Justice: Ujimaa Medics
- “Ending the War on Black Trans People”
- Health and Safety Issues for Prison Laborers
- “Syllabus: A History of Anti-Black Racism in Medicine” (African American Intellectual History Society)
- Health Effects on Black Communities After Police Shootings
- “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!”
- Grocery Stores and Black Food Geographies
- “Work in the Intersections: A Black Feminist Disability Framework”
- The Pruitt–Igoe Housing Projects and Military Testing on Humans
- “An Anthropologist’s Perspective on COVID-19: Q&A with Dr. Adia Benton”
- Black Women’s Health Support Networks
- “Black Brazilians Hit Hard by COVID-19”
- Funding Social Programs Instead of the Police
- “Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects”
- Black Immigrants and “The New American Servitude”
- “Chavismo” and the National Distribution of Health Care in Venezuela
- Risking Our Lives to “Go Back to Work”
- “On Telling Ugly Stories: Writing with a Chronic Illness”
- Prison Guards and Medical Neglect
- Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts”
- 19th Century Race Science
- “State Violence Is at the Root of Health Inequities”
- Health Effects of U.S. Housing Policy
- “‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies,and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, I500-I770”
- Frantz Fanon and a Decolonial Politics of Care
- “Curative domains: Women, healing and history in black women's narratives”
- Chemical Pollution and “Breathing While Black”
- “On Doulas”
- Muslim Wellness Foundation
- “‘Moving Towards Home’: The Politics and Poetics of Environmental Justice in the Work of June Jordan”
- Anarkata Statement: Environmental Justice, Mutual Aid, and Centering Black Trans Women in Black Struggle
- “I used to be a 911 dispatcher. I had to respond to racist calls every day.”
- How Black Physicians Face Racism in the Profession
- “America’s Toxic Prisons”
- CIA’s Plan to Test Drugs on Incarcerated People
- “‘Sitting With the Sick’: African American Women's Philanthropy”
- Art, Activism, and HIV/AIDS
- The “afrocidal core of Detroit’s water politics”
- “Sterilisation and Eugenics in the Global South Are Championed by White Women”
- Advancing Black Health in Canada
- “The abject inhumanity of America’s minimum wage”
- Science, White Supremacy, and the Politics of Knowledge
- The “Toxic Legacy” of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq
- “Abolition Ecologies” in Nairobi and Toronto
- Black Health Alliance in Canada
- “Žižek’s Trans/gender Trouble”
- Trans Feminist Work and Afro-diasporic Fugitivity in Brazil
- “Showing Up for Black Mothers”
- On Centering the Work of Black Disabled Women
- “Black Women and the Charleston Hospital Workers’ Strike of 1969”
- “South African health care workers protest, threaten strike”
- Public Health and the Treatment of Haitian Migrants
- “Medical Violence and the Medieval ‘Miracle of the Black Leg’”
- Fighting Medical Mistrust
- “African Americans and Eugenics”
- The Anti-Blackness of Fetal Personhood Laws
- Environmental Racism in South Carolina
- “War Games in the Time of Coronavirus”
- Black Liberation and Environmental Justice
- “The movement doesn’t need martyrs; the movement needs people committed to honoring their bodies and their wellness.”
- Abolishing Police and Abolishing Big Tech: The Anti-Blackness of Silicon Valley
- “Why Did They Die? On Combahee and the Serialization of Black Death”
- The Abolition of Psychiatry
- “Black Psychoanalysts Speak”
- Anti-Blackness and Fat Phobia
- “Who Wants to Be Special? Pathologization and the Preparation of Bodies for Prison”
- Interview with Monica Coleman on “Bipolar Faith”
- Hysterectomies in ICE Detention
- “68-Year-Old Woman Dies After Utility Company Cuts Power for Oxygen Tank Following Overdue Bill”
- Social Work and Policing
- “The Institutionalized Repression of Queer and Transgender Rights in Ghana”
- Eviction and Public Health
- “The Position of the Unthought”
- Carceral Social Work
-
- “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics”
- Shutting Off Water in Detroit and Johannesburg
- “Reformism Isn’t Liberation, It’s Counterinsurgency”
- Black Women and Maternal Health Care
- “Black Availability: Antimigrant Policies in Africa and the Exploitation of Black Migrants”
- Race and Medical Technology
- The Problem with “Latinx for Black Lives”
- Advocating for Black Trans People in Prison
- Pollution in ‘Cancer Alley’
- Communalism and Health Justice
- “Black Lesbian Intellectuals Shined Light on HIV/AIDS Epidemic”
- Environmental Activism in Kenya
- Audre Lorde and “The Cancer Journals”
- Scientific Racism and the U.S. Military
- Introduction to the Book, Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America
- “Black/Queer Optimism in the Early Era of AIDS”
- Anti-Blackness in Toronto’s Health Care System
- Closing the Racial Gap in Emergency Care
- The Anti-Blackness of Enlightenment Science
- “Prison Food, Abolitionist Geographies, and Food Sovereignty”
- Black Bone Marrow Donors
- Criminalization and Racialized Gender-Based Violence
- “Where We Put Our Trash”
- Race, Medicine, and Reproductive Justice
- Breaths, Chokeholds, and Anti-Blackness
- The Anti-Blackness of American Swimming Pools
- When Canada Banned Black Medical Students
- “Freedom Farmers”
- How the U.S. War Machine Pollutes the Earth
- Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”
- “Responding to Anti-Blackness and Settler Colonialism in Early Childhood Education”
- Frantz Fanon, Disability Studies, and the Clinical Encounter
- “Medical Violence Against People of Color and The Medicalization of Domestic Violence”
- Gentrification and Public Health
- Introduction to Karla FC Holloway’s Book, Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, a Memorial
- “Distorted mirrors: Toward a clear gaze on Black suffering”
- Cameroonian Women Protesting Unsanitary Conditions and Medical Neglect in U.S. Detention Centers
- “Prayer, Protest, and Police Brutality: Black Muslim Spiritual Resistance in the Ferguson Era”
- Anti-Blackness and “Failure to Protect” Laws
- Ylê Asé de Yansã: Community Building in Sao Paulo, Brazil
- The Time ICE Threatened to Expose Cameroonian Asylum-Seekers to COVID-19
- Protesting the U.S. Miliary: “The Largest Polluter in the World”
- “Abolitionist and Ancestor: The Legacy of Erica Garner”
- “Renegade Gestation: Writing Against the Procedures of Intellectual History”
- Police Terror in Brazil
- “Racism is Structured as a Language: Sexual Difference and the 1943 Detroit Race Riot”
- Principles of Healing Justice
- “Race, Medicine, and the Origins of American Psychiatry”
- How Black Africans are Pathologized as Disease Carriers in Algeria
- Pharmacy Deserts in Chicago’s Black Communities
- “Policing the Borders of Suffering”
- Missionaries as White Saviors who Play Doctor in Africa
- Creating Public Safety Without Relying on Law Enforcement
- “Abolition Can’t Wait”
- Care Work
- “The Only Treatment is Freedom: Mumia Abu-Jamal and COVID”
- Why the solution is not inclusion, diversity, and “Black Faces in High Places”
- Race, Neighborhoods, and African American Health
- “Is Gay Marriage Anti-Black?”
- Saidiya Hartman’s “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors”
- Introduction to Alys Eve Weinbaum’s book, The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery
- “Black Afterlives Matter: Cultivating Kinfulness as Reproductive Justice”
- Building Communities of Support for Black Women with Mental Health Concerns
- “Black Maternal and Infant Health: Historical Legacies of Slavery”
- Reproductive Justice and Reproductive Injustice
- “Black Care”
- Frantz Fanon and Colonial Medicine
- “Anti-Black Racism is Environmental Hazard”
- State Violence and Black Health
- White Fantasies, White Anxieties, and Caster Semenya
- “What is required is a new science” - A Conversation between Sylvia Wynter and Bedour Alagraa
- The Anti-Blackness of NFL Concussion Settlements
- “Black Feminist Theory for the Dead and Dying”
- Denise Ferreira da Silva on Ethics and Value
- Cathy J. Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens”
- Why Listening and Empathy Won’t Dismantle Structural Racism
- “Black Time: Slavery, Metaphysics, and the Logic of Wellness”
- Mourning Suicide
- Refusing the Mathematics of Black Life
- “Stop capitalizing off our loved ones” - “Official Statement from Samaria Rice, mother of Tamir Rice, Lisa Simpson, mother of Richard Richer, and the Collective”
- Dr. Keisha Ray Discusses Black Bioethics
- Black Lung Disease, Slavery, and the Origins of Life Insurance
Gwendolyn Wallace (she/her) is a senior at Yale University pursuing a BA in the History of Science and Medicine, concentrating in Gender, Reproduction, and the Body. Her research interests include histories of community health activism, reproductive justice, and the intersections between race-making, science, and medicine. Gwendolyn enjoys working with young children, gardening, and searching for used bookstores to explore.
Roberto Sirvent is Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University. He is an Affiliate Scholar at Yale University's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, where he directs the “Race, Bioethics, and Public Health” project. Roberto also serves as editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
COMMENTS?
Please join the conversation on Black Agenda Report's Facebook page at http://facebook.com/blackagendareport
Or, you can comment by emailing us at [email protected]
Ama Ata Aidoo lands a knock-out blow to white neocolonial anti-African revisionism.
The killing of Timothy Thomas in 2001 ignited Cincinnati’s long-simmering tensions over police violence. This struggle continues today, forcing a painful question: When justice is denied, does…
"DOGE— Department Of Grifter Enrichment" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Brittany Friedman. Friedman is assistant professor of sociology at the University of…
From Gaza to Sudan to the streets of America, the oppressors of our time demand mass resistance. Not just protest, but an organized, unrelenting struggle. Black radical politics remind us that only…
