This reading list is intended to complement the Conversation on Racial Disparities in Healthcare hosted by the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Books are displayed in case to the right of the library entrance and are available to be checked out. Links go to the e-book if available.
Highlighted resources:
Under the Skin : The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation by Linda Villarosa
This Pulitzer Prize finalist is an expansion on the author’s articles in the New York Times about the increased infant mortality and maternal death rates in African American women. Even controlling for income, education, and access to health care, African Americans still have a lower life expectancy than white people. The book addresses issues including myths and misinformation about African Americans common in the medical field, maternal health, and emotional pain.
Invisible Visits: Black Middle-Class Women in the American Healthcare System by Tina K. Sacks
Invisible Visits is a qualitative study of middle-class Black women describing how discrimination in medical care persists regardless of socio-economic status, and bases discrimination in healthcare as a symptom of systemic racism, sexism, and classism.
Legal focus:
Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care by Dayna Bowen Matthew
Just Medicine argues that implicit bias among doctors and other healthcare providers leads to Black and brown patients receiving inferior medical care. The author proposes a legal solution and describes how antidiscrimination laws could be used to address implicit bias.
Healthcare and Human Dignity: Law Matters by Frank McClellan
Healthcare and Human Dignity discusses legal remedies to address healthcare discrimination. The author uses narratives at the beginning of each chapter to anchors his argument that dignity in medical care requires legal protection.
Historical focus:
Body and Soul: the Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination by Alondra Nelson
Point 6 of the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point program is “We want completely free health care for all black and oppressed people.” Body and Soul examines the BPP’s health activism, which included establishing free community-based medical clinics. The author interviews former Black Panthers, visits clinics descended from the BPP’s People’s Free Medical Clinics, and uses primary sources to tell the story of the Black Pather Party’s place in the “long medical civil rights movement.”
Deluxe Jim Crow: Civil Rights and American Health Policy, 1935-1954 by Karen Kruse Thomas
Deluxe Jim Crow is a history of health care policy and advocacy in the South from the New Deal through the end of legal segregation with Brown. The author describes a “Devil’s bargain” where segregation was maintained even as funding and resources for segregated institutions reached some degree of parity.
Other books from our collection:
The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills by David A. Ansell
How Inequality Kills examines disparities in life expectancies by looking at communities along Ogden Ave. on Chicago’s West Side. The author discusses inequality itself as a disease or cause of death, and maintains that, due to structural racism and structural violence, “where you live dictates when you die.”
Black and Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism by John Hoberman
Black and Blue examines the thought processes and behaviors of physicians and the “folkloric beliefs” leading to medical racism. The author takes a historic view on the development of beliefs and behavior. He critiques cultural competency programs for relying on oversimplifications of patients’ lived experiences, and therefore insufficient and ineffective to remedy discrimination in medical care.
Patel, Kant, and Mark E. Rushefsky. Health Care in America: Separate and Unequal by Kant Patel and Mark E. Rushefsky
Health Care in America looks at health care inequality as related to race, gender, age, and geographic location. The authors examine attempts to reduce inequality and examine how those efforts have succeeded or failed.
Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care
A comprehensive and extensive report from the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Understanding and Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care addressing racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare at both systemic and individual levels.
Dying While Black by Vernellia R. Randall
Dying While Black addresses a range of issues related to medical racism. The final chapter discusses reparations within the context of healthcare.
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