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Is Race-Based Medicine Good for Us?: African American Approaches to Race, Biomedicine, and Equality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Dorothy E. Roberts
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Extract

Public discourse on race-specific medicine typically erects a wall between the scientific use of race as a biological category and the ideological battle over race as a social identity. Scientists often address the potential for these therapeutics to reinforce a damaging understanding of “race” with precautions for using them rather than questioning their very development. For example, Esteban Gonzalez Burchard, an associate professor of medicine and biopharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, states, “We do see racial differences between populations and shouldn’t just close our eyes. Unfortunately, race is a politically charged topic, and there will be evildoers. But the fear should not outweigh the benefit of looking.” Although it is recognized that ideology influences the social meaning of race, it is usually assumed that there is a separate, prior scientific understanding of race that is not contaminated by politics.

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , Fall 2008 , pp. 537 - 545
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2008

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