Race and Racism in Health Care

Articles

View a larger list of citations concerning race and racism in medicine here.

Addressing Racism in Health Care

• Bell HS, Odumosu F, Martinez-Hume AC, Howard HA, & Hunt LM (2019). Racialized risk in clinical care: clinician vigilance and patient responsibility. Med Anthropol, 38(3), 224–238.
• Cerdeña JP, Rehman T, & Hardeman RR. (2020). Why bias matters in medicine: qualitative insights from anonymous, online reports. Journal of the National Medical Association, 112(1), 6–14.
• Irizar, P., Pan, D., Taylor, H., Martin, C. A., Katikireddi, S. V., Kannangarage, N. W., Gomez, S., La Parra Casado, D., Srinivas, P. N., Diderichsen, F., Baggaley, R. F., Nellums, L. B., Koller, T. S., & Pareek, M. (2024). Disproportionate infection, hospitalisation and death from COVID-19 in ethnic minority groups and Indigenous Peoples: an application of the Priority Public Health Conditions analytical framework. EClinicalMedicine, 68, 102360. 
• Kuehnert P, Fawcett J, DePriest K, Chinn P, Cousin L, Ervin N, Flanagan J, Fry-Bowers E, Killion C, Maliski S, Maughan ED, Meade C, Murray T, Schenk B, Waite R. (2022). Defining the social determinants of health for nursing action to achieve health equity: A consensus paper from the American Academy of Nursing. Nursing Outlook, 70(1):10-27. 
• Merz, S., Aksakal, T., Hibtay, A., Yücesoy, H., Fieselmann, J., Annaç, K., Yılmaz-Aslan, Y., Brzoska, P., & Tezcan-Güntekin, H. (2024). Racism against healthcare users in inpatient care: a scoping review. International journal for equity in health, 23(1), 89. 
• Muramatsu N, Chin MH. (2022). Battling structural racism against Asians in the United States: call for public health to make the "invisible" visible. Journal of Public Health Management & Practice, 28(Suppl 1):S3-S8
• Shankar M, Cox J, Baratta J, De Leon G, Shaw JG, Israni ST, Zulman DM, Brown-Johnson CG. (2022). Nonmedical transdisciplinary perspectives of Black and racially and ethnically diverse individuals about antiracism practices: a qualitative study. JAMA Network Open, 5(2):e2147835. 
• Solnick RE, Peyton K, Kraft-Todd G, & Safdar B. (2020). Effect of physician gender and race on simulated patients’ ratings and confidence in their physicians: a randomized trial. JAMA Network Open, 3(2), e1920511. 
• Stangl AL, Earnshaw VA, Logie CH, Van Brakel W, Simbayi LC, Barré I, & Dovidio JF. (2019). The health stigma and discrimination framework:  a global, crosscutting framework to inform research, intervention development, and policy on health-related stigmas. BMC Medicine, 17(1). 
• Walsh CC, Willen SS, Williamson AF (2022). Learning to see racism: perspective transformation among stakeholders in a regional health and equity initiative. Journal of Public Health Management & Practice, 28(Suppl 1):S82-S90.

Racism and Medical Education

• Bazargan-Hejazi, S., Negrete Manriquez, J. A., McDermoth-Grimes, M., Parra, E. A., & Prothrow-Stith, D. (2022). Underrepresented in medicine students' perspectives on impactful medical education. BMC medical education, 22(1), 904. 
• Escalante, E., Smiley, Y., Agrawal, D., Teach, S. J., Cora-Bramble, D., & Barber, A. (2022). Increasing Pediatric Residency Class Diversity to Improve Patient Outcomes and Address Structural Racism. Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, 97(6), 850–854. 
• Fadoju D. (2021). Sounding the alarm: six strategies for medical students to champion anti-racism advocacy. Journal of Healthcare Leadership.
• Lim GHT, et al. (2021). Students' perceptions on race in medical education and healthcare. Perspectives on Medical Education, 10(2), 130-34. 
• Nawaz H & Brett AS (2009). Mentioning race at the beginning of clinical case presentations: a survey of US medical schools. Med Educ, 43(2), 146–154.
• Phelan SM, Burke SE, Cunningham BA, Perry SP, Hardeman RR, Dovidio JF, … van Ryn M. (2019). The effects of racism in medical education on students’ decisions to practice in underserved or minority communities. Academic Medicine : Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, 94(8), 1178–1189.
• Rosario C, Al Amin S, Parker C. (2022). [Un]Forgetting history: preparing public health professionals to address structural racism. Journal of Public Health Management & Practice, 28(Suppl 1):S74-S81.
• Sabin J, Guenther G, Ornelas IJ, Patterson DG, Andrilla CHA, Morales L, Gurjal K, Frogner BK. (2022). Brief online implicit bias education increases bias awareness among clinical teaching faculty. Medical Education Online, 27(1):2025307. 
• Salhi BA, Tsai JW, Druck J, Ward-Gaines J, White MH, & Lopez BL (2020). Toward structural competency in emergency medical education. AEM Education and Training, 4(S1), S88–S97. 
• Sandoval RS, Afolabi T, Said J, Dunleavy S, Chatterjee A, & Ölveczky D. (2020). Building a Tool Kit for Medical and Dental Students: Addressing Microaggressions and Discrimination on the Wards. MedEdPORTAL, 16, 10893.
• Sandoval, R. S., Dunleavy, S., Afolabi, T., Said, J. T., Connor, J., Hossain, A., Kassamali, B., Kienka, T., Srinivasan, M., Cheng, A., Ölveczky, D., & Chatterjee, A. (2022). Equity in medical education: Addressing microaggressions and discrimination on the wards. Medical teacher, 44(5), 551–558. 
• Simpson T, Evans J, Goepfert A, Elopre L. (2022). Implementing a graduate medical education anti-racism workshop at an academic university in the Southern USA. Med. educ. online, 27(1):1981803. 
• Wasserman JA & Browne BJ. (2021). "On triggering and being triggered: civil society and building brave spaces in medical education." Teaching and Learning in Medicine.

Racial health care disparities

• Callahan CL, Schwartz K, Corley DA, Ruterbusch JJ, Zhao WK, Shuch B, Hofmann JN. (2020). Understanding racial disparities in renal cell carcinoma incidence: estimates of population attributable risk in two US populations. Cancer Causes and Control, 31(1), 85–93. 
• Erving CL (2020). Gendered tri-racial stratification and health disparities. Social Science Research. 
• Gomez LE (2022). Anti-Latino racism, the racial state, and revising approaches to "racial disparities". Journal of Public Health Management & Practice, 28(Suppl 1):S9-S14.
• Johnson CD (2022). Conquering the health disparities of structural racism. Journal of Public Health Management & Practice. 28(Suppl 1):S15-S17. 
• Mackey K. (2021). Racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19-related infections, hospitalizations, and deaths: a systematic review. Annals of Internal Medicine.
• Mehra R, Keene DE, Kershaw TS, Ickovics JR, & Warren JL. (2019). Racial and ethnic disparities in adverse birth outcomes: Differences by racial residential segregation. SSM - Population Health, 8. 
• Michaels, E. K., Lam-Hine, T., Nguyen, T. T., Gee, G. C., & Allen, A. M. (2023). The Water Surrounding the Iceberg: Cultural Racism and Health Inequities. The Milbank quarterly, 101(3), 768–814. 
• O’Brien R, Neman T, Seltzer N, Evans L, & Venkataramani A. (2020). Structural racism, economic opportunity and racial health disparities: Evidence from U.S. counties. SSM - Population Health, 11. 
• Rhee TG, Marottoli RA, Van Ness PH, & Levy BR. (2019). Impact of perceived racism on healthcare access among older minority adults. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 56(4), 580–585. 
• Siden JY, Carver AR, Mmeje OO, Townsel CD. (2022). Reducing implicit bias in maternity care: a framework for action. Womens Health Issues. 32(1):3-8.
• Vince RA Jr, Eyrich NW, Mahal BA, Stensland K, Schaeffer EM, Spratt DE. (2022). Reporting of racial health disparities research: are we making progress? Journal of Clinical Oncology, 40(1):8-11. 

Clinical research involving race and ethnicity

• Chaney C, Lopez M, Wiley KS, Meyer C, & Valeggia C. (2019). Systematic review of chronic discrimination and changes in biology during pregnancy among African American women. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 6(6), 1208–1217. 
• Cleveland Manchanda, E., Sivashanker, K., Kinglake, S., Laflamme, E., Saini, V., & Maybank, A. (2023). Training to Build Antiracist, Equitable Health Care Systems. AMA journal of ethics, 25(1), E37–E47. 
• Li Y, Lu Q, Wang Y, & Ma S. (2020). Racial differences in testicular cancer in the United States: descriptive epidemiology. BMC Cancer, 20(1). 
• Liu P, Ross JS, Ioannidis JPA, Dhruva SS, Vasiliou V, & Wallach JD. (2020). Prevalence and significance of race and ethnicity subgroup analyses in Cochrane intervention reviews. Clinical Trials, 17(2), 231–234. 
• Lydecker JA, Gueorguieva R, Masheb R, White MA, & Grilo CM. (2019). Examining race as a predictor and moderator of treatment outcomes for binge-eating disorder: Analysis of aggregated randomized controlled trials. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 87(6), 530–540. 
• Miyares LC, Falcone GJ, Leasure A, Adeoye O, Shi FD, Kittner SJ, … Woo D. (2020). Race/ethnicity influences outcomes in young adults with supratentorial intracerebral hemorrhage. Neurology, 94(12), e1271–e1280. 
• Nguyen-Truong, C. K. Y., Waters, S. F., Richardson, M., Barrow, N., Seia, J., Eti, D. U., & Rodela, K. F. (2023). An Antiracism Community-Based Participatory Research With Organizations Serving Immigrant and Marginalized Communities, Including Asian Americans and Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders in the United States Pacific Northwest: Qualitative Description Study With Key Informants. Asian/Pacific Island nursing journal, 7, e43150. 
• Pike LRG, Royce TJ, Mahal AR, Kim DW, Hwang WL, Mahal BA, & Sanford NN. (2020). Outcomes of HPV-associated squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck: Impact of race and socioeconomic status. JNCCN Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, 18(2), 177–184. 
• Simpson LA, Adams L, Edmunds M, Gluck M. (2022). Setting the course to high impact, equitable health services research. Health Services Research. 57(1):7-11.
• Wang E, et al. (2021) "Racial and ethnic disparities in severe maternal morbidity: a qualitative study of women's experiences of peripartum care." Womens Health Issues, 31.1, 75-81.

Searching the Literature

About to start a research or evidence synthesis project? We have brought together some helpful tips and tools when searching the literature. Consider these terms when building your search. Not all terms or tips will be applicable to every research project. Ask yourself who am I searching for, what needs to be included in my results, and how can I best describe each concept?

Guidelines

• Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts from the American Medical Association
• Using bias-free language to talk about racial and ethnic identity with inclusivity and respect from APA Style
• Implementation guidance on data collection standards for race, ethnicity, sex, primary language and disability status from the US Department of Health and Human Services
• Ghidei L, Murray A, Singer J. (2019) Race, research, and women's health: best practice guidelines for investigators. Obstet Gynecol, 133(4), 815‐818.

Books

Racism & Health Care

• A grammar of power in psychotherapy: exploring the dynamics of privilege by Malin Fors
• An anthropology of biomedicine by Margaret Lock and Vinh-Kim Nguyen
• Black and blue: the origins and consequences of medical racism by John Hoberman
• Body and soul: the Black Panther Party and the fight against medical discrimination by Alondra Nelson
• Breathing race into the machine: the surprising career of the spirometer from plantation to genetics by Lundy Braun
• Citizenship and mental health by Michael Rowe
• COVID-19 and health system segregation in the US racial health disparities and systemic racism by Prem Misir
• Fearing the black body: the racial origins of fat phobia by Sabrina Strings
• Just medicine: a cure for racial inequality in American health care by Dayna Bowen Matthew
• Medical apartheid: the dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans from colonial times to the present by Harriet A. Washington
• Medicating race: heart disease and durable preoccupations with difference by Anne Pollock
• Pain: a political history by Keith Wailoo
• Reproductive injustice: racism, pregnancy, and premature birth by Dána-Ain Davis
• Reproducing race: an ethnography of pregnancy as a site of racialization by Khiara Bridges
• The social determinants of mental health edited by Michael T. Compton and Ruth S. Shim
• Under the skin: racism, inequality, and the health of a nation by Linda Villarosa
• Under the strain of color: Harlem's Lafargue Clinic and the promise of an antiracist psychiatry by Gabriel N. Mendes

Biography/Autobiography

• Black man in a white coat: a doctor's reflections on race and medicine by Damon Tweedy 
• The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Racism and Technology

• Captivating technology: race, carceral technoscience, and liberatory imagination in everyday life edited by Ruha Benjamin
• Fatal invention: how science, politics, and big business re-create race in the twenty-first century by Dorothy Roberts

Data Sources

• Curated list of datasets including the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey, Black Women’s Health Study, DiversityData, Jackson Heart Study, National Survey of American Life, and others from the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health
• COVID-19 related datasets that stratify race/ethnicity curated by the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library
• Resource Center for Minority Data from ICPSR includes things like the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, the U.S. Transgender Survey, multiple datasets on racist attitudes in policing and sentencing in US cities, and multiple health datasets related to race/racism and the overall experience of being a person who’s marginalized in the US.
• Social Determinants & Health Equity resource guide from healthdata.gov (USDHHS) is a curated list of mostly federal datasets (from U.S. DHHS’ data catalog site) to aid people in determine health equity and inequity based on social determinants of health. 
• Guide to data visualization based on being anti-racist and equity-aware
• OMH Policy and Data
• Global Indigenous Data Allianceis a resource for indigenous data justice practices

Yale Voices

• Medical Student Activism: Political x Institutional x Personal by Robert Rock and Nientara Anderson
• Nguemeni Tiako MJ. "The pictures on the wall: transitioning from a historically black college/university (HBCU) to an ivy league medical school." Acad Med. 2018, 93(6), 820.
• in-Training: the agora of the medical student community
• Racial awareness, if you will by Max Jordan Nguemeni Tiako
• Our Hospitals' Unsung Heroes by Max Jordan Nguemeni Tiako
• The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition Keynote 2021 Conference with David W. Blight* (Chair of the Yale and Slavery Working Group; Sterling Professor of History; and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale) in conversation with Elizabeth Alexander (President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) and Jonathan Holloway (President of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey).
• Trends in Difference in Health Status and Health Care Access by Shiwani Mahajan, MBBS, MHS, César Caraballo, MD, Yuan Lu, ScD, et al

• A history of anti-Black racism in medicine from the African American Intellectual History Society
• Institutionalized racism: a syllabus from JSTOR
• Anti-racism in medicine collection from the Association of American Medical Colleges
• Anti-racism summer reading program for incoming medical students from the University of Washington

Web Resources

• Medicine and Race: AMS Annotated Bibliography from Brown Alpert Medical School
• Racism: science & tools for the public health professional from Apha Press
• Race and Racism in Medicine from New York University Health Sciences Library
• Toward the abolition of biological race in medicine: transforming clinical education, research, and practice from University of California, Berkeley
• U.S. Health Justice: An Initiative of Yale Health Professional Students
• Read, Watch, Listen, and Learn: A curated collection on combating racism and advancing equality from Yale Alumni
• Civic Health Alliance
• Race Deconstructed

Media

Podcasts

• Flip the Script by Max Tiako, MD Candidate at the Yale School of Medicine
• Throughline from NPR
• The Stoop by Hana Baba and Leila Day
• Race, Violence & Medicine by Dr. Brian Williams
• The Public Health Problem of Racism: Conversations on the intersection of Race & Mental Health
• Redressing Racism in US Health Care (episode) by Dr. Sanjay Gupta
• Addressing Anti-Black Racism in Medicine (episode) by Utibe Essien MD, MPH
• How Racism Impacts Our Mental Health (episode) by Therapy for Black Girls
• Racism is a Public Health Issue with Dr. Mary Bassett (episode) by America Dissected
• Race, Place, and Health: Clinician and Community Perspectives (episode) by The Clinical Problem Solvers
• Racism, Police Violence, and Health (episode) by The Clinical Problem Solvers
• Into the Black Doctors Vetting the Vaccine (episode) by Into America

Lectures

• The problem with race-based medicine by Dorothy Roberts, JD
• Race medicine: treating health inequities from slavery to genomics by Dorothy Roberts, JD
• Allegories of race and racism by Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones
• Hidden histories of medicine, slavery, and resistance by Carolyn Roberts, PhD (Yale University)