How America Has Racialized Medicine During Epidemics

Just a month ago, there was chatter about how African Americans have a unique racial immunity to the novel coronavirus. Now that data is emerging that African Americans are actually contracting Covid-19 at alarming rates, the new chatter is just the opposite: that African Americans instead have a unique racial vulnerability to it. While there are many potential good explanations for this disparity, including racism in the health care system, much of the focus has been instead on black people’s behaviors as the cause. In a recent press conference, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, an African American, addressed the disparity in black deaths by scolding black people to “step up” their social distancing game while chiding them about avoiding alcohol, tobacco, and drugs.

There is unfortunately a long, sordid history in the medical world of holding black people responsible for poor health outcomes, despite the racial discrimination they have encountered in doctor’s offices and hospitals. Connecticut College gender and women’s studies professor Mab Segrest explores this history in her new book, “Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum.”