Rejection used to be common for medical sociologist Thomas LaVeist when he tried to get his research published on the effects of racism on the health of black people. “Now,” said the 60-year-old dean of Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, “I have those same journals asking me to write articles for them.”
LaVeist’s experience illustrates the transformation in medical research. While few would dispute that black Americans are more prone to chronic health problems and have shorter life expectancies than whites, the medical community generally sought answers in biology, genetics, and lifestyle. Research, like LaVeist’s, that focused on racism was frowned upon as an amateurish detour from serious intellectual inquiry.
In recent years, and especially since Black Lives Matter protests erupted last year, systemic racism has been transformed from a fringe theory to a canonical truth. Medical researchers offer a sweeping socio-political explanation for racial health disparities by citing the hundreds of peer-reviewed articles authored by LaVeist and a host of others, thus conferring upon the study of systemic racism the imprimatur of scholarly authority.
This year, the National Institutes of Health issued an apology to all who have suffered from structural racism in biomedical research. The NIH is dedicating $90 million to the study of health disparities and structural racism, engaging in more than 60 diversity and inclusion initiatives, and committing “every tool at our disposal to remediate the chronic problem of structural racism.”
Deemed incontestable, systemic racism provides the political rationale for “dismantling”—in the words of no less an authority than the NIH—the institutions and cultural standards that, according to the framework’s advocates, are maintained to uphold white supremacy.
The consequences of ignoring this new prime directive for racially focused research were made clear this year when the top two editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association were pressured to resign after the organization ran a podcast that questioned whether systemic racism explains racial health disparities.
“This is the first time the NIH has issued a call for research on structural racism. This is the first time JAMA fires an editor who said something wrong about racism,” says Shervin Assari, an associate professor of family medicine and urban public health at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, one of four historically black medical schools in the U.S. Assari has authored more than 350 papers on race, social determinants, and health equity.
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