https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/07/medicines-tricky-operation-grafting-systemic-racism-onto-hard-science/
A few years ago, concepts such as “white supremacy,” “systemic racism,” and “structural intersectionality” were not the standard fare of prestigious medical journals. But a February special issue of Health Affairs, the Washington, D.C.-based peer-reviewed journal, analyzes racial health disparities not through biology, behavior, or culture, but through the lens of “whiteness,” along with concepts such as power, systems of oppression, state-sanctioned violence, and critical race praxis—a sampling of terms that appear in the issue.
The Health Affairs special issue reflects the effort of “antiracist” scholars to transform concepts still considered speculative and controversial—and some say unprovable—into scientific fact. It is being advanced by other high-profile publications as well, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Scientific American, which last year published articles entitled “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy.”
But this scientific aspiration faces major challenges. Science demands verification, testability, and replicability, whereas race is a social construct that can be difficult to separate from factors like class or culture, and explaining the data often remains dependent on academic theories about systemic racism. The articles in Health Affairs indicate that elevating the concept of systemic racism from moral certitude to scientific fact will require developing new tools and methods.