On a Thursday morning in 1726, French colonial officials in Pondichéry – France’s principal colonial holding on India’s southeastern coast – received word that a dead body had been discovered at the bottom of a well. The governor of Pondichéry dispatched three officials to investigate the report. The officials quickly located the body and identified… Read more →
Tag: Race
Race and Early American Medical Schools: Review of Christopher D.E. Willoughby’s Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools
In 2017, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts announced that it would stop using race as a factor in estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) calculation, a measure of kidney function. Then, in 2020, several other medical systems, including the Massachusetts General Brigham system, the University of Washington, and the University of Pennsylvania, agreed… Read more →
Maternal Grief in Black and White: Enslaved Mothers and Antislavery Literature on the Eve of War
Mrs. Tamor and her six children. Helen and her son, a child of “tender years.” Margaret Garner, an “affectionate mother” of four, also pregnant with a fifth child. An unnamed woman whose infant would soon be taken from her and “whose sufferings, on account of the separation from her child, seemed greater than for her… Read more →
BMI, Race, and Bodies: How Race Science Reemerges in the Unlikeliest of Places
The connection between Black female bodies and ill health, fatness, and inferiority marks the historical record on race and health. The Body Mass Index (BMI) is a prominent contemporary marker of this linkage. While there are strong arguments for and against the contention that there is a causal connection between BMI and ideal health, these… Read more →
Bottled Racism: A Review of Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice by Andrea Freeman
In recent years, the black maternal and fetal health crisis has been front page news, and for good reason. Black women die from pregnancy complications at three times the rate of white women, and the black infant mortality rate is more than double that of all other ethnic groups. Due to racism in the medical… Read more →
Blinded by the White: Race and the Exceptionalizing of Ted Bundy
Ted Bundy just won’t quit. Or at least our cultural obsession with him won’t, long after he was executed in Florida by electric chair just over thirty years ago. Netflix’s Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, released in January, has reignited interest in Bundy once again and introduced him to a new generation… Read more →
Who Was the Original “Welfare Queen?”: Review of Josh Levin’s The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth
How do you tell a story about a real-life, embodied individual who inspired a stereotype, without reducing her life to fit into the same trope you are trying to upend? How do you uncover the exception that proved the rule without reifying the label you acknowledge is pernicious? I’m not sure, and Josh Levin sure… Read more →
If You See Something, Say Something: Imperial Origins of White Women’s Modern Racial Profiling
In 2018, confrontations between white women and people of color in the United States have become viral news bytes emblematic of widespread systemic racial profiling. Journalists, attorneys, civil rights activists, and armchair social media commentators point to the cases involving BBQ Becky, Permit Patty, and Golfcart Gail as examples of deep-seated beliefs in white female… Read more →
“Hateful, Un-American Ideas!” Gender, Race, and Politics in Cold War Romance Comic Books
In the October 1949 issue of the romance comic Hollywood Confessions, the protagonist of the story “Too Ugly to Love” describes himself as so ugly that he resembles a “menace from a horror picture.”1 Jon Koslo has “accepted … [his] ugliness philosophically!” when a film producer spots him and “exploits [his] ugliness” by giving him… Read more →
The Privilege of Despair
A preternatural calm settled over me on Saturday afternoon as I heard the news of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. I wasn’t reconciled to the outcome; my calm did not come from satisfaction. Instead, it came from the awful confirmation of a different kind — that the United States was still the white… Read more →