Health Disparities and Health Omissions: Pushing Medical Anthropology Forward in the United States

Abstract

AbstractRacialized diagnosis of the fatal neurodegenerative disease ALS illustrates the limitations of medical anthropological knowledge that focuses only on “ethnic differences” to explain health disparities at the population level. I argue that a central focus on racism in our analysis of biomedical US spaces, and explicitly anti‐Black racism, will better equip anthropologists to understand how racialized forms of knowledge production in medicine and science have deleterious effects on people’s lives and bodies. The aggregate effects of racial science (the belief that human beings can be separated into biologically distinct groups) in slavery’s afterlife impact how clinicians and researchers see and treat Black people. I elaborate the concept of “health omissions” to equip anthropologists, clinical researchers, and biomedical clinicians with an analytical and truth‐telling lens that can attend to the ways that systemic marginalization in slavery’s afterlife omits Black people’s health problems and care.