Samuel K Roberts: illuminating history, racial bias, and public health

Abstract

In 2009, Samuel Kelton Roberts, Jr's first book, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation, was published. “The book itself is about how racialism is baked into the kernel of modern public health practice here in the USA. Some of the most foundational moments in public health sit adjacent to or are ones that play a role in our history of race and racialisation. Even the way we collected data in the 19th and early 20th century was not just racially biased, but often racialised in their methods. This is one reason why anyone doing historical epidemiology or attempting to track morbidity and mortality rates over decades must do so with great caution”, explains Roberts, who is Associate Professor of History and Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University's School of the Arts and Sciences and its Mailman School of Public Health and lead of the Research Cluster for the Historical Study of Race, Inequality and Health at the Columbia University Center for Science and Society, New York, NY, USA. During the COVID-19 pandemic the book has received renewed interest with, he says, “the idea of infectious disease as showing us something about structural violence” finding resonance in these times.