Black and Blue

Black & Blue is the first systematic description of how American doctors think about racial differences and how this kind of thinking affects the treatment of their black patients. The standard studies of medical racism examine past medical abuses of black people and do not address the racially motivated thinking and behaviors of physicians practicing medicine today.

Black & Blue penetrates the physician's private sphere where racial fantasies and misinformation distort diagnoses and treatments. Doctors have always absorbed the racial stereotypes and folkloric beliefs about racial differences that permeate the general population. Within the world of medicine this racial folklore has infiltrated all of the medical sub-disciplines, from cardiology to gynecology to psychiatry. Doctors have thus imposed white or black racial identities upon every organ system of the human body, along with racial interpretations of black children, the black elderly, the black athlete, black musicality, black pain thresholds, and other aspects of black minds and bodies. The American medical establishment does not readily absorb either historical or current information about medical racism. For this reason, racial enlightenment will not reach medical schools until the current race-aversive curricula include new historical and sociological perspectives.

Auteur

John Hoberman is a social and medical historian at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America, The Olympic Crisis: Sport, Politics, and the Moral Order, and Sport and Political Ideology.

Contenu

Acknowledgments

1. The Nature of Medical Racism: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism
   Introduction
   "Avoidance and Evasion"
   Judging How Physicians Behave
   Judging Physician Conduct: Privacy and the "Halo Effect"
   The Oral Tradition
   Physicians Share the Racial Attitudes of Their Fellow Citizens
   The Medical Liberals

2. Black Patients and White Doctors
   The African American Health Calamity: The Silence
   Medical Vulnerability and Racial Defamation
   How Do (White) Physicians Think About Race?
   Evidence of Medical Racism
   Resistance to the Critique of Racial Bias In Medicine
   Medical Liberalism and the Medical Literature
   The Physician's Private Sphere
   Playing Anthropologist
   From Racial Folklore to Racial Medicine

3. Medical Consequences of Racializing the Human Organism
   Racial Interpretations of Human Types and Traits
   Introduction
   Racial Interpretations of Black Infants and Children
   Racial Interpretations of the Black Elderly
   Racial Interpretations of the Black Athlete
   Racial Interpretations of Black Musical Aptitude
   Racial Interpretations of Losing Consciousness
   Racial Interpretations of the Nervous System
   Racial Interpretations of Pain Sensitivity
   Racial Interpretations of Heart Disease
   Racial Interpretations of Human Organs and Disorders
   Racial Interpretations of the Eyes
   Racial Interpretations of Black Skin
   Racial Interpretations of Human Teeth
   Racial Interpretations of "White" and "Black" Disorders
   Black "Hardiness"
   Physical Hardiness
   Emotional Hardiness
   Conclusion: How Human Organ Systems Acquire Racial Identities
   Racial Folklore In Medical Specialties
   A Century of Racial Pharmacology: From Racial Folklore to Racial Genetics
   The Role of Racial Folklore In Obstetrics and Gynecology
   During the Twentieth Century

4. Medical Apartheid, Internal Colonialism, and the Task of American Psychiatry
   Introduction
   "Africanizing" the Black Image
   American Psychiatry As Racial Medicine
   The Racial Primitive In American Psychiatry
   The Task of Black Psychiatry
   Colonial Medical Status

5. A Medical School Syllabus On Race
   Introduction
   The Doctor-Patient Relationship
   The Problem Patient
   Medical Authors' Aversion to Race
   Race and Medical Education: the Search For "Cultural Competence"
   Two official Versions of "Cultural Competence"
   Physicians' Beliefs About Racial Differences: A (Belated) Study
   A Medical Curriculum On Race
   Practical Advice For Physicians
   Social Class, Misdiagnoses, and Therapeutic Fatalism
   "Cultural Competence" As Knowledge of Stereotype Systems
   Raceless Humanism: "Medical Humanities" and the Evasion of Difference
   Medical Curriculum Change Is Possible: The Case of Abortion Training

Notes
Index