Health Inequities and the Making of Race: A Short History

Please join The New York Academy of Medicine's Section on the History of Medicine for a special lecture from Dr. Rana Hogarth, "Health Inequities and the Making of Race: A Short History."

This talk focuses on the contributions of physicians who lived and worked in slave societies of North America and the Anglophone Caribbean to the making of race and racial differences. It highlights how, in the production of medical knowledge and the furtherance of the medical profession, these physicians made damaging assumptions about Black people's bodies that still linger with us today. This talk encourages us to consider how legacies of slavery shaped the creation of medical knowledge and the contours of medical education. Finally, it draws attention to the ways our current expectations about health and health outcomes still depend on outdated ideologies of race.

The lecture will be followed by a discussion led by Dr. Andrew Racine of Albert Einstein College of Medicine and The Children's Hospital at Montefiore.

Speaker Bios

Rana Hogarth, MHS, PhD, is an Associate Professor of history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the medical and scientific constructions of race during the era of slavery and beyond. Dr. Hogarth's first book, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2017. In it, she examines how white physicians “medicalized” blackness—a term she uses to describe the process by which white physicians defined blackness as a medically  significant marker of difference in slave societies of the American Atlantic. Her second project examines the genealogy and deployment of the terms used describe mixed race offspring of black and white people (“mulatto,” “quadroon,” etc.) in American medical and lay discourse. It traces how these terms were used in colonial Caribbean contexts and in mainland North America during the era of slavery, and illuminates how American eugenicists adopted these terms to correlate mental and physical capabilities of mixed race people to their racial ancestral makeup. In doing so, they refashioned these terms from crude labels to precision tools with valid scientific meanings. In the early twentieth century, American eugenicists looked southward to the Caribbean to conduct “race crossing” studies, viewing that region as an ideal experimental site to undertake the study of a topic considered taboo in the United States during that time. The results of their studies gave credence to the notion that race was a visual and quantifiable biological feature and confirmed white anxieties about the perils of racial mixing. Finally, this project centers Caribbean ex-slave colonies as experimental spaces that allowed eugenicists to extract data from mixed race people for the benefit of American scientists and the lay public.

Andrew D. Racine, MD, is Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and has served as the Chief of the Division of General Pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine / Children's Hospital at Montefiore since 1998, before which time he was the Associate Director of Pediatrics at the Jacobi Medical Center. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College and his MD and PhD in Economics from New York University. Dr. Racine was an intern and pediatric resident at the Children's Hospital in Boston. He received board certification from the American Board of Pediatrics in 1987. Dr. Racine's clinical interest in general pediatrics concentrates on the health issues confronting infants, children, adolescents and their families in urban environments. He is the Pediatric Medical Director for two practices: The Comprehensive Family Care Center, a federally qualified health center in the east Bronx, and the Family Care Center, a hospital based general practice adjacent to the Children's Hospital at Montefiore. These sites combine an attending-based practice of pediatrics with a resident continuity clinic. Together they provide care for approximately 20,000 patients and their families. At the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he has an appointment as a Research Associate, Dr. Racine has collaborated with other health economists to investigate such topics as trends in infant mortality rates, the economic determinants of child health status, and the role of publicly financed health insurance in accounting for variations in children's health. An active member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Dr. Racine has served as the Co-Chair of the Youth Advocacy Committee for Chapters 2 and 3 of District II for several years.