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“Anti-Blackness, Bioethics, and Public Health: 200 Introductory Resources for Community Study”
Gwendolyn Wallace and Roberto Sirvent
29 Apr 2021
🖨️ Print Article
“Anti-Blackness, Bioethics, and Public Health: 200 Introductory Resources for Community Study”
“Anti-Blackness, Bioethics, and Public Health: 200 Introductory Resources for Community Study”

Writers, artists, community organizers and scholars have all contributed their analysis of the resource documents listed, below, and how they might be useful in assessing anti-Black structures around the world.

“We hope the list helps communities explore questions that are not traditionally discussed.”

This resource list is a place to start for those interested in the relationships between anti-Blackness, bioethics, and public health. Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic brought more attention and interest to the racism of the medical industrial complex. Unfortunately, however, it remains too common for scholars and practitioners to study issues of health and medicine without interrogating the way that anti-Blackness structures our world. The resource list below offers perspectives from writers, artists, community organizers, and academics who offer their thoughts on the ways that anti-Blackness, bioethics, and public health intersect. The list, while sizable, is not meant to be exhaustive. Nonetheless, we hope it helps communities explore theories, cases, and questions that, for whatever reason, are not traditionally discussed in conversations around bioethics and public health. 

(Hyperlinks are included for each resource)

  1. “Racism Didn't Kill George Floyd. Anti-Blackness Did”
  2. Anti-Blackness and School Safety
  3. “Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica”
  4. Policing and Public Health
  5. “Reckoning with histories of medical racism and violence in the USA”
  6. Audre Lorde and Crip-of-Color Critique
  7. Sex Education and HIV Prevention Programs by Garifuna Immigrant Communities
  8. “Medical Apartheid”
  9. Policing of Black Girls in School
  10. “Racial Capitalism and COVID-19”
  11. Justice for Kayla Moore
  12. “Black Girls Don't Get to Be Depressed”
  13. Ethics of “Vaccine Nationalism”
  14. “Black Feminist Ecological Thought: A Manifesto”
  15. Coronavirus and Neo-Colonialism in Colombia
  16. “Hungry, Shackled, and Grieving: What Prison Is Like for Pregnant People”
  17. U.S. Education Systems and Public Health
  18. “Breonna Taylor was briefly alive after police shot her. But no one tried to treat her”
  19. Black Women and the U.S. Health Care System
  20. “The Dangerous History of Immunoprivilege”
  21. Physical, Psychic, and Spiritual Healing Practices by Native South Africans
  22. “Black Trans Sex Workers in Colombia”
  23. “Sanctions Kill: The Devastating Human Cost of Sanctions”
  24. Labor Strikes and Health Justice
  25. “Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too: The Politics of Emergent Afrocentric Ecowomanism”
  26. “The Architects of Abolitionism”
  27. A Conversation on Karla FC Holloway’s book, Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, 
    Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics
  28. “My Mother Is Busy Getting Ready to Die”
  29. France’s Extortion of Haiti 
  30. “Making the Case for Reproductive Revolution”
  31. Charleena Lyles and #SayHerName
  32. “The Able-Bodied Slave”
  33. Abolish the Anti-Black Medical Industrial Complex
  34. “Black Studies: In the Wake”
  35. Black Women Radical Self-Defense and the Pathologization of Black Mothers' Political Action
  36. Denise Ferreira da Silva’s “Black Feminist Poethics”
  37. “Dionne Brand: On narrative, reckoning and the calculus of living and dying”
  38. Anti-Blackness in Canadian Health Care
  39. “From I Can’t Breathe to I Can’t Grieve: Black Grief Matters”
  40. Polluting Black Communities 
  41. “Pathologizing the Crisis: Psychiatry, Policing, and Racial Liberalism in the Long Community Mental Health Movement”
  42. Oakland Power Projects: Resources for Anti-Policing Health Workers
  43. “When a Black Man’s Heart Was Transplanted Without Consent”
  44. Mutual Aid and Health Justice: Ujimaa Medics
  45. “Ending the War on Black Trans People”
  46. Health and Safety Issues for Prison Laborers
  47. “Syllabus: A History of Anti-Black Racism in Medicine” (African American Intellectual History Society)
  48. Health Effects on Black Communities After Police Shootings
  49. “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!”
  50. Grocery Stores and Black Food Geographies
  51. “Work in the Intersections: A Black Feminist Disability Framework”
  52. The Pruitt–Igoe Housing Projects and Military Testing on Humans
  53. “An Anthropologist’s Perspective on COVID-19: Q&A with Dr. Adia Benton”
  54. Black Women’s Health Support Networks
  55. “Black Brazilians Hit Hard by COVID-19”
  56. Funding Social Programs Instead of the Police
  57. “Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects”
  58. Black Immigrants and “The New American Servitude”
  59. “Chavismo” and the National Distribution of Health Care in Venezuela
  60. Risking Our Lives to “Go Back to Work”
  61. “On Telling Ugly Stories: Writing with a Chronic Illness”
  62. Prison Guards and Medical Neglect
  63. Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” 
  64. 19th Century Race Science
  65. “State Violence Is at the Root of Health Inequities”
  66. Health Effects of U.S. Housing Policy
  67. “‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies,and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, I500-I770”
  68. Frantz Fanon and a Decolonial Politics of Care
  69. “Curative domains: Women, healing and history in black women's narratives”
  70. Chemical Pollution and “Breathing While Black”
  71. “On Doulas”
  72. Muslim Wellness Foundation
  73. “‘Moving Towards Home’: The Politics and Poetics of Environmental Justice in the Work of June Jordan”
  74. Anarkata Statement: Environmental Justice, Mutual Aid, and Centering Black Trans Women in Black Struggle
  75. “I used to be a 911 dispatcher. I had to respond to racist calls every day.”
  76. How Black Physicians Face Racism in the Profession
  77. “America’s Toxic Prisons”
  78. CIA’s Plan to Test Drugs on Incarcerated People
  79. “‘Sitting With the Sick’: African American Women's Philanthropy”
  80. Art, Activism, and HIV/AIDS
  81. The “afrocidal core of Detroit’s water politics”
  82. “Sterilisation and Eugenics in the Global South Are Championed by White Women”
  83. Advancing Black Health in Canada
  84. “The abject inhumanity of America’s minimum wage”
  85. Science, White Supremacy, and the Politics of Knowledge
  86. The “Toxic Legacy” of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq
  87. “Abolition Ecologies” in Nairobi and Toronto
  88. Black Health Alliance in Canada
  89. “Žižek’s Trans/gender Trouble”
  90. Trans Feminist Work and Afro-diasporic Fugitivity in Brazil
  91. “Showing Up for Black Mothers”
  92. On Centering the Work of Black Disabled Women
  93. “Black Women and the Charleston Hospital Workers’ Strike of 1969”
  94. “South African health care workers protest, threaten strike”
  95. Public Health and the Treatment of Haitian Migrants 
  96. “Medical Violence and the Medieval ‘Miracle of the Black Leg’”
  97. Fighting Medical Mistrust
  98. “African Americans and Eugenics”
  99. The Anti-Blackness of Fetal Personhood Laws
  100. Environmental Racism in South Carolina
  101. “War Games in the Time of Coronavirus”
  102. Black Liberation and Environmental Justice
  103. “The movement doesn’t need martyrs; the movement needs people committed to honoring their bodies and their wellness.”
  104. Abolishing Police and Abolishing Big Tech: The Anti-Blackness of Silicon Valley
  105. “Why Did They Die? On Combahee and the Serialization of Black Death”
  106. The Abolition of Psychiatry
  107. “Black Psychoanalysts Speak”
  108. Anti-Blackness and Fat Phobia
  109. “Who Wants to Be Special? Pathologization and the Preparation of Bodies for Prison”
  110. Interview with Monica Coleman on “Bipolar Faith”
  111.  Hysterectomies in ICE Detention
  112. “68-Year-Old Woman Dies After Utility Company Cuts Power for Oxygen Tank Following Overdue Bill”
  113. Social Work and Policing
  114. “The Institutionalized Repression of Queer and Transgender Rights in Ghana” 
  115. Eviction and Public Health
  116. “The Position of the Unthought”
  117. Carceral Social Work
  118.  
  119. “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics”
  120. Shutting Off Water in Detroit and Johannesburg
  121. “Reformism Isn’t Liberation, It’s Counterinsurgency”
  122. Black Women and Maternal Health Care
  123. “Black Availability: Antimigrant Policies in Africa and the Exploitation of Black Migrants”
  124. Race and Medical Technology
  125. The Problem with “Latinx for Black Lives”
  126. Advocating for Black Trans People in Prison
  127. Pollution in ‘Cancer Alley’
  128. Communalism and Health Justice
  129. “Black Lesbian Intellectuals Shined Light on HIV/AIDS Epidemic”
  130. Environmental Activism in Kenya
  131. Audre Lorde and “The Cancer Journals”
  132. Scientific Racism and the U.S. Military
  133. Introduction to the Book, Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America
  134. “Black/Queer Optimism in the Early Era of AIDS”
  135. Anti-Blackness in Toronto’s Health Care System
  136. Closing the Racial Gap in Emergency Care
  137. The Anti-Blackness of Enlightenment Science
  138. “Prison Food, Abolitionist Geographies, and Food Sovereignty”
  139. Black Bone Marrow Donors
  140. Criminalization and Racialized Gender-Based Violence
  141. “Where We Put Our Trash”
  142. Race, Medicine, and Reproductive Justice
  143. Breaths, Chokeholds, and Anti-Blackness
  144. The Anti-Blackness of American Swimming Pools
  145. When Canada Banned Black Medical Students
  146. “Freedom Farmers”
  147. How the U.S. War Machine Pollutes the Earth
  148. Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”
  149. “Responding to Anti-Blackness and Settler Colonialism in Early Childhood Education”
  150. Frantz Fanon, Disability Studies, and the Clinical Encounter
  151. “Medical Violence Against People of Color and The Medicalization of Domestic Violence”
  152. Gentrification and Public Health
  153. Introduction to Karla FC Holloway’s Book, Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, a Memorial
  154. “Distorted mirrors: Toward a clear gaze on Black suffering”
  155. Cameroonian Women Protesting Unsanitary Conditions and Medical Neglect in U.S. Detention Centers
  156. “Prayer, Protest, and Police Brutality: Black Muslim Spiritual Resistance in the Ferguson Era”
  157. Anti-Blackness and “Failure to Protect” Laws
  158. Ylê Asé de Yansã: Community Building in Sao Paulo, Brazil
  159. The Time ICE Threatened to Expose Cameroonian Asylum-Seekers to COVID-19
  160. Protesting the U.S. Miliary: “The Largest Polluter in the World” 
  161. “Abolitionist and Ancestor: The Legacy of Erica Garner”
  162. “Renegade Gestation: Writing Against the Procedures of Intellectual History”
  163. Police Terror in Brazil
  164. “Racism is Structured as a Language: Sexual Difference and the 1943 Detroit Race Riot”
  165. Principles of Healing Justice
  166. “Race, Medicine, and the Origins of American Psychiatry”
  167. How Black Africans are Pathologized as Disease Carriers in Algeria
  168. Pharmacy Deserts in Chicago’s Black Communities
  169. “Policing the Borders of Suffering”
  170. Missionaries as White Saviors who Play Doctor in Africa
  171. Creating Public Safety Without Relying on Law Enforcement
  172. “Abolition Can’t Wait”
  173. Care Work
  174. “The Only Treatment is Freedom: Mumia Abu-Jamal and COVID”
  175. Why the solution is not inclusion, diversity, and “Black Faces in High Places”
  176. Race, Neighborhoods, and African American Health
  177.  “Is Gay Marriage Anti-Black?”
  178. Saidiya Hartman’s “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors”
  179. Introduction to Alys Eve Weinbaum’s book, The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery
  180. “Black Afterlives Matter: Cultivating Kinfulness as Reproductive Justice”
  181. Building Communities of Support for Black Women with Mental Health Concerns
  182. “Black Maternal and Infant Health: Historical Legacies of Slavery”
  183. Reproductive Justice and Reproductive Injustice
  184. “Black Care”
  185. Frantz Fanon and Colonial Medicine
  186. “Anti-Black Racism is Environmental Hazard”
  187. State Violence and Black Health
  188. White Fantasies, White Anxieties, and Caster Semenya
  189. “What is required is a new science” - A Conversation between Sylvia Wynter and Bedour Alagraa
  190. The Anti-Blackness of NFL Concussion Settlements
  191. “Black Feminist Theory for the Dead and Dying”
  192. Denise Ferreira da Silva on Ethics and Value
  193. Cathy J. Cohen’s “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens”
  194. Why Listening and Empathy Won’t Dismantle Structural Racism
  195. “Black Time: Slavery, Metaphysics, and the Logic of Wellness”
  196. Mourning Suicide
  197. Refusing the Mathematics of Black Life
  198. “Stop capitalizing off our loved ones” - “Official Statement from Samaria Rice, mother of Tamir Rice, Lisa Simpson, mother of Richard Richer, and the Collective”
  199. Dr. Keisha Ray Discusses Black Bioethics
  200. Black Lung Disease, Slavery, and the Origins of Life Insurance
    Gwendolyn Wallace  (she/her) is a senior at Yale University pursuing a BA in the History of Science and Medicine, concentrating in Gender, Reproduction, and the Body. Her research interests include histories of community health activism, reproductive justice, and the intersections between race-making, science, and medicine. Gwendolyn enjoys working with young children, gardening, and searching for used bookstores to explore.

Roberto Sirvent  is Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University. He is an Affiliate Scholar at Yale University's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, where he directs the “Race, Bioethics, and Public Health” project. Roberto also serves as editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum. 

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