[Mis]Placing Race in Biomedical Clinical Context: Racial Categories,Medical Research,and the Reproduction of Health Disparities |
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| Authors: | Ashley C. Rondini |
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| Affiliation: | Franklin and Marshall College |
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| Abstract: | Notions of racial categories as biologically significant remain persistently salient to oppressive hegemonic ideas about race, despite scientific evidence to the contrary. Biomedical and epidemiological researchers are both professionally socialized and institutionally mandated to utilize racial categories in their research design, implementation, and interpretation processes, under the premise that doing so can facilitate the development of measures to combat racial disparities in health outcomes and care. However, when aggregate data intended to illustrate racial disparities are inappropriately extrapolated to the individualized context of biomedical clinical practice, essentialist notions of racial difference are reified. This paper integrates interdisciplinary perspectives from the fields of sociology, medicine, public health, epidemiology, evolutionary biology, and biological anthropology to explore the ideological, historical, and structural contexts through which the conflation of racial categories as indicators of group‐level inequities in health outcomes and care experiences with essentialized notions of biological differences between racial groups may inform disparate care at the level of individual patient encounter in biomedical clinical practice. |
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