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Race, Health, and Medicine:
- Ryan Levi and Dan Gorenstein, “AI in medicine needs to be carefully deployed to counter bias—and not entrench it,” NPR (June 6, 2023): LINK. “The data these algorithms [and machine learning] are built on, however, often reflect inequities and bias that have long plagued U.S. health care. Research shows clinicians often provide different care to white patients and patients of color. Those differences in how patients are treated get immortalized in data, which are then used to train algorithms.”
- Kristen de Groot, “Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race and Rights in the Age of Abolition,” Penn Today (June 6, 2023): LINK. A new book by historian Kathleen M. Brown excavates the “struggle for liberty and highlights how bodily rights and personal freedom were put at the forefront of the fight, often by Black women abolitionists.”
- Patrick Boyle, “Do Black patients fare better with Black doctors?” Association of American Medical Colleges (June 6, 2023): LINK. “Research shows that racial concordance can improve communication, trust, and adherence to medical advice. That has implications for health care providers.”
Reparations:
- Samira Shackle, “The backlash: how slavery research came under fire,” The Guardian (June 1, 2023): LINK. “More and more institutions are commissioning investigations into their historical links to slavery—but the fallout at one Cambridge [England] college suggests these projects are meeting growing resistance.”
- Howard Manly, “Reparations over formerly enslaved people has a long history: 4 essential reads on why the idea remains unresolved,” The Conversation (June 1, 2023): LINK. As the debate rages on in California and other jurisdictions, historians and other scholars have added to our understanding of reparations. This article spotlights some of the recent work by scholars.
- John Silvanus Wilson, “Universities cannot be bystanders when democracy is imperilled,” Times Higher Education (June 4, 2023): LINK. The author (a former president of Morehouse College) focuses on the distinctive role of HBCUs in sustaining American democracy—while also critiquing elite institutions of higher education: “Rather than advance democracy, most of America’s campus leaders have resembled bystanders, largely reticent about the world’s injustices.”
- Dee DePass, “Bush Foundation giving away $50M to slave descendants in Minnesota and Dakotas,” [Minneapolis] Star Tribune (June 5, 2023): LINK. “A Bush Foundation-funded effort will issue $50 million to the descendants of slaves living in Minnesota and the Dakotas over eight years in the hopes of building Black wealth, reversing systemic injustices and positively impacting communities.”
And other topics…
- Jon Edelman, “NCORE Conference Tackles Affirmative Action and Mass Incarceration,” Diverse Issues in Higher Education (June 1, 2023): LINK. At the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education, Tim Wise and Michelle Alexander offered critical perspectives on: 1) the potential landscape of higher education if affirmative action is overturned and 2) the actual landscape of mass incarceration a decade after Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
- Tina Jenkins Bell, “‘An Otherworldly Existence’ Converts Nonbelievers to Optimists,” South Side Weekly (June 2, 2023): LINK. Kee Merriweather—a queer Black artist from the South Side of Chicago—“explores the intersections between Afrofuturism, environmentalism, and the survival of people of color. Beyond survival, Merriweather imagines empowered existences, free of systemic and environmental restraints.”