Word: racializing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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While the rest of the country wrangled over the behavior of police officers in the wake of the Henry Louis Gates arrest last month, some scientists were pulling out their hair over racial profiling of a different kind: that perpetrated by medical researchers. Experts within the research community say a small but stubborn streak of racial profiling has long persisted in the medical literature, borne out in studies that attribute health disparities between blacks and whites not to socioeconomics or access to health care alone but also to genetic differences between the races - a concept that implies that a biological...
Every few years, in fact, a new study like Albain's materializes, each following a remarkably similar logic: Researchers identify a disparity in health outcomes (cancer survival or response to treatment, for example) that falls along racial fault lines; investigators then adjust for socioeconomic status, and, when the disparity persists, conclude it must be genetic. That consistent failure of reasoning bemuses Jay Kaufman, a McGill University professor of epidemiology who studies health disparities. "Why are we still doing this study?" he says. "If you are trying to make the argument that [different health outcomes] must be genetic by exhausting other...
...will be able to test everyone for 'it' and we will find some Caucasians who have it and some blacks who don't and we won't be talking about black and white anymore," she says. Still, geneticists point out that hereditary traits follow ancestral lines, not racial ones. And race in America, as it is socially defined, constitutes such broad categories that it is a crude - arguably useless - proxy for genetics...
...controlled for socioeconomics, there must be some unknown biological factor (as opposed to some unknown social or cultural factor) at play, says David Williams, a Harvard professor of public health and African American studies. "The biology is a fall-back black box that many researchers use when they find racial differences," he says. "It is knee-jerk reaction. It is not based on science, but on a deeply held, cultural belief about race that the medical field has a hard time giving...
...birth and death certificates. In some countries, such as Canada, medical researchers can choose to ask about race, but in other places - France, for example - researchers have a hard time winning approval for any study that specifically involves participants' race. Meanwhile, in the U.S., not only is racial data ubiquitous, its inclusion is mandated by the government in certain medical studies. The 1994 National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act calls for the reporting of racial differences when analyzing treatment effects in clinical trials...