In Black America Podcast: Black & Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism
Dr. John M. Hoberman, far rightAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
On this edition of In Black America, producer/host John L. Hanson Jr. speaks with Dr. John M. Hoberman, Ph.D., Chair, Germanic Studies, the University of Texas at Austin, and author of Black & Blue The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism. Almost all studies of medical racism in this country examine past medical abuses of African Americans and do not address the racially motivated thinking and behaviors of doctors practicing medicine today.
Black & Blue penetrates the physician’s private sphere where racial fantasies and misinformation distort diagnoses and treatments. Doctors have always absorbed the racial stereotypes and folkloric beliefs about racial differences that permeate the general population. Within the world of medicine this racial folklore has infiltrated all of the medical sub-disciplines, from cardiology to gynecology to psychiatry. Doctors have thus imposed white or black racial identities upon every organ system of the human body, along with racial interpretations of black children, the black elderly, the black athlete, black musicality, black pain thresholds, and other aspects of black minds and bodies. The American medical establishment does not readily absorb either historical or current information about medical racism. For this reason, according to Hoberman, racial enlightenment will not reach medical schools until the current race-aversive curricula include new historical and sociological perspectives.
Podcast: Download (26.5MB)
