Reproduction of Race Science: How My Health Care Education is Teaching Racial Bias

“You have to push harder when you give black women epidurals, you know, because black people have tougher muscles.” This is how an acquaintance of mine in nurse-anesthetist school described his recent clinical experience administering epidurals. Where did this person learn this? Was his assumption racial bias he brought to nursing, or was the racial bias taught as a part of his health care education? How are such flagrantly racist biases circulated as “scientific truths” in the medical community so that practitioners are emboldened to state them as fact? Easily, if my first semester in nursing school has taught me anything. Racism and race science is a part of our curriculum. For example, one instructor taught my class that “black women have a higher breast cancer mortality rate. We’re not… Read more »