3.00 Credits
This course will examine African Americans' struggles for equal access to healthcare from slavery to the present. Racist, gendered, sexualized, and ableist stereotypes of black bodies have made them subject to medical exploitation and experimentation, and has shaped their access to health and treatment when they do gain access. Moreover, structural inequalities have shaped African Americans disproportionate vulnerability to disease, and medical discourse has often ignored, distorted, or manipulated this knowledge to reproduce inequality. Given their unequal access to health and wellness, African Americans have struggled against discrimination and disenfranchisement from the colonial period to the present. This course will focus on how racial, gender, and sexual politics shape African Americans' experiences of health and illness, focusing on histories of medical experimentation, infectious diseases, sexually transmitted diseases, cancer, reproductive health, violence, criminalization (police brutality and incarceration), among other sites of health inequality. We will read works by: Harriet Washington, Evelyn Hammonds, Keith Wailoo, Dorothy Roberts, Jim Downs, Joanna Schoen, James H. Jones, Cathy Cohen, Samuel Kelton Roberts, Jonathan Metzl, Alondra Nelson, Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, Sonja MacKenzie, and John A Rich, among others.