"What Is (and Is Not) Racist in Our Healthcare System"

Ian Peebles (Philosophy, Arizona State University) will present a talk entitled "What Is (and Is Not) Racist in Our Healthcare System." 

Abstract: The past decade has brought with it increased attention to racial health disparities (RHDs) and the ways in which racism is implicated in these disparities. Contemporary work in philosophy and bioethics presupposes racism to be essentially structural or polysemous. While racism does manifest itself in various ways and at various levels (one of which is structural), I believe the current theories of racism predominant in the literature have limitations in the context of clinical care and research. In this talk, I will discuss what those limitations are, then offer a novel theory of racism – a virtue-based account of racism – as an alternative that is able to overcome these limitations while still highlighting the features most important in research related to RHDs and racism’s role in RHDs.  

Sponsored by the Redefining Doctoral Education in the Humanities Initiative, the Medical Humanities program, and the Department of African and African-American Studies.