Why Black People Die Sooner

What Medicine Gets Wrong About Race and How to Fix It

Joseph L. Graves (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

272 Seiten

2025
Columbia University Press (Verlag)
978-0-231-21796-5 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

There is a persistent gap in life expectancy between Black people and their white counterparts in the United States. It is a direct result of structural racism within American society and has nothing to do with genetic differences. In past eras, scientific racism sought to shift the blame to the supposed physical inferiority of people of African descent. Even today, medicine labors under false beliefs derived from nineteenth-century racial thinking, harming patients who are not of European descent.

Why Black People Die Sooner is a powerful and rigorous examination of the ways racism shapes health and disease. Joseph L. Graves Jr. demonstrates that the medical profession still fails to grasp basic facts about race, tracing how deep-rooted falsehoods have perpetuated the disparity between Black and white lifespans. He equips readers with the tools to dispel the fallacies and errors of racialized medicine, including an understanding of evolutionary biology and human biological variation. Graves also debunks common misconceptions about race and health on topics such as high blood pressure, sickle cell disease, the microbiome, infectious diseases, and cancer. Why Black People Die Sooner closes by offering a sweeping vision for dismantling medical racism, from professional training to clinical practice through biomedical research. Timely and bracing, this book reveals why medicine keeps misunderstanding race—and how we can make it change.

Joseph L. Graves Jr. is the MacKenzie Scott Endowed Professor of Biology at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. A fellow of the Council of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he received the Liberty Science Center’s Genius Award in 2024. His books include Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (Columbia, 2021, with Alan H. Goodman), which received the 2024 W. W. Howells Prize for the best book in biological anthropology.

Preface
Introduction: Medicine Has Always Gotten Race Wrong
Part I. Why
1. Racial Injustice Causes Health Injustice
2. Don’t Blame It on Pandora
3. There Is No Slavery Gene: Debunking the Myths of Hypertension
4. Race and the Microbiome
Part II. Harm
5. Infectious Disease Strikes Unevenly: The Poor Die More
6. Bad Blood: The Racialization of Sickle Cell Anemia
7. Cancer Is Unfair
8. Race and Epigenomics: Nobody Knows the Trouble We’ve Seen
9. How Algorithms Can Hurt
Part III. How to Fix It
10. Precision Medicine
11. Doing the Work to Change Medical Minds
Conclusion: Building a World Where We Can All Live Well
Notes
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	17.10.2025
Zusatzinfo	11 B&W Images, 6 tables
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 235 mm
Themenwelt	Medizin / Pharmazie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
	Studium ► Querschnittsbereiche ► Epidemiologie / Med. Biometrie
	Studium ► Querschnittsbereiche ► Prävention / Gesundheitsförderung
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	0-231-21796-X / 023121796X
ISBN-13	978-0-231-21796-5 / 9780231217965
Zustand	Neuware