Race, health, and discrimination: historical and contemporary perspectives from Brazil and the United States.

This Supplement of CSP is the result of an interdisciplinary international conference Race, Health, and Discrimination: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in August 2015. The Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) and the University of Michigan collaborated to bring together approximately 40 scholars from Brazil and the United States to examine the status of current research and knowledge around race, health, and discrimination. This conference was one facet of a larger collaboration between Fiocruz and the University of Michigan that encompasses research areas in health, human rights, maternal and infant care, epidemiology and the history of medicine and public health. From the outset, we envisioned this as an interdisciplinary gathering – a type of academic meeting that is all too uncommon in academia. With this goal in mind, we brought together epidemiologists, historians, clinical researchers, anthropologists, geneticists, and sociologists to present diverse approaches to studying race/color, racism, and racial formation in relation to health and disease. The three co-organizers recognized the importance of race/color – as categories and lived experience – in studies of health and society around the world, and increasingly in Brazil. We also recognized that foregrounding race/color in Brazil can often require swimming upstream, given both the influences of longstanding conceptions of “racial democracy”, and the challenges associated with classifying race in a country where racial and ethnic survey categories vary regionally and over time. Despite this fluidity, ethnic and racial inequalities in health have been documented and reveal that black, indigenous and brown people face undisputable health inequalities. The disciplinary backgrounds of the three co-organizers – Dóra Chor, Alexandra Minna Stern, and Ricardo Ventura Santos – exemplifies our interest in interdisciplinary crossfertilization. Chor, an epidemiologist, has been at the forefront of a new wave of epidemiologic and public health research that demonstrates empirically the existence and profound implications of racial health inequalities in Brazil. Stern, a historian, has focused on changes and continuities in racial regimes and stereotypes in relation to health and illness in Latin America and the United States. Santos, an anthropologist, has written extensively on the complex relationship between racial/ ethnic identities, health and technoscience in Brazil. In addition to topics of race and health, the three editors have worked purposefully Race, health, and discrimination: historical and contemporary perspectives from Brazil and the United States