Introduction: Critical Race Theory and the Health Sciences.

This symposium volume begins with a simple provocation: race and racism are central to the development of medicine and the health sciences. If pursuits of health equity are to be taken seriously, this repositioning of race as central rather than peripheral to science and medicine suggests that improved health outcomes and reduced disparities cannot be attained until we acknowledge that these fields are sustained by racialized social, political, and economic forms of governance. Despite the seemingly progressive and socially benevolent role assigned to the health sciences, we must expand our inquiries to understand how they are constituted by forms of reasoning, belief, and practice that cannot be decoupled from power relationships that create racial inequality. The authors in this symposium issue provide a framework for identifying the latent racism within the health sciences and in turn propose new directions for conceptualizing human difference and group disparities. Within medicine and the health sciences, race is widely understood as a “natural” part of human diversity that scientists and physicians merely observe. These fields largely assume that the visual distinctions that align with social understandings of race reflect real and meaningful biological dispositions. Tied to this is the assumption that these racialized genetic and physiological dispositions explain why certain racial groups may be sicker—or healthier—than others. From this standpoint, racism is thought to be an external social or political variable that has little to do with the processes that shape health outcomes or that influence the measurement of human differences. This perspective is not only woefully inadequate, but also affirmatively harms human health by perpetuating theories of biological race in the clinic, the lab, and within our collective imaginations.