Keisha Ray, PhD, recently accepted a book contract for her forthcoming book, Black Health: Social, Cultural, and Political Determinants, from Oxford University Press. The book will be part of the Bioethics for Social Justice series.
Snippet about the book:
The emergence of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19 in 2020 has put black people’s health into America’s focus in ways it has never been before. So far, black people make up over 1/3 of COVID-19 related deaths. Like other health conditions that disproportionately affect black people, black people are not necessarily dying from COVID-19 just because they are black. They are dying because of the systemic and institutional racism that black people experience, which makes them vulnerable to poor health. COVID-19 has made people pay attention to the social causes of black people’s disproportionately poor health, including the social causes for the higher rates of co-morbidities. In this book, I want to extend the interest that the general public is showing for black people’s experiences of COVID-19 to the data we have on the other ways that systemic racism in American institutions affect black health.
This book is ultimately an inquiry into the relationship between health, health care, and social justice. Using the methodologies of inquiry established by bioethics and health humanities, I explore the injustices that oppression, white supremacy, and discrimination have imposed on black people and thus hindered their overall wellbeing and ability for social mobility. As such, this book is a good fit for the Bioethics for Social Justice series edited by Sean Valles and Quill Kukla. This book fits its theme of topics in bioethics and their social and cultural intersections, making it perfect for the series.