Episode 5: How We Arrive

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What does it mean to be well in America? Who is seen as deserving of healthcare? Racism has plagued the American medical system since its inception and continues to produce disparities in health and life expectancy to this day. In this episode, Carvell Wallace and Jeffery Robinson trace the decades-long epidemic of sharply higher mortality rates among both Black people giving birth and their babies. In conversation with OB/GYN and maternal/infant health advocate Dr. Joia Crear-Perry, as well as SéSé Doula Services founder Nicole JeanBaptiste, we’ll examine the way the healthcare system was designed to fail Black people, with a focus on Black maternal and infant health.

Additional Resources

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• Campbell, Kendall M., Irma Corral, Jhojana L. Infante Linares, and Dmitry Tumin. 2020. “Projected Estimates of African American Medical Graduates of Closed Historically Black Medical Schools.” JAMA Network Open 3, no. 8: e2015220.

• Duffy, Thomas P. 2011. “The Flexner Report—100 Years Later.” The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 84, no. 3: 269–76.

• Greenwood, Brad N., Rachel R. Hardeman, Laura Huang, and Aaron Sojourner. 2020. “Physician-Patient Racial Concordance and Disparities in Birthing Mortality for Newborns.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 117, no. 35: 21194–200.

• Haskell, Rob. 2018. “Serena Williams on Motherhood, Marriage, and Making Her Comeback.” Vogue, January 10, 2018.

• Henson, Martelia L. “Medicalized Childbirth in the United States: Origins, Outcomes, and Opposition.” Marshall.Edu.

• “Interpretation: The Slave Trade Clause.” Constitutioncenter.Org. Accessed October 12, 2020.

• Kelkar, Kamala. 2016. “When Labor Laws Left Farm Workers behind — and Vulnerable to Abuse.” Pbs.Org. September 18, 2016.

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• Sidhu, Jonathan. “Exploring the AMA’s History of Discrimination.” Propublica.org. Accessed October 12, 2020.

• Stahnisch, Frank W., and Marja Verhoef. 2012. “The Flexner Report of 1910 and Its Impact on Complementary and Alternative Medicine and Psychiatry in North America in the 20th Century.” Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine: ECAM 2012: 647896.

• Sullivan, Louis W., and Ilana Suez Mittman. 2010. “The State of Diversity in the Health Professions a Century after Flexner.” Academic Medicine: Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges 85, no. 2: 246–53.

• Vilda, Dovile, Maeve Wallace, Lauren Dyer, Emily Harville, and Katherine Theall. 2019. “Income Inequality and Racial Disparities in Pregnancy-Related Mortality in the US.” SSM - Population Health, Volume 9, December 2019.

• Washington, Harriet A. 2008. “Apology Shines Light on Racial Schism in Medicine.” The New York Times, July 29, 2008.

• Wiencek, Henry. 2012. “The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson.” Smithsonian Magazine. September 30, 2012.

• Zhang, Sarah. 2018. “The Surgeon Who Experimented on Slaves.” Atlantic Monthly, April 18, 2018.