Black Bioethics, Racism, and Our Humanity: Using Our Stories for Justice

Despite Black people being central to the creation of bioethics and the development of its primary principles of ethical treatment in research and clinical care, issues relevant to the mistreatment of Black people are routinely treated as outliers in the field. Recently, there has been a push to change this and encourage bioethicists to honor it’s justice principles by making topics such as medical racism more mainstream, but progress has been slow. Here, I discuss one method of progression in the field—Black Bioethics—and what it means for how we think of Black people’s health, racism and epistemological violence’s threat to our health. I advocate for the use of Black people’s self-narratives as a means of pushing the field forward, securing health justice for Black people, and honoring African American culture.

Keisha Ray
Professor Keisha Ray received her PhD in philosophy from the University of Utah. She is currently a tenured Associate Professor and holds the John P. McGovern, MD Professorship of Oslerian Medicine at the McGovern Center for Humanities & Ethics at UT Health Houston. Most of Dr. Ray’s work focuses on the effects of institutional racism on Black people’s health, highlighting Black people’s own stories, and the sociopolitical implications of biomedical enhancement. She has contributed to top clinical, bioethics, and medical humanities journals. And based on her expertise, Dr. Ray is frequently called upon as a bioethics expert for popular news sources. Lastly, Dr. Ray is the author of the book “Black Health: The Social, Political, and Cultural Determinants of Black People’s Health” with Oxford University Press.

https://msu.zoom.us/j/99329403867

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