Systemic: How Racism is Making Us Sick (Hardcover)

Description

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A science-based, data-driven, and global exploration of racial disparities in health care access by virologist, immunologist, and science journalist Layal Liverpool; In the spirit of ambitious bestselling books like Medical Apartheid and Killing the Black Body.

The COVID-19 pandemic taught us that viruses disproportionately affect people of color. Here, Layal Liverpool goes a step further to show that this disparity exists for all types of illness and that it is caused by racism. 

Liverpool will show how racism is woven, invisibly, not just into the structure of medicine and science but into our very bodies. Refuting the false belief that there are biological differences between races, Liverpool goes on to show that racial stereotyping and trauma can however lead to biological changes that make people of color more vulnerable to illness. 

Systemic tackles:

• The problem of racial bias and data gaps in medicine where the default human subject is white
• The dangerous health consequences of systemic racism, from the physical and psychological effects of daily micro- and macro-aggressions to intergenerational trauma
• The fatal stereotypes that keep people of color undiagnosed, untreated, and unsafe
• How we can fix these problems by confronting bias and closing the data gap

Using data-driven science, Layal Liverpool shows that racism itself can have biological consequences on the body.

About the Author

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Layal Liverpool is a science journalist with expertise in biomedical science, particularly virology and immunology. Her PhD research at Oxford focused on investigating how invading viruses are detected by the body’s immune system. Her writing has appeared in Nature, New Scientist, Wired, and the Guardian. Currently, she is a journalist at Nature.