Avoiding Racial Essentialism in Medical Science Curricula

Lundy Braun, Barry Saunders

A wave of medical student activism is shining a spotlight on medical educators' sometimes maladroit handling of racial categories in teaching about health disparities. Coinciding with recent critiques, primarily by social scientists, regarding the imprecise and inappropriate use of race as a biological or epidemiological risk factor in genetics research, medical student activism has triggered new collaborations among students, faculty, and administrators to rethink how race is addressed in the medical curriculum. Intensifying critiques of racial essentialism are a crucial concern for educators since bioscientific knowledge grounds the authority of health professionals. Central ethical issues-racial bias and social justice-cannot be properly addressed without confronting the epistemological problem of racial essentialism in bioscience teaching. Thus, educators now face an ethical imperative to improve academic capacities for robust interdisciplinary teaching about the conceptual apparatus of race and the recalibration of its use in teaching both genetics and the more pervasive and urgent social causes of health inequalities.