Braun Lundy, Saunders Barry
Professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and Africana studies at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Associate professor of social medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill.
AMA J Ethics. 2017 Jun 1;19(6):518-527. doi: 10.1001/journalofethics.2017.19.6.peer1-1706.
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.
一波医学生激进主义浪潮正将聚光灯投向医学教育工作者在讲授健康差异时对种族类别的有时笨拙的处理方式。与近期主要由社会科学家提出的关于在遗传学研究中不精确且不恰当地将种族用作生物学或流行病学风险因素的批评相呼应，医学生激进主义引发了学生、教师和管理人员之间的新合作，以重新思考医学课程中如何处理种族问题。对种族本质主义的批评日益激烈，这是教育工作者至关重要的关切，因为生物科学知识是健康专业人员权威地位的基础。如果不在生物科学教学中直面种族本质主义的认识论问题，核心伦理问题——种族偏见和社会正义——就无法得到妥善解决。因此，教育工作者现在面临一项伦理责任，即提高学术能力，以便就种族概念体系进行强有力的跨学科教学，并重新校准其在遗传学教学以及健康不平等更为普遍和紧迫的社会成因教学中的应用。
