📚Ten Essential Black Bioethics Books

A curated list of my favorite books about the health and well-being of Black Americans

As an academic bioethicist, I give many lectures on justice in healthcare - often focusing on our shortcomings. It is impossible to address healthcare inequity without understanding our history's deep, painful roots in racism. It’s my responsibility to educate myself as much as possible about the history of racism and its continued impact today so I can be a better bioethicist and physician.

Understanding Black health is essential for every healthcare worker.

I’ve made you a curated list of my top ten books on Black health and wellbeing. I hope you’ll pick up at least one of these incredible books this Black History Month. Please let me know which book (or books!) interests you.

These are a few of my favorite Black bioethics books.

These ten books specifically help me:

• Understand the historical and current challenges Black patients face

• Connect how slavery and post-Reconstructionist policies and laws continue to impact Black people’s health and well-being today.

• More deeply connect anti-oppression ideas, such as anti-racism, with reproductive justice, disability justice, and environmental justice.

• Recognize the work I need to do to identify insidious racism in medicine and work to provide anti-racist care every day.

1. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century

By Dorothy Roberts

Not to exaggerate much - I think about this book all the time.

The Human Genome Project proved that humans are not divided by race, but biological arguments for racial differences persist in science and medicine. Roberts’ book helped me identify these biological assumptions more effectively in research papers and medical education. This book is highly readable and applicable to anyone involved in science education or interested in understanding what genetic science actually shows.

2. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

by Harriet Washington

If I had it my way, Medical Apartheid would be required reading for every medical and nursing student in America. Washington provides a complete history of America’s mistreatment of Black Americans, using them as experimental subjects without their knowledge or consent. From grave robbing to prisons, Black people’s bodies have been disrespected and violated in the name of medical science.

If you hope to understand the connections between Black American history and appropriate mistrust and distrust of medical research, Medical Apartheid is a must-read.

Also, check out Washington’s book Carte Blache: The Erosion of Medical Consent to better understand how loopholes to informed consent in the 1990s continue to impact vaccine research today.

3. Black Health: The Social, Political, and Cultural Determinants of Black People's Health (Bioethics for Social Justice)

by Keisha Ray

Keisha Ray’s book Black Health clarifies that “Black Health is Black Bioethics.” This book is rigorous enough for academic bioethicists and accessible to everyday patients.

She explores the hidden curriculum Black patients face, from having pain taken seriously to accessing life-saving medical interventions.

4. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

by Dorothy Roberts

First released in 1997, Killing the Black Body remains a powerful condemnation of the ways America fails Black citizens over and over. Roberts chronicles slavery, forced sterilization, criminalization of pregnancy, and how Black women have been denied access to motherhood for generations.

The Twentieth Anniversary Edition includes a new forward by the author.

5. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology 

By Deirdre Cooper Owens

Dierdre Cooper Evans tells the origin story of modern gynecology through the lens of the enslaved and poor women whose bodies were exploited to gather knowledge. In particular, Cooper Evans shows how Black and Irish women’s fertility was exploited not only for economic purposes but for medical experimentation and exploitation. She ties the erasure of Black women’s pain all the way to current approaches to fertility care.

The entire book is available for free through JSTOR.

6. Black Disability Politics 

By Sami Schalk

Sami Schalk’s Black Disability Politics shows how issues of disability and racism are intimately intertwined. Ableism, deeply rooted in white supremacy, means disabled Black Americans are impacted by racism multi-dimensionally. She shows how the Black liberation movement's language and political approach differ from the white-dominated disability rights movement in America.

I learned so much about both the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women’s Health Project from her unique disability perspective of the evidence.

7. Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forget

by Mikki Kendall

Mikki Kendall pulls no punches in Hood Feminism, showing how white feminism has not only abandoned women of color but often trampled over and erased them in the process.

Kendall expertly and accessibly spells out the connections between race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and violence.

8. Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundation, Theory, Practice, Critique

Edited by Loretta J. Ross, Lynn Roberts, Erika Derkas, Whitney Peoples & Pamela Bridgewater Toure

I refer to Radical Reproductive Justice as the bible of reproductive justice books. From fertility and pregnancy to parenthood, the book provides the theoretical and practical tools to understand the intersection of reproduction with other justice issues, such as environmental justice, abolition, poverty, and immigration.

Sections include historical context, policy, practice, activism, and poetry.

9. Reproductive Rights as Human Rights: Women of Color and the Fight for Reproductive Justice

by Zakiya Luna

Luna tells the story of the social justice organization SisterSong and how its members used international human rights frameworks to promote reproductive health in America. This is the book to learn about the activism and advocacy of SisterSong with context. She shows how Black women worked to redefine the most urgent questions in reproductive health around intersectional identities.

Luna effectively connects the fight for reproductive justice with broader civil liberties.

10. Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine

by Uché Blackstock

This book just came out this week! I’ve followed Dr. Blackstock on Twitter for years and am thrilled to have the chance to read her book on racism in medicine.

What other books have you read that helped you understand Black health better?

There are so many other books to share, but I’ll save them for another newsletter!