Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, Volume 3 Issue 1, Special Issue: Race and the Global Politics of Health Inequity
Numbers about human tragedy often elicit only a dulled response and a rueful shake of the head: In 2008, 9.2 million children died from vaccine-preventable disease. In 2004, 2.2 million people worldwide succumbed to diarrheal diseases. Are we surprised that in that same year, 99% of maternal deaths occurred in developing countries? Or that the child mortality rate in Africa was four times the adult mortality rate? That’s a lot of numbers and a lot of ratios. Yet because of the size, a casual reader does not, perhaps cannot or will not, take in the specifics. After all, what does “9.2 million children” mean, this slaughter of innocents? It may be that the abstract quality of large numbers allows us to insulate ourselves against the monstrousness of the human suffering they represent.
In this issue of Race/Ethnicity, we invite our readers to consider whether there is anything “natural” about human suffering of this magnitude, so marked by race, class, gender and geography, with special attention to the social, economic and political foundations of health inequity.The issue begins with our “classic” piece, Dr. Paul Farmer’s “On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below,” in part because it gives faces and a presence to the weight of numbers. We follow Dr. Farmer’s essay with several graphs culled from various sources to some world-wide statistics on life and death.
Our five essays consider a variety of health-related topics, outcomes, current research, and issues. The Whariki Research Group of Massey University, New Zealand, explores the perception of privilege in “ ‘It’s Hard at the Top but It’s a Whole Lot Easier than Being at the Bottom:’ The Role of Privilege in Understanding Disparities in Aotearoa/New Zealand.”
In “Science, Surveillance, and the Politics of Redress in health Disparities Research,” Simon J. Craddock Lee of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center explores the complexities involved in trying to take “race” and “ethnicity” seriously in health research without reifying race and ethnicity.
“Biobank” is a general term for any collection of biological material and data that will one day be utilized by medical researchers. Richard Tutton of Lancaster University examines some of the controversies surrounding the work of the United Kingdom Biobank in “Biobanks and the Inclusion of Racial/Ethnic Minorities.” Though promoted by some as a way to treat and cure human ailments, other see the possibility of such data stores being used to reinforce racial stereotypes.
In “Cultural Factors Influencing HIV-Related Attitudes and Behaviors in the third World: Ethnicity and Religion in Guyana,” Jessica Hubbard and Richard Lee Rogers of Southern Wesleyan University examine how cultural factors such as ethnicity and religion impact the transmission AIDS among individuals in Guyana.
Dr. Edward O’Neil Jr.’s essay neatly bookends our classic piece, supplying a view on suffering from the streets of Nairobi, Capital of Kenya, where he worked as a physician in “Poverty, Structural Violence, and Racism in a World Out of Balance.”
