For the spring semester, students at Columbia University will be able to take CSER W4340 “Visionary Medicine: Racial Justice, Health and Speculative Fictions.” The course, which claims that “racial justice is the bioethical imperative of our time,” has been highlighted by the MRCTV blog.
All the lofty liberal Ivy League dreams about what a course on race should entail are met with this class.
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The course description starts off by providing background on die-ins from black medical students during the Fall 2014 semester, as part of the Black Lives matter movement. Specific mention is made to black male medical students from Harvard.
The course description also ponders, with added emphasis:
From more of the course description?
With regards to the die-ins, many of the goals mentioned in a release from Physicians For A National Health Program are laudable:
We feel it is essential to begin a conversation about our role in addressing the explicit and implicit discrimination and racism in our communities and reflect on the systemic biases embedded in our medical education curricula, clinical learning environments, and administrative decision-making. We believe these discussions are needed at academic medical centers nationwide.
…
Racial bias and violence are not exclusively a problem of the criminal justice system. As we have seen in Ferguson, Mo., New York, and countless other places, bias kills, sickens, and provides inadequate care. As medical students, we must take a stand against the oppression of our black and brown patients, colleagues, friends, and family. By standing together at medical schools nationwide, we hope to demonstrate that the medical student community views racial violence as a public health crisis. We are #whitecoats4blacklives.
Certainly it ought to be a common goal that one’s race ought not to be a factor in the care he or she receives from the medical community.
With specific regards to Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray, such deaths were unfortunate. Their race should not be an only factor however when examining their death.
It’s worth speculating that if Brown, Garner, and Gray had been “more seemingly elite bodies,” i.e., white, and had interacted with police in the same manner that they did, they might still have ended up dead, and their deaths would still have been an unfortunate loss of human life.
The course also connects to activism. “Ultimately, the course aims to connect the work of science and speculative fiction with on the ground action and organizing,” the course description concludes.
MRCTV also pointed out that the course instructor Sayantani DasGupta, describes herself on Twitter as a “health and social justice scholar” and a “feminist media critic.” The course, for four credits, will be offered in the the Center for Study of Ethnicity and Race.
