ABSTRACT
Medicine cannot imagine more racially just futures until it grapples with its racially unjust past and present: its complicity in, dependence on, and enacting of racial violence. Students of the health humanities can utilize speculative and science fiction as lenses through which to examine medicine’s historic and present-day complicity in the dehumanization, subjugation, and torture of bodies of color. It is in this context that I teach “Black Museum,” a 2017 episode of the television program Black Mirror, and Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out in a senior undergraduate seminar called “Visionary Medicine: Racial Justice, Health and Speculative Fiction.” Both texts can be read as indictments of biotechnological medicine, but also of the health humanities, a field in which we often seek to empathetically “take the perspective of others.” Yet there is no neurotechnological or narrative “in” into another’s experience. For the health humanities field to expect such empathetic access is a kind of voyeurism. If anti-racist work is to be a part of the health humanities, our task must be to examine our own personal and institutional complicity in the silencing and marginalization of certain lived experiences in favor of others, and to listen harder, listen differently, listen better.
