ABSTRACT
It is common knowledge that the US medical profession excluded Black people and white women from its ranks for most of its history. What is less widely considered is how much of the status achieved by the profession required those barriers. In this essay, I argue that medicine's storied transformation into an elite profession was as much a racial project as a professional one. Through a sociohistorical analysis, I illustrate how medicine's exclusionary practices were not simply historical artifacts of a racist society but were a core strategy for medicine's achievement of the American Dream. I take an intersectional view in considering racial projects as inherently gendered. Reconceptualizing professionalization as a racial project is important not just for understanding the past but for explaining enduring forms of exclusion in medicine as well as in the broader US labor market.
