ABSTRACT
This is a case study that points to some potentially negative consequences of failing to think clearly about race and racism (see the previous selection). This selection also provides a detailed illustration of the misinterpretation of statistics and the lack of standards and accountability in publishing them on the part of journalists, physicians, medical researchers, and pharmaceutical companies (see selection 28). For example, a widely cited statistic holds that mortality rates from heart disease are twice as high among Blacks as among Whites. This difference has been used to justify the development of an “ethnic drug” designed specifically on the basis of a thinly veiled concept of race. Kahn argues that this approach both diverts attention away from complex socioeconomic, behavioral, and psychosocial factors and favors the tendency to construe race as a biological category. He explains that thinking of diseases in terms of racial susceptibility continues to attract adherents despite a consensus within anthropology and genetics about the disutility of such a construct (see Graves 2001).
