Scholar and author Harriet Washington will speak on medical racism in a virtual discussion presented by the University of Alabama at Birmingham on Thursday, Nov. 4. The event will be from 5-6 p.m. via Zoom. Register online.
Washington is the author of “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present,” which won a National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the 2007 PEN Oakland Award and the 2007 American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award. She will speak about her groundbreaking work and how legacies of violence and exploitation impact the medical system today.
“Medical Apartheid and the Exploitation of Black Bodies: An Evening with Harriet Washington” will be moderated by Kecia Thomas, Ph.D., dean of the UAB College of Arts and Sciences.
This public health and social justice discussion is presented by UAB’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the College of Arts and Sciences’ Institute for Human Rights, Lister Hill Center for Health Policy, and Student Affairs’ Student Multicultural and Diversity Programs.
Washington has been a fellow in medical ethics at the Harvard Medical School, a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University, a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health and the recipient of a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University.
In 2021, she published “Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent.” Her 2019 book, “A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind,” explores how poor people of color disproportionately suffer from environmental disasters and exposure to environmental toxins. She is also the author of “Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We ‘Catch’ Mental Illness” and “Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself — And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future.”