I am not your minority

Leaving aside all the physical facts which one can quote, leaving aside rape or murder, leaving aside the bloody catalogue of oppression, which we are in one way too familiar with already, what this does to the subjugatedis to destroy his sense of reality… the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you."James Baldwin, I am Not Your Negro 1Opening pages of The Lancet or The New England Journal of Medicine from the early-to mid-20th century exposes phrases like "a boy, aged 2½, of full-blooded negro stock" with "haemoglobinuria" or "a 21-year-old colored man" with myalgias.2,3 Reading terms like "Negro" and "colored" today might tense the muscles in revulsion or shame, yet such language was commonly used by medical academicians to describe Black patients in earlier eras.As Black descendants of the enslaved successively changed their group identity from "Colored" to "Negro" to "Black" ("negro/a/x/e" or "preto/ a/x/e") and, in the United States, to "African American," academic medical professionals have attempted to incorporate these terms into their clinical and scholarly lexicon.4 Yet, Western medicine continuously defaults to Whiteness as normative in ways that reinforce racial essentialism and overlook White supremacy.