Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Black Lives Matter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Black Lives Matter. Show all posts

Saturday, March 18, 2023

Black Bioethics in the Age of Black Lives Matter

Ray, K., Fletcher, F.E., Martschenko, D.O. et al. 
J Med Humanit (2023).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09783-4

Here are two excerpts:

Lessons Black Bioethics can take from BLM

BLM showed that telling Black people’s stories or giving them a space to tell their own stories is viewed as an inherently political act simply because Black people’s existence is viewed as political. At the same time, it taught us that we absolutely must take on this task because, if we do not tell our stories, other people will tell them for us and use our stories to deny us our rightful moral status and all the rights it entitles us.

BLM let Black people’s stories fuel its social justice initiatives. It used stories to put Black people at the forefront of protests and social inclusion efforts to show the extent to which Black people had been excluded from our collective social consciousness. Stories allowed us to see the total impact of anti-Black racism and the ways it infiltrates all parts of Black life. And for those who were far removed from the experience of being Black, BLM used stories to make us care about racial injustice and be so moved that we were unable to turn our backs on Black people’s suffering. In this way, stories are an act of rebellion, a way to force people to reckon with BLM’s demands that Black people ought to be treated like the full and complex human beings we are.

Black Bioethics is also a rebellion. It is a rebellion against the status quo in bioethics—a rebellion against Black people’s lives being an afterthought, particularly in issues of justice. Stories aid in this rebellion. Just as stories helped BLM show the full range of Black people’s humanity and the ways that individuals and institutions deny Black people that humanity, stories help Black Bioethics demonstrate just how our institutions contribute to Black people’s poor health and prevent them from living full lives. In Black Bioethics, stories can create the same emotional stirring that they did for BLM supporters since they share many of the same challenges and goals. And just as it would be imprudent to underestimate the role of stories in social justice, it would be imprudent of us to underestimate what stories can do for our sense of health justice for Black people.

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Toward an intersectional bioethics

Bioethics is well-positioned to foster antiracism in scholarship, training, and advocacy (Danis et al. 2016). Although the field focuses on ethical issues in biomedical research and clinical care specifically, Danis et al. (2016) point out that many ethical dilemmas that impact health and well-being lie outside of healthcare settings. For instance, there are significant ethical dilemmas posed by the social determinants of health and complex disease. Social factors such as poverty, unequal access to healthcare, lack of education, stigma, and racism are underlying and contributing factors to health inequalities. These inequalities, in turn, generate the ethical dilemmas that bioethics grapples with (Danis et al. 2016). If the field genuinely values the just conduct of biomedical research and the just provision of clinical care, then it will need to draw upon intersectionality to understand and effectively analyze the many interlocking complexities in our world and in human experiences. Social activist movements like BLM and their use of intersectionality offer several lessons to those in the field working to secure justice in biomedicine, clinical care, and society.

First, as an analytic tool, intersectionality recognizes and understands that different social forces conjoin to produce and maintain privilege and marginalization. Therefore, intersectionality clarifies instances in which real lives and experiences are being erased. Bioethics cannot afford to “neglect entire ways of being in the world,” though it has and continues to do so (Wallace 2022, S79). Social activist movements like BLM are drawing attention to ways of being that are unjust yet largely ignored by mainstream hegemonic interests. For instance, BLM directly acknowledges within its movement “those who have been marginalized within [other] Black liberation movements” (Black Lives Matter n.d.). Using intersectionality, BLM heightens awareness of the ways in which Black queer and trans individuals, undocumented individuals, and people with disabilities have different experiences with White supremacy and advance colonialism. In doing so, it centers rather than erases real lives and experiences. Learning from this movement, bioethical scholarship grounded in the principle of justice will need to find ways to center the experiences of Black-identifying individuals without treating the Black community as a homogenous entity.

Monday, June 22, 2020

5 Anti-Racist Practices White Scholars Can Adopt Today – #BLM Guest Post

Marius Kothor
TheProfessorIsIn.com
Originally posted 17 June, 2020

We are facing a historic moment of reckoning. The violent murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis ignited a movement that has engulfed the entire country. As people demand companies and organizations to account for their complicity in systemic racism, Black scholars are shedding new light on the anti-Blackness embedded within academic institutions. 

Black scholars such as Dr. Shardé M. Davis and Joy Melody Woods, for example, have started the #BlackintheIvory to bring renewed attention to the Micro and Macro level racism Black scholars experience in academia. A number of white scholars, on the other hand, are using this moment as an opportunity for hollow virtue signaling. Many have taken to social media to publicly declare that they are allies of Black people. It is unclear, however, if these performances of “woke-ness” will translate into efforts to address the systemic racism embedded in their departments and universities. From my experiences as a graduate student, it is unlikely that it will. Yet, for white scholars who are genuinely interested in using this moment to begin the process of unlearning the racist practices common in academia, there are a few practical steps that they can take. 

Below is a list of 5 things I think white scholars can do to begin to address racism in their day-to-day encounters with Black scholars. 
  1. Publicly Articulate Solidarity with Black Scholars
  2. Stop Calling the Black People in Your Institution by the Wrong Name
  3. Do Not Talk to Black People as if You Know their Realities Better than They do
  4. Cite Black Scholars in the Body of Your work, Not Just in the Footnotes 
  5. Don’t Try to Get Black Scholars to Validate Your Problematic Project 

Saturday, September 16, 2017

How to Distinguish Between Antifa, White Supremacists, and Black Lives Matter

Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic
Originally published August 31, 2017

Here are two excerpts:

One can condemn the means of extralegal violence, and observe that the alt-right, Antifa, and the far-left have all engaged in it on different occasions, without asserting that all extralegal violence is equivalent––murdering someone with a car or shooting a representative is more objectionable than punching with the intent to mildly injure. What’s more, different groups can choose equally objectionable means without becoming equivalent, because assessing any group requires analyzing their ends, not just their means.

For neo-Nazis and Klansmen in Charlottesville, one means, a torch-lit parade meant to intimidate by evoking bygone days of racial terrorism, was deeply objectionable; more importantly, their end, spreading white-supremacist ideology in service of a future where racists can lord power over Jews and people of color, is abhorrent.

Antifa is more complicated.

Some of its members employ the objectionable means of initiating extralegal street violence; but its stated end of resisting fascism is laudable, while its actual end is contested. Is it really just about resisting fascists or does it have a greater, less defensible agenda? Many debates about Antifa that play out on social media would prove less divisive if the parties understood themselves to be agreeing that opposing fascism is laudable while disagreeing about Antifa’s means, or whether its end is really that limited.

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A dearth of distinctions has a lot of complicated consequences, but in aggregate, it helps to empower the worst elements in a society, because those elements are unable to attract broad support except by muddying distinctions between themselves and others whose means or ends are defensible to a broader swath of the public. So come to whatever conclusions accord with your reason and conscience. But when expressing them, consider drawing as many distinctions as possible.

The article is here.