Being black in a capitalist white supremacist patriarchal society can affect your health. The enslavement torture and denial of life necessities for so much of American history to black folks produces what some people have called like a slave health deficit. What you see now is the way that scientific beliefs about the biology of black people is then linked to equally false and dangerous beliefs about the culture of African Americans.
Scientists weren’t the first to divide humanity along racial – and and racist – lines. But for hundreds of years, racial scientists claimed to provide proof for those racist hierarchies – and some still do.
Resources for this episode:
Fatal Invention, by Dorothy Roberts
The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter