Common formulations of the concept of white privilege propose that white privilege guarantees white people positive results. So, when bad things happen to white people — when the jobs and the ...industries on which they once relied disappear, when they are denied admission to their preferred university, when they lose a promotion to a nonwhite candidate, when they die from suicide and drug overdoses at unprecedented rates — we are left to believe that white people experiencing these adverse consequences did not have white privilege or that their white privilege did not work for them. That is, we are left to conclude that white privilege is meaningless when white disadvantage is present. Further, given the undeniable fact of widespread white disadvantage, we are left vulnerable to the claim that for many, if not most, white people, white privilege is inconsequential, insignificant, or altogether nonexistent.
In reality, the fact of white privilege is much more complicated than this facile, mechanical formulation suggests. This Article proposes that we ought to understand white privilege to be something that can lead to unfavorable results just as capably as it can lead to favorable ones. That is, white privilege is a double-edged sword. Theorizing both edges of white privilege provides a more nuanced rendering of the concept. This complexly rendered formulation may help us understand how white privilege can coexist with white disadvantage. Indeed, it might help us understand how white privilege actively produces white disadvantage.
The Article uses the recent arrests and prosecutions of women for using opioids during their pregnancies as an opportunity to engage with and theorize the idea of white privilege. The analysis proceeds in four Parts. Part I explains the origins of the opioid epidemic as well as the government’s response to it, emphasizing that the current drug crisis has hit white people and white communities the hardest and, further, that pregnant women have not been immune from it. Part II explores how the State has responded to substance use during pregnancy. At times, the State has responded with its civil systems, choosing to involve the child welfare system and child protective services; at other times, it has responded with its criminal systems, choosing to arrest and prosecute women for using substances while pregnant. Part III then analyzes the demographics of these arrests and prosecutions. It explains that prosecuting women for substance use during pregnancy began in earnest in the 1980s and 1990s, when the crack cocaine scare gripped the nation. During this time, those who were prosecuted were largely black women. However, the opioid epidemic (and the methamphetamine scare before it) has hit white communities particularly hard. Consequently, the demographics of arrests and prosecutions for substance use during pregnancy have shifted, with white women coming to predominate among those subjected to penal state power. Part IV theorizes the significance of these shifted demographics — investigating what they might mean for the concept of white privilege. A brief Conclusion follows.
When it comes to people of color, the Roberts Court treats "racism" as if it is an objective fact - out there in the world, apparent to anyone who stumbles upon it. The Roberts Court invites ...observers to believe that it is just using simple common sense when it identifies, or refuses to identify, something as racism.
Reproducing Race, an ethnography of pregnancy and birth at a large New York City public hospital, explores the role of race in the medical setting. Khiara M. Bridges investigates how race--commonly ...seen as biological in the medical world--is socially constructed among women dependent on the public healthcare system for prenatal care and childbirth. Bridges argues that race carries powerful material consequences for these women even when it is not explicitly named, showing how they are marginalized by the practices and assumptions of the clinic staff. Deftly weaving ethnographic evidence into broader discussions of Medicaid and racial disparities in infant and maternal mortality, Bridges shines new light on the politics of healthcare for the poor, demonstrating how the "medicalization" of social problems reproduces racial stereotypes and governs the bodies of poor women of color.
Racial disparities in maternal mortality have recently become a popular topic, with a host of media outlets devoting time and space to covering the appalling state of black maternal health in the ...country. Congress responded to this increased societal awareness by passing the 'Preventing Maternal Deaths Act' at the tail end of 2018. The law provides states twelve million dollars annually, for five years, to fund maternal mortality review commissions-interdisciplinary collections of experts that evaluate and investigate the causes of every maternal death in a jurisdiction. Fascinatingly, although activists, journalists, politicians, scholars, and other commentators understand that the maternal health tragedy in the United States is a racial tragedy, the 'Preventing Maternal Deaths Act' completely ignores race. Indeed, the term "race" does not appear anywhere in the text of the statute. The irony is striking: An effort to address a phenomenon that has become salient because of its racial nature ignores race entirely. The racial irony embodied by the 'Preventing Maternal Deaths Act' serves as an invitation to investigate not only the Act itself, but the national conversation that is currently taking place about racial disparities in maternal deaths. Indeed, in important respects, if the general discourse that surrounds racial disparities in maternal mortality is impoverished, then we should expect that the solutions that observers propose will be impoverished as well. This is precisely what this article discovers.
We hear the term "poor people and people of color" regularly. For example, the term frequently pops up in discussions of the criminal justice system. As a case in point, a recent report by The ...Sentencing Project describes racial disparities in sentencing and criticizes the United States for effectively operating "two distinct criminal justice systems: one for wealthy people and another for poor people and people of color." The term also appears in analyses of the ubiquitous presence that the state has in the lives of disempowered populations. In a report published by The Century Foundation, the authors assert that "we do not need a unified theory of privacy to show that... marginal communities enjoy far less of it in practice. In some contexts, poor people and people of color have legal rights to privacy, but no means to exercise them." Variations of the term are also common. For example, a Center for American Progress article, which condemns the Hyde Amendment for making abortion inaccessible to women who cannot afford to pay for the procedure, is titled "How the Hyde Amendment Discriminates Against Poor Women and Women of Color.", We hear the term "poor people and people of color" regularly. For example, the term frequently pops up in discussions of the criminal justice system. As a case in point, a recent report by The Sentencing Project describes racial disparities in sentencing and criticizes the United States for effectively operating "two distinct criminal justice systems: one for wealthy people and another for poor people and people of color." The term also appears in analyses of the ubiquitous presence that the state has in the lives of disempowered populations. In a report published by The Century Foundation, the authors assert that "we do not need a unified theory of privacy to show that . . . marginal communities enjoy far less of it in practice. In some contexts, poor people and people of color have legal rights to privacy, but no means to exercise them." Variations of the term are also common. For example, a Center for American Progress article, which condemns the Hyde Amendment for making abortion inaccessible to women who cannot afford to pay for the procedure, is titled "How the Hyde Amendment Discriminates Against Poor Women and Women of Color."
What does racial justice - and racial injustice - look like with respect to artificial intelligence in medicine ("medical AI")? This article offers that racial injustice might look like a country in ...which law and ethics have decided that it is unnecessary to inform people of color that their health is being managed by a technology that likely encodes the centuries of inequitable medical care that people of color have received. Racial justice might look like an informed consent process that is reformed in light of this reality. This article makes this argument in four Parts. Part I canvases the deep and wide literature that documents that people of color suffer higher rates of illness than their white counterparts while also suffering poorer health outcomes than their white counterparts when treated for these illnesses. Part II then provides an introduction to AI and explains the uses that scholars and developers predict medical AI technologies will have in healthcare, focusing specifically on the management of pregnancy. Part III subsequently serves as a primer on algorithmic bias - that is, systematic errors in the operation of an algorithm that result in a group being unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged. This Part argues that we should expect algorithmic bias that results in people of color receiving inferior pregnancy-related healthcare, and healthcare generally, because medical AI technologies will be developed, trained, and deployed in a country with striking and unforgivable racial disparities in health. Part IV forms the heart of the article, making the claim that obstetricians, and healthcare providers generally, should disclose during the informed consent process their reliance on, or consultation with, medical AI technologies that likely encode inequities. To be precise, providers should have to tell their patients that an algorithm has informed the recommendation that the provider is making; moreover, providers should inform their patients how racial disparities in health may have impacted the algorithm's accuracy. It supports this argument by recounting the antiracist, anti-white supremacist-indeed radical-origins of informed consent in the Nuremberg Trials' rebuke of Nazi "medicine." This Part argues that the introduction into the clinical encounter of medical AI - and the likelihood that these technologies will perpetuate racially inequitable healthcare while masking the same - is an invitation to reform the informed consent process to make it more consistent with the commitments that spurred its origination. This Part proposes that, given the antiracist roots of the doctrine of informed consent, it would be incredibly ironic to allow the informed consent process to permit a patient - and, particularly, a patient of color - to remain ignorant of the fact that their medical care is being managed by a device or system that likely encodes racism. This Part argues that informing patients about the likelihood of race-based algorithmic bias - and the reasons that we might expect race-based algorithmic bias - may, in fact, be a prerequisite for actually transforming the inequitable social conditions that produce racial disparities in health and healthcare.
Disability-selective abortion bans are laws that prohibit individuals from terminating a pregnancy because the fetus has been diagnosed with a health impairment. Many environmental toxins-to which ...low-income people and people of color disproportionately are exposed-are known to cause impairments in fetuses. When the fact of environmental injustice is read together with disability-selective abortion bans, we see that in one moment, the state fails to protect its citizens from toxins that impair fetal health, while in another moment, that same government compels its citizens to give birth to health-impaired fetuses. This Article identifies these two moments as the dysgenic state. Whereas the eugenic state of the early twentieth century sought to remove impairments from the population, the dysgenic state of the early twenty-first century seems committed to producing an impaired citizenry.
This Article makes two important interventions into the existing literature. First, the Article intervenes simply to identify the dysgenic state-to call out the processes that harm the health of fetuses and then compel pregnant people to carry these pregnancies to term. Second, the Article intervenes to analyze the racial stakes of the dysgenic state. What is the significance of the empirically documented fact that people of color are disproportionately exposed to environmental toxins? What does it mean that because people of color also disproportionately bear the burdens of poverty, they are the least able to avoid the constraints of abortion regulations like disability-selective abortion bans? What does it mean, then, that the state produces impairments not in its citizenry generally, but in its nonwhite citizenry specifically? This is the puzzle that this Article sets out to describe and then analyze.
Deploying Death Bridges, Khiara M
UCLA law review,
04/2022, Letnik:
68, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This Article observes that if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, people of color-specifically black people-disproportionately will be impacted by the abortion restrictions that will ...proliferate in the wake of the decision. In many cases, those forced to terminate unwanted pregnancies under unsafe conditions will be black; some of these people will die. This Article asks about the political weight of these deaths. It asks whether abortion rights activists will deploy the deaths of black people with the capacity for pregnancy in their continued struggle for abortion rights. And it wonders whether activists for racial justice will deploy the deaths of these black people-most of whom will be cis women, but many of whom will be trans men and nonbinary people-in the struggle against racial injustice.
The Poverty of Privacy Rights makes a simple, controversial argument: Poor mothers in America have been deprived of the right to privacy.The U.S. Constitution is supposed to bestow rights equally. ...Yet the poor are subject to invasions of privacy that can be perceived as gross demonstrations of governmental power without limits. Courts have routinely upheld the constitutionality of privacy invasions on the poor, and legal scholars typically understand marginalized populations to have "weak versions" of the privacy rights everyone else enjoys. Khiara M. Bridges investigates poor mothers' experiences with the state—both when they receive public assistance and when they do not. Presenting a holistic view of just how the state intervenes in all facets of poor mothers' privacy, Bridges shows how the Constitution has not been interpreted to bestow these women with family, informational, and reproductive privacy rights. Bridges seeks to turn popular thinking on its head: Poor mothers' lack of privacy is not a function of their reliance on government assistance—rather it is a function of their not bearing any privacy rights in the first place. Until we disrupt the cultural narratives that equate poverty with immorality, poor mothers will continue to be denied this right.
The aim of this article is to begin to theorize the fraught space within which class-privileged racial minorities exist the disadvantage within their privilege. The article posits that the ...invisibility of the racial subordination of wealthier people of color (that is, their marginalization on account of their race) is fertile soil for the germination of post-racialism the sense that we, as a nation, have overcome our racial problems. The dramatic visibility of the minority poor's suffering, combined with the relative invisibility of the suffering of those minorities who are not poor, breeds the belief that class is now the main issue; it breeds the belief that class is the thing that really matters. If, as post-racialism suggests, class is the real problem, then we can, and ought to, dismantle any racial stratification that we witness through race-neutral, class-based means. But, if race remains a real problem that is, if people and groups continue to be disadvantaged on account of their race then the class-based mechanisms will not actually eliminate racial inequality. Thus, it is important for us to see the race-based disadvantage that class-privileged people of color endure in order to defeat post-racial thinking., The aim of this article is to begin to theorize the fraught space within which class-privileged racial minorities exist—the disadvantage within their privilege. The article posits that the invisibility of the racial subordination of wealthier people of color (that is, their marginalization on account of their race) is fertile soil for the germination of post-racialism—the sense that we, as a nation, have overcome our racial problems. The dramatic visibility of the minority poor’s suffering, combined with the relative invisibility of the suffering of those minorities who are not poor, breeds the belief that class is now the main issue; it breeds the belief that class is the thing that really matters. If, as post-racialism suggests, class is the real problem, then we can, and ought to, dismantle any racial stratification that we witness through race-neutral, class-based means. But, if race remains a real problem—that is, if people and groups continue to be disadvantaged on account of their race—then the class-based mechanisms will not actually eliminate racial inequality. Thus, it is important for us to see the race-based disadvantage that class-privileged people of color endure in order to defeat post-racial thinking.
