2022 CAUSE & Heinz College Speaker Series
The Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE) and the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy are pleased to announce speakers for our 2022 virtual speaker series on racial disparities in America.
As part of Carnegie Mellon’s larger efforts to address these challenges, CAUSE (housed in the Department of History, Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences) and Heinz College created this series in 2021 to include collaborative programs designed to deepen our understanding of the historical and contemporary policy dimensions of persistent class and racial inequality in American society.
Segregated Medicine- How Racial Politics Shaped American Healthcare
Friday, March 11, 2022 | 4:30pm - 6:30pm ET
This talk argues that racial segregation played a critical role in shaping the development, distribution of resources, and organization of American healthcare in cities like St. Louis, MO. Segregated Medicine builds upon extant and forthcoming histories to address the central question posed in the book’s subtitle: How did racial politics, specifically the policies and practices of racial segregation and alternatively African Americans’ adaptations to it, shape the development and evolution of the American healthcare system? Eradicating segregated medicine in the 1950s and 60s combined with economic shifts in healthcare financing failed to uproot entrenched racial inequities. Desegregating American healthcare coincided with an economic restructuring of American healthcare in the 1970s and 80s that paradoxically left many African American communities without equitable access to hospital care. Narrated from a local perspective that places the intellectual, political, and social experiences of pragmatic African Americans at the center of the story, this book traces important transitions in American healthcare and their unexamined consequences on the ground. Segregated Medicine complements existing work that has largely told this story from the national political and policy perspectives.
Dr. Ezelle Sanford III is an Assistant Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University and Visiting Assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University. His scholarship sits at the intersection of African American, medical, and urban histories. He is particularly interested in histories of race, science, and medicine from the 19 th century to the present. He is currently working on a book project titled, Segregated Medicine: How Racial Politics Shaped American Healthcare, which utilizes the case of St. Louis’s Homer G. Phillips Hospital, America’s largest segregated hospital in the mid-twentieth century, to trace how the logic and legacy of racial segregation established structures of healthcare inequality that persist to this day. His work has been featured in popular and academic publications and has received several fellowships and awards.