Institutional Racism, Whiteness, and Bioethics: symposium co-editor Chris Mayes

JBI Dialogues

In this episode of JBI Dialogues, Dr Christopher Mayes talks about the journal's new symposium Institutional Racism, Whiteness, and the Role of Bioethics. Chris is a Research Fellow in the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University and a Research-Affiliate in Sydney Health Ethics at the University of Sydney. He is an interdisciplinary scholar with disciplinary backgrounds in sociology and philosophy. He co-edited the Institutional Racism, Whiteness, and Bioethics symposium with Professor Yin Paradies and Dr Amanuel Elias. Yin is Professor of Race Relations and Amanual is a Research Fellow, also in the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University, Australia.

Lead essay extract: Institutional racism can be defined as differential access to power, resources, and opportunities by race that further entrenches privilege and oppression (Paradies 2016). Along with similar concepts such as systemic, structural, cultural, and societal racism, this form of racism profoundly shapes almost all aspects of our lives, including health and healthcare (Williams, Lawrence, and Davis 2019). Yet, racism more broadly and institutional racism in particular has been a neglected subject in bioethical discourse and scholarship (Danis, Wilson, and White 2016). Bioethics has the potential to make important contributions to anti-racist programmes and strategies addressing institutional racism, yet as scholars have argued, the “whiteness” of bioethics undermines its capacity to attend to institutionalized forms of racism (Mayes 2020; Russell 2016; Danis, Wilson, and White 2016). ... This symposium brings together scholars and researchers from a variety of disciplines to examine how racism has been institutionalized in healthcare, how whiteness manifests in healthcare, and what bioethics can contribute towards anti-racism. In October 2019, we invited researchers to consider the following questions:

• What are the historical and material processes that contributed to the institutionalization of racism in medicine and healthcare settings?
• What role can Indigenous knowledges play in de-centering whiteness and addressing racism?
• Does bioethics have a role in addressing racism or is it too entangled with histories of racism and whiteness?

The articles in this issue respond to these questions and articulate the affective dimension of race in clinical spaces, the economic and social costs of racialized health inequalities, the continuing effects of colonialism and complicity of bioethics in institutional racism.

Links / resources

• The complete Journal of Bioethical Inquiry symposium Institutional Racism, Whiteness and Bioethics
• Direct links to articles mentioned in the episode
  • Symposium Lead Essay: Institutional Racism, Whiteness, and the Role of Critical Bioethics, by Christopher Mayes, Yin Paradies, Amanuel Elias
  • White Medicine, White Ethics: On the Historical Formation of Racism in Australian Healthcare, by Christopher Mayes (in the Journal of Australian Studies)
  • Black bodies and Bioethics: Debunking Mythologies of Benevolence and Beneficence in Contemporary Indigenous Health Research in Colonial Australia, by Chelsea J. Bond, David Singh & Sissy Tyson
  • Bioethicists Should Be Helping Scientists Think About Race, by Camisha Russell