Deirdre Cooper Owens, Wilson Professor of History and director of the Humanities in Medicine program, wrote a Feb. 12 guest column for The Washington Post on the United States’ long history of medical racism.
- She noted the similarities between the 1793 yellow fever epidemic — where many Black Philadelphians served as front-line workers and died in disproportionate numbers — and the current pandemic. Owens pointed out that publisher Mathew Carey wrote a pamphlet condemning Black workers, and that Black ministers Richard Allen and Absalom Jones wrote a tract refuting the mistaken belief about Black people’s immunity to yellow fever and defending the Black community against charges of immorality and criminality, providing evidence using quantitative data.
- She touched on other instances, such as the Tuskegee syphilis study, the case of Henrietta Lacks, and forced hysterectomies in the South in the 1950s and 1960s.
- She wrote that, thankfully, a number of major organizations, from the American Medical Association to the March of Dimes, have stepped up to declare medical racism a public health crisis.
- “Medical racism has no place in a country where Black Americans, like those who worked and suffered during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic, have contributed so much to our society,” she wrote. “It is an outdated racial science that not only has made the United States the most dangerous developed nation for Black pregnant people to give birth, but also has made a respiratory disease into a racialized disease.”
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Chigozie Obioma, English, an internationally recognized author:
- discussed his college experiences in Cyprus and the United States; his second novel, “An Orchestra of Minorities”; and how racism in America compares to that in other places, for a Feb. 2 Inland360.com article.
- read from his work and answered audience questions as part of Washington State University’s Visiting Writers Series.
- was the featured guest on the Feb. 8 episode of Literary Hub’s History of Literature podcast. He discussed his childhood in Nigeria, his novels “The Fishermen” and “An Orchestra of Minorities,” what he’s discovered about how fiction works, his love for Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day” and his recent work with the Alexander platform.
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New research led by Ingrid Haas, political science, has shown the human brain is processing politically incongruent statements differently — attention is perking up — and that the candidate’s conviction toward the stated position is also playing a role.
- Stories on the research have appeared in the Sidney Sun-Telegraph, Medical Xpress, Neuroscience News, Science Codex, Scienmag and a few other media outlets.
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A 2010 study by Dawn O. Braithwaite, interpersonal and family communication, and colleagues was highlighted in a Feb. 23 Wall Street Journal article on people relying on their “chosen family,” or close friends, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The study found that more “voluntary families” were “supplemental,” meaning members still got along with their biological or legal families but sought alternative kinds of support. Braithwaite was also quoted in the article.
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New research by Kate Lyons, biological sciences, and colleagues at the University of New Mexico suggests that the offspring of massive bipedal dinosaurs outcompeted medium-sized species for food, which would help explain the surprising lack of species diversity in an animal group that dominated the planet for roughly 140 million years.
