I always do a double take whenever I see AA as an abbreviation for race on lecture slides because “what you actually did research on Asian Americans that’s awesome” and then it’s never for Asian Americans because all scientists know that Asian Americans is basically the same thing as white people so like why do we need to study Asian Americans specifically as a racial subgroup to determine whether they have different needs for clinical care *sarcasm*
Seriously though, I find some treatment of Asian Americans in clinical research absolutely appalling. We don’t have data on the incidence of melanoma in Asian Americans and like... melanomas basically depend on sun exposure. Melanoma/sun exposure is in turn dependent on the environment, so we can’t exactly depend on research studies out of Asia for our estimates because of the history of colorism and colonialism has made many Asian Americans averse to sun exposure. At the same time, we don’t know the amount of sun exposure dark skinned individuals need to sustain sufficient Vit D. And colorectal cancer? Breast cancer? At some point, people decided because people in Asia have very low rates of breast cancer, all Asian Americans therefore do not need breast cancer screening, disregarding the evidence of many environment risk factors that are more prominent than genetic risk factors. Plenty of older Asian American women, who eat a more Americanized diet and follow more Americanized medical guidelines for care, died as a result.
Science, in general, has a really nasty and condescending habit of putting itself in an ivory tower and above the faults of society, that somehow empiricism is above racism and economic division, while forgetting that empiricism is always dependent on the bias and assumption the scientist makes. Science also has a habit of occasionally completely disregarding the lives it has taken in its ignorance. This attitude needs to change. We need to be better at recognizing disparities and differences, and how they impact science and the world. We’d all be scientists for that.