#structural racism

[odinsblog]

[feminist-space]

[bookquotesfrombooks]

“But crime bills have never correlated to harm any more than fear has correlated to actual violence. We are not meant to fear suits with policies that kill. We are not meant to fear good White males with AR-15s. No, we are to fear the weary, unarmed Latinx body from Latin America. The body kneeling to Allah is to be feared. The black body from hell is to be feared. Adept politicians and police and prison entrepreneurs manufacture the fear and stand before voters to deliver them—messiahs who will liberate them from fear of these other bodies.”

Ibram X. Kendi

How to Be an Antiracist (Paperback Edition)

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Howard Fenn & Kurt Miceli

Published: Feb 8, 2026

The president’s recent push to send federal health care dollars directly to individuals, rather than insurers, reflects a broader demand for transparency and effectiveness in how public funds are used. Government‑funded medical research, which forms the foundation of much clinical care, also requires such scrutiny. In recent years, academic medicine has advanced a nebulous theory of “structural racism” that echoes the 19th‑century miasma idea which blamed disease on “bad air.” Despite scant evidence, studies attempting to validate this vague framework have multiplied, often funded by largely unaware taxpayers. Refocusing federal research dollars on rigorous science and evidence-based care is essential to correcting this trajectory.

But how did this happen? The construct of “structural racism” was virtually absent from medical literature until a decade ago. Since then, it has become the default explanation in academic medicine for differences in health outcomes across racial and ethnic groups. Its rise accelerated during the 2020 anti-racism zeitgeist, which swept through corporate boardrooms and university administrations while also becoming a core ideological pillar of Black Lives Matter and other political movements.

Academic medicine was no exception. This philosophy quickly gained favor in medical education, academic health centers, elite journals, and professional associations, eventually influencing federal agencies that distribute research monies.

The result: a surge of grant-funded studies built on the premise that racism causes health disparities. Of the nearly 2,300 articles indexed under the term “structural racism” in PubMed, the US National Library of Medicine’s database of leading biomedical and health journals, 95% were published after Jan. 1, 2020. In 2025 alone, PubMed lists 400 such papers – nearly four times the total published before 2020.

Supporting this proliferation has been a tsunami of federal taxpayer dollars coming from the National Institutes of Health. From 2020 to 2025, an NIH database search finds nearly 750 projects mentioning “structural racism” in their abstracts, costing almost $533 million in total. More than 70 of those projects were funded in 2025 at just under $40 million – significantly down from 2024’s 220+ projects totaling $150 million, but still far above 2020, when only 12 projects received a little over $12 million in aggregate. Before 2020, the NIH had funded just 10 such projects at a combined cost of $4 million.

Funding patterns across NIH’s 27 Institutes and Centers from 2020 to 2025 make clear that ideology, not medical science, drove much of this growth. The largest investments came from the National Institute on Drug Abuse ($147 million in total funding), National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities ($70 million), and National Institute on Aging ($57 million), each pouring substantial resources into “structural racism” research.

In 2025, for example, NIDA supported a project under the Healthy Brain and Child Development National Consortium that identified “structural racism” as a risk to babies before and after birth, alongside more recognizable factors like maternal health, toxic exposures, and child abuse – thereby conflating an abstract, ill-defined, and ideological social theory with measurable, scientific variables as a threat to child development.

Also in 2025, NIMHD funded the Clinical Research Scholars Training (CREST) program, a “health-equity focused” initiative created in part due to NIH calls for research on “the impact of structural racism and discrimination on health disparities.” Eligibility for this program was limited to those deemed “underrepresented in biomedical research.” All others need not apply.

And just last year, a NIA-funded project invoked “interrelated systems of structural racism” and “race-specific stress” as risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline, diverting attention and resources away from well-established contributors such as genetics, medical conditions, lifestyle and environmental factors, and core biological mechanisms like amyloid plaques and tau tangles.

Unfortunately, a commitment to science gave way to ideology years ago. Under Francis Collins, the NIH “acknowledged and committed to ending structural racism,” without even defining the concept itself. “Structural racism” was accepted despite its questionable validity and lack of explanatory power. With vague boundaries and mechanisms difficult to measure, claims of “structural racism” far exceeded the empirical evidence. Nevertheless, the idea was accepted wholesale and used to justify a wave of DEI initiatives, effectively recasting the NIH as an “anti-racist” institution in the Ibram Kendi mold. Objective science was no longer sufficient; the agency was expected to take an activist stance.

Proponents embraced this shift, seeing an opportunity to move health research from “individual-level risk, health behavior, and functioning” to “structural level concepts” with “structural racism” specifically named. Research dollars supported tools like the Structural Racism Effect Index to “guide policies and investments to advance health equity.” The incentives were clear: Few researchers – early-career or established – would decline funding in an area where the NIH was heavily investing, especially when that support could provide a route to publication in top journals.  

Yet the instruments used to quantify “structural racism” expose a basic flaw: They don’t measure racism. The SREI’s nine dimensions, for example, largely track socioeconomic conditions – wealth, income, housing, employment. In practice, a high score identifies communities facing poverty. Even researchers linking SREI scores to hypertension, obesity, smoking, and low physical activity concede they “cannot make causal inferences.” These health risks may result from poverty, contribute to it, or arise from entirely different causes. Labeling them as products of “structural racism” adds no explanatory value, miscasts economic hardship as race-based, and downplays individual responsibility. It overshadows far more consequential drivers of outcome disparities, including access to care, personal choice, medical comorbidities, and genetics.

Nonetheless, no alternative explanation for health disparities has received anywhere near the same attention in leading medical journals – such as The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and JAMA – as “structural racism.” This concept has been treated as settled fact, with disparities alone offered as proof: If disparities exist, racism must be the cause. Likewise, many medical organizations have reinforced this view through policies and position papers that embed an anti-racism framework into scientific inquiry.

But change is in the air. The NIH’s recent miasma-like fixation on “structural racism” is finally clearing, and under Director Jay Bhattacharya the agency is refocusing on its core mission of funding rigorous, evidence-based science rather than ideology-driven research. This shift will direct scarce taxpayer dollars toward work grounded in medical science and its practical application – research that can genuinely improve health rather than feed political currents. This course correction is timely, and while sustained effort in 2026 will be needed to fully restore the NIH to its rightful mission, taxpayers can take comfort: America’s leading biomedical and medical science research institute will once again prioritize their dollars and their health.

-

Howard H. Fenn is a clinical psychiatrist certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology with additional qualifications in geriatric psychiatry. 

Kurt Miceli serves as chief medical officer for Do No Harm, a membership organization representing health-care professionals, patients, and policymakers focused on keeping identity politics out of medicine.

==

Wouldn't it be easier to just study the best ways to align everyone's chakras?

[yayfeminism]

“Even if someone could snap their fingers and eliminate every racist idea in every human’s head, racial injustice would persist. People of color would still wake up the next morning, and the morning after that, in neighborhoods with worse schools, fewer jobs, more pollution, and less justice. Because of how social structures organize our world, people of color face unfair obstacles even when other people aren’t treating them in prejudiced ways.””

Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change Michael Brownstein , Daniel Kelly , Alex Madva

[cottonccat]

Police force in the entirety of America (I mean the continent.) was slave control.

It was never a civil defense. Its basis is on killing indigenous and black people, poor people.

It didn't change. It has to end for us to have actual civil defense.

[feminist-space]

[thenixkat]

How Redlining Shaped Communities (They Cloned Tyrone) | READUS 101 by  La'Ron Readus