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Cultura Obscura: Race, Power, and “Culture Talk” in the Health Sciences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2021

Ruha Benjamin*
Affiliation:
Department of African American Studies, Princeton University. University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley, Spelman College
*
Send correspondence to ruha@princeton.edu.

Abstract

“The price of culture is a Lie.”

This Article advances a critical race approach to the health sciences by examining “culture talk” as a discursive repertoire that attributes distinct beliefs, behaviors, and dispositions to ethno-racialized groups. Culture talk entails a twofold process of obfuscation – concealing the social reality of the people it describes and hiding the positionality of those who employ cultural generalizations. After tracing how culture talk circulates and reproduces racist narratives in and beyond the health sciences, I examine how cultural competency training in medical schools and diversity initiatives in stem cell research use the idiom of culture to manage and manufacture group differences. From culturing cells in the lab to enculturing people in the clinic, I apply the concept of coproduction to argue that culture talk is a precondition and product of scientific knowledge construction.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics and Boston University 2017

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25 Id.

26 Id.

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28 Id. at 767.

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46 Id. at 44. Importantly, Perry distinguishes narrative from stereotype. Whereas the latter conjures a totalizing image of a group, a narrative tells you “what follows from that meaning … racial narratives have a greater potential to intervene in deliberation and decision making because they both operate in people’s minds as knowledge and also seem less ideological.” Id. at 46.

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65 Id.

66 Id. at 115.

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