Anti-Racism Resource Library
Why should you care?
Our practice strives to improve health and medicine communications. Given the history of medicine in North America, in many ways our practice is inseparable from racial justice work. Racism permeates clinical practice and biomedical research, academia, public health policy, and of course, medical education. It is through medical education that racism and biases are perpetuated down and across generations of health professionals and educators.
As communicators, understanding our audience’s needs is a core part of our practice, but without an understanding as to how racism permeates our society we can’t truly understand how our work might impact those with different lived experiences than our own. By growing our professional communities’ baseline anti-racism knowledge we will collectively be better able to meet our audiences where they’re at, which is foundational to truly communicating with one another.
Objectives of the primer
The Biomedical Communications Anti-Racism Committee (BMCARC) anti-racism primer serves as a starting point for medical communications professionals looking to learn more about how our profession is complicit in and upholds systems of oppression as a starting point towards dismantling these systems. In the near future, BMCARC will be launching a full anti-racism resource library, but until then we hope this gets you started!
Goals of the library
The library will serve as a launching point for students and professionals to encourage further study and action on anti-racist and decolonialized approaches to medical illustration. A secondary objective of this resource is to provide resources to critically examine the role that race and colonialism play in our work, our education and the broader medical field, as well as highlight the importance of diverse perspectives within medicine.
key resources we think you should read!
Click or tap on the resource title to see more information.
+ Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
A book by Deirdre Cooper Owens.
An examination of the widespread medical exploitation black enslaved women and (in comparison) Irish immigrant women experienced, within the development of modern US gynecology. It is pretty well known that 19th-century white male surgeons—lionized as pioneers of the field—performed extensive gynecological experimentation on these groups of women. The list of acclaimed doctors includes Sims, along with John Peter Mettauer and Nathan Bozeman. The procedures these doctors perfected on black and Irish women’s bodies include overatomies (the removal of both ovaries), cesarean sections, and obstetric fistula repair.
By placing the women at the center of the historical analysis, Cooper Owens invites readers to understand these women’s socio-medical experiences and see them as more fully fleshed out, complex human beings. Cooper Owens frames them as significant historical actors as well as the rightful “mothers of modern gynecology.” The author’s incorporation of case studies, oral histories from formerly enslaved people, and slave narratives provides powerful secondary sources of evidence.
+ Stop Bastardizing Design with False Empathy
An article by Writingprincess
The author argues that corporate America has bastardized design thinking methodologies, especially what it means to design with “empathy”. For empathy to be a successful part of design, it must have an internal activity that leads to transformative action. It often looks like non-Westernized design principles of collectivism, relationship-building, and communalism. Empathy is something you build and requires overcoming the barriers to empathy we cognitively display (e.g., the way you show up in space, place, and time). Building empathy is not about making people feel, but making people act to change their behaviour.
+ Implementing Anti-Racist Pedagogy in Health
A Literature review by Linda Diffey and Javier Mignone.
This article is a literature review examining the implementation of anti racist pedagogies in the training of healthcare professionals within Canada. Rather than treating race issues as a monolith authors examine four categories of pedagogical approaches:
- Dialogue across social groups
- Deconstructing power and privilege
- Student transformation
- Application to (medical) practice.
These pedagogical approaches can be of interest in how we as biomedical communicators form educational materials.
+ Identifying Racialized Design to Cultivate a Culture of Awareness in Design
An article by Lisa E Mercier and Terresa Moses
This article focuses on how our culture perpetuates racism by examining different forms of Racialized Design. The authors highlight 3 key areas in which racialized design can be identified: artifacts (ex: everyday objects), systems (ex: public transportation), and experiences (ex: first hand encounters).
By learning to identify elements of racialized design around us, we can be more conscientious of these less visible indicators of racism and end the cycle of perpetuating harm.
This contradiction leaves us blaming others for racist incidents and leaving ourselves out of the social justice movements. By doing nothing, we are perpetuating this system.
+ The Co-Constitutive Nature of Neoliberalism, Design, and Racism
An article by Lauren Williams
Williams argues that design practices (e.g., Design Thinking) compounds and conceals the oppressive effects of racism and neoliberalism. Social design emerged in the service of marshaling design principles and practices to effect social change, positioning itself as a mechanism capable of reconfiguring “wicked” social problems like racism. However, it carries many assumptions from design principles from commercial design fields (e.g., product design). Design moves toward innocence often, particularly when it proffers technological solutions for problems of socio-political scale (e.g., when it tokenizes black consumers), and when it packages profit-based motivations under a thinly veiled “concern” for the consumer desires of people of color.
+ Implicit Bias and Racial Disparities in Health Care
An article by Khiara M. Bridges
Black people do not receive the same quality of health care that their white counterparts receive, even when insurance status, income, age, and severity of conditions are comparable. Providers are less likely to deliver effective treatments to people of colour when compared to their white counterparts, after controlling for class, health behaviours, comorbidities, and access to health insurance and health care services. Dayna Matthew (author of Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American healthcare) argues that physicians have been exposed to negative narratives about racial minorities, adding to unconscious negative attitudes about racial groups.
+ Blindspot
A book by Mahzarin R Banaj and Anthony Greenwaldi
Banaji and Greenwald question the extent to which our unconscious perceptions of social groups shape our judgments about people’s character, abilities, and potential. The authors reveal biases with the Implicit Association Test, a method for scientists to explore unconscious attitudes towards different social groups.
+ Microsoft Inclusive Design
A library of different accessibility key points with videos
A repository of articles and videos that serves as a toolkit to help designers incorporate the full range of human diversity into their work. This is achieved by recognizing how often we use our own abilities and biases as a starting point, and helps the reader access the experiences of people with a range of perspectives and ability differences. These articles cover many ways to bridge the accessibility gap to minimize physical, cognitive, and social exclusion.
+ The Universal Patient Language (UPL)
A library of different accessibility key points with videos
The UPL is an evolving set of resources made with the support of Bridgeable to help communicate to patients about complex topics. This ranges from It was co-created with patients, caregivers, advocates, healthcare providers, and visual communication experts.
+ The Justyna Green Podcast: Sarah Weir, How Design, Diversity and Inclusion are Linked
A podcast by Justyna Green with Sarah Weir
On Design brings you insightful conversations with design's most inspiring figures - from designers to artists, creative directors to entrepreneurs and everybody in between. If you want to know what inspires them, how they work and how they see the world, this is the podcast for you.
Claire Cheung on Studio PI, Diversity and Equality
Simone Farresin on Formafantasma and Radical Design
Adam Nathaniel Furman on Identity and Creativity
+ Design after Capitalism
A lecture series by Matthew Wizinsky
In Design after Capitalism, Matthew Wizinsky argues for design practices to reorient toward deliberate transitions of everyday politics, social relations, and economies. Looking at design through the lens of political economy, Wizinsky calls for the field to transcend the logics, structures, and subjectivities of capitalism—to combine design entrepreneurship with social empowerment in order to facilitate new ways of producing those things, symbols, and experiences that make up everyday life.
As we build the BMCARC Anti-Racism Resource Library, we're collecting resource submissions and suggestions from the BMC community through the form linked below.
What kind of resources can be submitted into the BMCARC Resource Library?
Online resources, like tutorials, journal articles, eBooks, podcasts, and more
Links to physical resources, either through your public library or the U of T library
What kinds of topics fit in the BMCARC Resource Library?
Race and medical illustration
Design / Illustration and racism
Accessibility resources
Systemic oppression
Working with underserved communities