Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge - a tradition that continues today within some black populations.

With the rise of the Movement for Black Lives and the feverish calls for Medicare for All, the public spotlight on racial inequality and access to healthcare has never been brighter. Just Health examines how deep structural racism embedded leads to worse health outcomes and lower life expectancy for people of color. By presenting evidence of discrimination in housing, education, employment, and the criminal justice system, Dayna Bowen Matthew shows how racial inequality pervades American society and the ways that this undermines the health of minority populations.

This is a no-holds-barred response to the liberal and conservative retreat from an assertive, activist, and socially transformative civil rights agenda of recent years - using a Black feminist lens and the issue of the impact of recent legislation, social policy, and welfare "reform" on Black women's - especially poor Black women's - control over their bodies' autonomy and their freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity in a society whose white mainstream is determined to demonize, even criminalize their lives.

The health-care system in the United States has been called the best in the world. Yet wide disparities persist between social groups, and many Americans suffer from poorer health than people in other developed countries. In this revised edition of Health Disparities in the United States, Donald A. Barr provides extensive new data about the ways low socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity interact to create and perpetuate these health disparities.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than 60 years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects.

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.

Reduced life expectancy, worsening health outcomes, health inequity, and declining health-care options - these are now realities for most Americans. However, in a country of more than 325 million people, addressing everyone's issues is challenging. How can we effect beneficial change for everyone so we all can thrive? What is the great equalizer?

The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project” issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together 18 essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with 36 poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance.

From the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a “groundbreaking” (Time) approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society and in ourselves—now updated, with a new preface.

In 1994, The Bell Curve and its controversial thesis catapulted the topic of genetic racial differences in IQ to the forefront of a renewed and heated debate. Now, in A Terrible Thing to Waste, award-winning science writer Harriet A. Washington adds her incisive analysis to the fray, arguing that IQ is a biased and flawed metric, but that it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. Featuring extensive scientific research and Washington's sharp, lively reporting, A Terrible Thing to Waste is sure to outrage, transform the conversation, and inspire debate.

Many believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as Torn Apart uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, legal scholar and sociologist Dorothy Roberts reveals that the child welfare system is better understood as a “family policing system” that collaborates with law enforcement and prisons to oppress Black communities. Child protection investigations ensnare a majority of Black children, putting their families under intense state surveillance and regulation.

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation - that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, he incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation - the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments - that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

Considered the definitive history of the American healthcare system, The Social Transformation of American Medicine examines how the roles of doctors, hospitals, health plans, and government programs have evolved over the last two and a half centuries. Updated with a new preface and an epilogue analyzing developments since the early 1980s, this new edition is a must-listen for anyone concerned about the future of our fraught healthcare system.

A crucial component of anti-Black racism is the unconscionable disparity in health outcomes between Black and white Americans. Sickening examines this institutionalized inequality through dramatic, concrete events from the past two decades, revealing how unequal living conditions and inadequate medical care have become routine. From the spike in chronic disease after Hurricane Katrina to the lack of protection for Black residents during the Flint water crisis, author Anne Pollock takes listeners on a journey through the diversity of anti-Black racism operating in healthcare.

One in five Americans now has medical debt in collections and rising health care costs today threaten every small business in America. Dr Makary, one of the nation's leading health care experts, travels across America and details why health care has become a bubble. Drawing from on-the-ground stories, his research and his own experience, The Price We Pay paints a vivid picture of price-gouging, middlemen and a series of elusive money games in need of a serious shake-up.