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Journal Article 1: Cuevas, A. G., & O’Brien, K. (2017). Racial centrality may be linked to mistrust in healthcare institutions for African Americans. Journal of Health Psychology, 1–9.

Abstract: Evidence suggests that racial identity is an important component to African Americans’ self-concepts and therefore may be relevant to patients’ trust in healthcare, yet little is known as to how racial identity may influence trust or mistrust. African American adults (N = 220) in the greater Portland, Oregon, area provided survey reports of healthcare-related attitudes and experiences. Those who reported higher racial centrality had lower trust in healthcare institutions. Based on these findings, clinicians employing patient-centered care approaches should recognize racial identity as an important component to patients’ experiences when they seek to deliver equitable care to African American patients.

Journal Article 2: Kahn, J. (2008). Exploiting race in drug development. Social Studies of Science, 38(5), 737–758.

Abstract: This paper explores events surrounding the US Food and Drug Administration’s formal approval of the heart failure drug BiDil in 2005. BiDil is the first drug ever approved with a race-specific indication, in this case to treat heart failure in ‘self-identified black patients’. BiDil has been cast by many as a step toward the promised land of individualized pharmacogenomics therapies. This paper argues, however, that when examined in context, the approval of BiDil emerges as a new model of how a pharmaceutical company may exploit race in the marketplace by literally capitalizing on the racial identity of minority populations and leveraging the disproportionate risk of adverse health outcomes they suffer into a cheaper, more efficient way to gain the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval for drugs. Discussions of BiDil in both popular media and professional journals have repeatedly elided the difference between pharmacogenomics therapies remain years-perhaps decades-in the future. The story of BiDil’s development elucidates an alternative model to developing tailored therapies that promises to fill in the gap between the promise and reality of pharmacogenomics medicine. It is a model that exploits race to gain regulatory and commercial advantage, while ignoring its power to promoted a regeneticization of racial categories in society at large.