Next Tuesday I’ll be at Emory to give a talk as part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Center Spring lecture series. The title of the talk is “Meaning and Measurement of Race in Health Research: Lessons from Hypertension in the African Diaspora.”

I’m especially happy to be giving this talk in Atlanta the day after Martin Luther King Day. In a speech to the Second National Convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights on March 25, 1966, Dr. King declared, “Of all forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.” I’ll open my talk on Tuesday with the slide you see at left to highlight Dr. King’s remark. It helps us to remember, I think, just how high the stakes are in scientific debate about the meaning and measurement of race in health research.

Here’s the abstract of my talk:

Current debate over racial inequalities in health has reignited controversy over the relations between race, biology, and culture. Some researchers maintain that racial categories are useful proxies for genetic differences in susceptibility to disease. Others see race as a cultural construct and argue for the primacy of social determinants of health. Yet few studies include the kinds of data necessary to pit genetic and sociocultural explanations head-to-head. Here I draw on genetic and sociocultural data from fieldwork in Puerto Rico and the southern United States to evaluate competing explanations for excess hypertension in the African Diaspora. The key finding is that the cultural ascription of racial identity, but not genetic ancestry, is associated with blood pressure. This finding underscores the need to examine how race and racism become embodied in human biology.

If you happen to be in Atlanta on Tuesday, come to the Psychology Building (PAIS) at Emory, Room 290, at 4:00 p.m.