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'Health equity tourists': How white scholars are colonizing research on health disparities
https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/23/health-equity-tourists-white-scholars-colonizing-health-disparities-research/Fueled by the massive health disparities exposed by the coronavirus pandemic and the racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd, health equity research is now in vogue. Journals are clamoring for it, the media is covering it, and the National Institutes of Health, after publicly apologizing for giving the field short shrift, recently announced it would unleash nearly $100 million for research on the topic.
This would seem to be great news. But a STAT investigation shows a disturbing trend: a gold rush mentality where researchers with little or no background or training in health equity research, often white and already well-funded, are rushing in to scoop up grants and publish papers. STAT has documented dozens of cases where white researchers are building on the work of, or picking the brains of, Black and brown researchers without citing them or offering to include them on grants or as co-authors.
A glaring example occurred in August when the Journal of the American Medical Association — a leading medical journal already under fire for how it handles issues of race — published a special themed issue on racial and ethnic health disparities in medicine. Meant to highlight JAMA’s new commitment to health equity, it served up an illustration of the structural racism embedded in academic publishing: Not one of the five research papers published in the issue included a Black lead or corresponding author, and just one lead author was Hispanic.
(snip)
Health equity researchers say they welcome new interest — and white allies — in their area, which focuses on finding solutions for poorer health outcomes in people from different races, ethnicities, genders, sexual identities, or income levels. But many are troubled by “health equity tourists” — some seen as well-meaning and motivated by their new awareness of racism, others as opportunistic scientific carpetbaggers — parachuting in to “discover” a field that dates back more than a century. Many of these newcomers, they say, are publishing naive and uninformed, and sometimes racist, research and “erasing” scholars of color who created much of the discipline’s foundational work.
This would seem to be great news. But a STAT investigation shows a disturbing trend: a gold rush mentality where researchers with little or no background or training in health equity research, often white and already well-funded, are rushing in to scoop up grants and publish papers. STAT has documented dozens of cases where white researchers are building on the work of, or picking the brains of, Black and brown researchers without citing them or offering to include them on grants or as co-authors.
A glaring example occurred in August when the Journal of the American Medical Association — a leading medical journal already under fire for how it handles issues of race — published a special themed issue on racial and ethnic health disparities in medicine. Meant to highlight JAMA’s new commitment to health equity, it served up an illustration of the structural racism embedded in academic publishing: Not one of the five research papers published in the issue included a Black lead or corresponding author, and just one lead author was Hispanic.
(snip)
Health equity researchers say they welcome new interest — and white allies — in their area, which focuses on finding solutions for poorer health outcomes in people from different races, ethnicities, genders, sexual identities, or income levels. But many are troubled by “health equity tourists” — some seen as well-meaning and motivated by their new awareness of racism, others as opportunistic scientific carpetbaggers — parachuting in to “discover” a field that dates back more than a century. Many of these newcomers, they say, are publishing naive and uninformed, and sometimes racist, research and “erasing” scholars of color who created much of the discipline’s foundational work.
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