I am deeply grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies, which awarded me a fellowship that gave me the time and space to complete the full draft of the manuscript.
This project developed over many years and has benefited from the support of my academic homes: MIT, where I began my PhD in September 2001 and first started serious academic exploration of many of these topics in racism and health, first in classes with Evelynn Hammonds and Ken Manning and later with support from the Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology, and Medicine under the leadership of David Jones; Georgia Tech, where I served on the faculty for ten years, learning from colleagues in the CDC Working Group on Racism and Health and later in the cross-institutional Working Group on Race and Racism in Contemporary Biomedicine, and learning from students whom I taught in courses including Biomedicine and Culture and Science, Technology, and Race; and finally, my current home, the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London, which provided a Seed Grant that allowed me to benefit from Beauty Dhlamini’s insightful research assistance for chapter 6 and more broadly has provided an incomparable intellectual environment in which to explore questions of health, medicine, and society. While I was preparing the revised manuscript under lockdown, Katherine Behar provided critical help with the images. The University of Minnesota Press has provided invaluable support for bringing the project to fruition as a book, especially Jason Weidemann and Zenyse Miller.
Many chapters began as conference presentations at the Society for Social Studies of Science and benefited from engagement with the audiences there. I also had the chance to present an individual chapter at the University of Amsterdam Department of Anthropology’s Ir/relevance of Race in Science and Society seminar series, and an overview of the book as a whole at both my own Department of Global Health and Social Medicine Seminar at King’s College London and the STS Circle at Harvard University.
Numerous colleagues and friends generously gave feedback on various iterations of chapters in progress, including Ruha Benjamin, Rasmus Birk, Silvia Camporesi, Carol Colatrella, Philip Cohen, Joe Dumit, Faith Groesbeck, Jennifer Hamilton, Tony Hatch, Amy Hinterberger, David Jones, Katrina Karkazis, Emma Kowal, Amade M’charek, Susana Morris, Alondra Nelson, Michelle Pentecost, Thao Phan, Manu Platt, Amy Slaton, Lindsay Smith, Brett St Louis, Judith Suissa, Siggie Vertommen, Kate Weiner, Lewis Wheaton, and Ros Williams. Sarah Blacker, Madeleine Pape, and Natali Valdez each taught from the draft manuscript in their undergraduate classes, and they and their students provided additional layers of insight. I owe a special thanks to Amy Agigian and Dartricia Rollins, who provided comments on the full manuscript. An extra measure of gratitude goes to my writing group—Mary McDonald, Nassim Parvin, and Jennifer Singh—who have remained treasured friends and intellectual interlocutors even though I left our beloved Atlanta and who provided generous feedback on many iterations.
Finally, Maital Dar has been a true partner not only in life but also in this work: she has often been my first interlocutor as the events occurred, has helped me to prepare the conference papers in which most of the chapters originated, and has been an invaluable editor as I completed the book. I cannot possibly thank her enough.