By Clarence C. Gravlee, Somatosphere, March 27, 2021
In late February, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an episode of its JAMA Clinical Reviews podcast titled, “Structural Racism for Doctors—What Is It?” In an accompanying tweet, the journal offered this eye-popping teaser: “No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care?” The answer, they promised, was in JAMA’s “user-friendly podcast,” a 15-minute conversation between two (white) physicians, host Ed Livingston and guest Mitchell Katz, editors in the JAMA network of journals.
It didn’t go as planned. The podcast and tweet soon came underfire—even from the journal’s parent organization, the American Medical Association. By March 4, the tweet had been deleted, the guest who tried to explain structural racism issued a statement distancing himself from the host’s remarks, and JAMA’s editor-in-chief Howard Bauchner issued an apology. The podcast was later taken down, and on March 16, Bauchner live-streamed a video conversation with three Black colleagues meant to set the record straight. It was too little, too late. On March 25, AMA announced that Bauchner had been placed on administrative leave.
What makes this story worth telling is not the drama of an editorial shakeup at one of the world’s top medical journals. Rather, it’s the content of the podcast itself. Now, don’t get me wrong. If your goal is to understand what structural racism is and how it harms health, look elsewhere. The podcast’s errors are so naive or absurd—No physician is racist? No Black or Hispanic people experience discrimination because that would be illegal?—that it doesn’t merit a rebuttal. And if you know from experience the toll that racism takes, you may have decided early on not to listen. At best, it is a distraction, a theft of energy and time; at worst, a form of gaslighting.
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