Race, Stroke, and the Limits of “Culturally Appropriate” Risk Reduction

• In Event: Biomedicine and Difference

Abstract

In August 2009, the American Stroke Association began a public service announcement campaign designed to inform African Americans about stroke warning signs and the need to seek immediate emergency medical care at their onset. The campaign, titled Stroke’s No Joke, featured African American stand-up comedians joking about family members delaying emergency medical care after the first signs of stroke, warning viewers of the dangers of delays in care-seeking. The campaign included television, radio, online, and billboard PSAs, using the tag line “Time lost is brain lost” to frame stroke as an urgent cardiac threat. Part of an effort to address both the disproportionate risk of stroke among African Americans as well as the deleterious effects of delays in seeking emergency medical care, Stroke’s No Joke represents a critical effort to reduce race-based disease disparities. Yet while the campaign was explicitly designed to target African Americans, it did not articulate this intention; instead, it deployed stand-up comedy as a coded proxy for a cultural construction of race.

The “Stroke’s No Joke” campaign is an example of so-called “culturally appropriate” or “culturally competent” health interventions designed to target high-risk populations. This paper performs a discourse analysis of this campaign to explore the limitations of this intervention on disease disparities. I argue that the use of stand-up comedy as a coded signifier of race undermines efforts to eliminate health gaps, and that a turn to STS offers an opportunity to consider how race and difference are made meaningful in the context of biomedicine.

Author

• Beza Merid, NYU