Caring for the Indian Heart: The Role of Race at the Stanford South Asian Translational Heart Initiative

• In Event: Racism and Health I

Abstract

In 2013 Rajesh Dash established the Stanford South Asian Translational Heart Initiative (SSATHI). Noting that South Asians had the highest rate of heart disease hospitalization of any ethnic group in California, SSATHI promises to educate South Asians about their risk and provide targeted treatments. Presumably it also seeks to create a niche in a competitive medical marketplace. The desire to tailor health care to a specific ethnic group places SSATHI into a complicated lineage, including race-specific medications (BiDil) and walking shoes (Nike AirNative). SSATHI’s specific claim, about South Asians’ peculiar susceptibility to heart disease, comes after a 50-year history of confusion about why South Asians suffer higher rates and more severe forms of heart disease than other ethnicities. Researchers have long hunted for some intrinsic factor to account for the disparity, with suspects ranging from small coronary arteries to genetic variants or the legacies of fetal development. This long search for the cause of South Asian susceptibility and tailored treatments is an incoherent project: as anthropologists have repeatedly reminded researchers, “South Asian” is not a natural kind, but an exceedingly heterogeneous category. Why and how does SSATHI assert the utility of South Asian as an analytic category nonetheless? SSATHI and the 50-year prehistory of the susceptibility discourse offer a valuable opportunity to explore how and why racial claims get made in medicine. While it is unfair to label the project as racist – SSATHI is an ameliorist endeavor – SSATHI demands exploration of the contested terrain between racial and racist.

Authors

• Alyssa Botelho, Harvard University

• David Shumway Jones, Harvard University