Racializing Refugees: On Medical Practice & Research

• In Event: Racism and Health I

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research within refugee-serving institutions in Philadelphia, this paper probes the relationship between physicians and the knowledge they both produce and consume about caring for refugees from around the world. First, I analyze how knowledge about refugees from different groups – whether racially-laden designations like “Asian” or “African” or national markers like Congolese or Burmese – circulates in clinical spaces as health care teams diagnose and treat refugees using standards of “evidence-based” medicine. I assess the primary literatures that refugee healthcare providers use to justify varying care plans, highlighting how race, while often unmentioned, structures the practice of refugee medicine. Then, I turn to the creation of knowledge about refugees, drawing on my participation in research conducted by physicians about refugee health. While these doctors often assert that they are studying cultural difference, I suggest that it is also race that structures their practices of knowledge-building. The implicit use of race as an analytic, not racism or economic injustice, often blinds physician-researchers to ways that structural racism and inequality are integral factors in refugee health disparities. Through these ethnographic explorations, then, I illuminate the ways that knowledge regimes inform practice and vice versa to produce an eminently racialized medical practice in these sites of care. I end with some reflections on how we might conduct a more just practice of refugee healthcare – and by extension, healthcare more generally – by shifting our gaze from the particularities of seemingly obvious cultural difference to social structure.

Author

• Michelle Munyikwa, University of Pennsylvania