Racial Gaslighting in Medical Education

• In Event: Medical Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 21. Medical Education

Abstract

Few other professions in the United States have attained the same historical and cultural power of allopathic medicine (MD). Starting in the mid-1800s, white men physicians as a group coordinated their political, social, economic, and cultural power to reshape reality in service of their professional authority (Trotter 2020; Bailey 2017). Today, such exclusionary processes sustain a deeply uneven educational landscape; indeed, only 5% of practicing physicians are Black and racist curricula contribute to health inequalities among Black Americans (Cunningham 2014; van Ryn et al. 2015; Manzer and Bell 2021). In this paper, we explore the historical foundations of medical education in the U.S., paying particular attention to the racial spectacles that informed the curriculum and drove Black physicians out of practice. We then examine several contemporary problems related to medical education and their proposed solutions: the persistent “discriminatory design” (Michalec and Hafferty 2023) that leverages “merit” to keep Black students out of the career pipeline and Black, Brown, and Asian physicians out of leadership (Meadows et al. 2023), the lack of teaching about sociological concepts of race and racism and its effects on trainees (particularly those who are Black or Brown) (Olsen 2024), the perpetuation of pathologizing racial myths in the curriculum that locate “race” as a biological truth (Amutah et al. 2021) and pathologizing students and faculty who resist (Bullock et al. 2021; Elliott 2024). Taken together, we argue that these forms of racial gaslighting perpetuate white supremacy via access to health and medicine and the political power of physicians. We conclude by discussing empirical examples of strategies that have been effectively deployed toward dismantling white supremacy in the curriculum (e.g., Baker et al 2025).

Authors

• Kelly Underman, Drexel University

• Lauren D. Olsen, Temple University