Something Something Something by Race, 2021
“how to squeeze our
lives into starved
models, stripped
naked for the
pleasure of a
statistician’s lusting
parsimonious eyes:
finding findings
found within
findings founded
upon foundations
found before one
could find a spice or
a continent to mash”
Excerpt
“…The suggestion is that epidemiology’s dominant paradigm is structurally racist, racial-capitalist, settler-colonial and epistemically violent: with discourse of racial health inequities dominated by extractivist, reductionist, positivist work done disproportionately by White scholars making professional and economic livings researching communities of colour (i.e. data expropriation and commodification) all while frequently misusing ‘race’ and rarely engaging structural racism—including as manifest within the epidemiology field itself. Here, I consider this dominant paradigm to be epistemic violence and erasure in the sense that the knowledges ‘known’ about communities of colour are, almost exclusively, in the form of reductionist empirical representations—curated by mostly White scholars—that focus on deficits/problems and have the effect of pathologizing and stigmatizing…”