Z60.5 / (En)Coded
Health Equity (2023)
Poem published in Health Equity’s November 2023 special collection on racism and clinical algorithms. The full poem is available open-access:
Z60.5 / (En)Coded
“their children wear our jerseys
[they race-adjust our brains]
they think we need attitude adjustment
they settle for statistical adjustment
they can’t control for justice
they can’t control our edges
our knees (their knees)
[they race-adjust our lungs]
our hips (their hips)
our fists
our mouths
our lips on their daughters
their daughters on TikTok
their sons on sigs, glocks
their silence __________
_________”
Abstract
With theoretical grounding in notions of biopower (Foucault), necropolitics (Mbembe), and "jim code" (Benjamin), this paper via poem offers a critical reflection on the everyday violences and harms of racist (en)coding as evident within, and facilitated and propagated through, a range of digital technologies—from platforms as benign as Microsoft Word, to medical devices of literal life/death consequence (e.g. pulse oximeters). Anchored in public health critical race praxis principles of "primacy of racialization" and "contemporary mechanisms” (Ford & Airhihenbuwa), it weaves a common thread through these varying technologies/techniques of racialized violence, surveillance, and erasure, positioning “race”-based clinical adjustments as ever-evolving biomedical expressions of biopower and necropolitics—a joint expansion of the algorithmic violence of structural racism as the fundamental operating code of “race” in the U.S. In this regard, this work suggests that racialized medicine is but an extension/contemporary mechanism of racialized (state) surveillance, subjugation, and life (de)valuation in the continuing project of White supremacy and settler colonialism—as both embedded within and fortified through “the clinic” as site and process of race-making. In doing so, the poem historicizes intergenerational lineages of racialization and the manner in which racisms (re-)present themselves over time and between generations, often mediated through everyday technologies that subtly encode anti-Blackness and racist narratives of Black bodies into biomedical thinking years before one encounters medical school curriculum.
“they good intention
they good intention real good
they well-mean
they racist bone-free
[ they be tryin’ so hard ]
their hands are not clean
their hands wrote the code
our hands get cuffed in labor
our hands cannot get soap
our lungs cannot get oxygen
their algorithms rope
their software comes with “bootstrap”
and that’s all you need to know”