1/Really glad to see this out today to with my co-authors @RheaBoydMD @EdwinLindo @Lachelle_Dawn I have many favorite quotes in this piece and will thread them below, but first some history about how this piece came to be. https://twitter.com/Health_Affairs/status/1278713810426232834

2/I got an embargoed copy of original paper from Azar & colleagues, then spent an hour annotating pdf w/comments & suggestions that I would have made, were I peer reviewing the paper.

3/When I finished, I realized I had one of many exemplars of why I find a theoretical big data problematic. So, my first fave quote from this blog is: “These harms include the creation and maintenance of an elaborate economy of suffering used to advance science.”

4/I also am pretty grateful for this line: “The academic publication process, through authors, reviewers, and editors, has legitimized scholarship that obfuscates the role of racism in determining health and health care.” (Cont’d in next tweet)

5/“This renders racism less visible & thus less accessible as a preventable etiology of inequity. It enables the health care infrastructure to unduly blame individual patients for the neglect & harm of systemic processes that undergird individual & population health inequities.”

6/I hope our list of suggestions (which is not exhaustive) will spark some discussion about how to make this all different. I personally believe that incubators grounded in training reviewers in core concepts would be helpful.

7/As many journals make content free i.e.: Racism and Medicine ( @NEJM) or collections on “Racism, Disparities, and Social Determinants of Health (Nursing for Women’s Health - which is only on FB or their “sister journal” @JOGNN_journal) you will turn critical eye to said content

END/A real use for anti-racism and book clubs (and/or journal clubs) would be to begin cleaning up our own contributions to blame narratives and dangerous ideas that underpin our scientific work.