Systemic

In the spirit of ambitious bestselling books by Harriet A. Washington and Dorothy Roberts, Liverpool uses data-driven science to show that racism can have biological consequences.

The pandemic taught us that viruses like Covid disproportionately affect people of color. Here, virologist, immunologist and science journalist Layal Liverpool goes a step further to show that this disparity exists for all types of illness and that it is caused by racism.

In Systemic, Liverpool will show how racism is woven, invisibly, not just into the structure of medicine and science but into our very bodies. Refuting the false belief that there are biological differences between races, Liverpool goes on to show that racial stereotyping and trauma can however lead to biological changes that make people of color more vulnerable to illness.

Systemic tackles:

• the problem of racial bias and data gaps in medicine where the default human subject is white
• the dangerous health consequences of systemic racism, from the physical and psychological effects of daily micro-and macro-aggressions to intergenerational trauma
• the fatal stereotypes that keep people of color undiagnosed, untreated, and unsafe
• how we can fix these problems by confronting bias and closing the data gap.