This isn’t just about museums. It’s about erasing the structural realities that shape American life—especially in healthcare.
If we can’t talk about race in history, how can we talk about it in medicine? How do we confront the roots of race-based medicine?
Race-based medicine isn’t just a relic of the past—it’s a practice that still affects patients every day:
From BMI, to eGFR calculations to spirometry corrections, race has been falsely coded into science as a biological truth rather than a social construct.
Mar 28, 2025 20:59Yet this order calls out Smithsonian exhibits like “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture” for stating that societies (including the U.S.) have used race to uphold power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.
It criticizes the exhibit for saying “Race is a social construct.”
Even though… race is a human invention.
It’s not a biological reality—it’s a social construct built to justify inequality. But in medicine, we still treat it like biology. That’s how you get things like different diagnostic algorithms based on race.
