The Hospital Won’t Save Us: An Exploration of the Racial Absence of Care and Emergent Radical Care as a Site of Liberation

The Hospital Won’t Save Us: An Exploration of the Racial Absence of Care and Emergence Radical Care as a Site of Liberation— is a qualitative exploration of hospital treatment and medical care reimagining. Based on in-depth interviews with Black care workers (i.e., Black birthers, Black doulas, and Black midwives), alongside publicly disseminated News stories of Black people’s treatment in the hospital over the last five years, my dissertation arrives at the formation of both my theoretical frameworks--the racial absence of care and emergent radical care. The racial absence of care conceptualizes the hospital as a site of racial violence in which the very organizational structure of the hospital is infused with racism, sexism, and heterosexism that ensures Black people receive inadequate care. Essentially, inadequate care, mistreatment, misdiagnosis, trauma, and death—especially of Black women, queer, nonbinary, and trans birthers—emerges as a contemporary form of scientific racism within hospitals. Emergent radical care reimagines what care is and how it should be administered to ensure Black folks are healthy and can maintain a long and high-quality life. Emergent radical care seeks to build futuristic medical-health communities centered around Black care workers’ principles and operating standards to ensure Black people are treated with high levels of medical care, thus removing racism as the causal mechanism of treatment and ensuring the health and well-being of all Black people. The overall objective of this study is to actively challenge White supremacy and the patriarchy/ heteropatriarchy by incorporating transformative care initiatives rooted in Black care workers, which seek to shift our understanding of medical care into the realm of hospital abolition. This study contributes to scholarly and public debates of considerable urgency as my research focuses on the treatment of Black bodies, specifically Black birthers, in hospitals, which often leads to various forms of mistreatment, inadequate care, misdiagnosis, trauma, and death. I challenge hospital reforms as adequate measures to improve the health and well-being of Black patients and seek to interrogate the racist, sexist, and heterosexist practices and organizational standards of hospitals.