Medical Journals Reluctant to Take on Racism, Critics Say

An editor’s departure at JAMA is bringing calls for a sharper focus on racism and its consequences.

The top editor of JAMA, the influential medical journal, stepped down on Tuesday amid a controversy over comments about racism made by a colleague on a journal podcast. But critics saw in the incident something more pernicious than a single misstep: a blindness to structural racism and the ways in which discrimination became embedded in medicine over generations. “The biomedical literature just has not embraced racism as more than a topic of conversation, and hasn’t seen it as a construct that should help guide analytic work,” said Dr. Mary Bassett, professor of the practice of health and human rights at Harvard University. “But it’s not just JAMA — it’s all of them.” The longstanding issue has gained renewed attention in part because of health care inequities laid bare by the pandemic, as well as the Black Lives Matter protests of the past year. Indeed, an informal New York Times review of five top medical journals found that all published more articles on race and structural racism last year than in previous years.