Historians have rightly noted the long history of constructions of race and medical/biological difference in the US and broader Atlantic world, from the construction of “slave diseases” in the 18^th century Atlantic U.S. to the construction of racial-genetic difference in the genomic era of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, spanning disciplines such as medicine, developmental biology, industrial sciences, and the social sciences. As historians have reconstructed these histories of scientific and racial discrimination, other have begun to highlight the strategies minoritized individuals employed in discussing the production of difference (for example, the health advocacy of the Black Panther Party in the mid 20^th century). As Nancy Stepan and Sander Gilman have argued, minoritized critics of race science have often sought to unsettle these dominant discourses of inequality from within, not just from outside. The talks in this panel thus explore the nuanced ways in which race, biology, social and medical institutions are deployed by these marginalized individuals to challenge the authority of racist scientific experts, focusing on the 20^th century US and onwards. In an era of surging health inequality and broad challenges to the epistemic authority of medical experts, the talks in this panel help historians today better understand the nuances of “medical authority”, the role of the individual in resisting medicalization, and how communities can secure care and health equity even in the face of exclusionary languages and social realities.

All talks in this panel thus explore the forms of discursive resistance employed by minoritized individuals and the ambivalent ways in which they have resisted dominant medical racism. James Fitz Gerald’s talk, “Industrial Maladjustment: Literary Naturalism and the Eugenic Spirit of Medicalization”, explores literary depictions of alcohol dependency. Drawing on the archive of progressive reformers, Fitz Gerald’s talk shows how the ecological could serve as a powerful challenge against the race-and-place logic of dependency, challenging the narrative of the supremacy of eugenics, focusing instead on the ambivalent project of euthenics and its challenge to progressive hereditarianism. This idea of a challenge from within is the subject of Michael Ortiz-Castro’s “To be in the Black”, which explores the history of NC Mutual, a black life insurance company. Responding to Hoffman’s extermination thesis, NC Mutual embraced the logics of racist valuation that had led Hoffman to his racist conclusion. This talk thus focuses on the ambivalent strategies of assimilation and defiance that characterized the discursive strategy of this company. Finally, looking at black pharmacies, Osaremen Okolo’s “The Black Pharmacy as a Site of Resistance” explores the pharmacy as a social space and site of resistance for Black Americans. The pharmacy offered a useful node through which black Americans organized their resistance to medical racism—both by providing a place of commerce but also by existing as a landing site for organization against racist medical experts. These talks thus establish a critical conversation over the ambivalences inherent to resistance and the production of new discourses of medical expertise.