Black Pills
In 2005 the FDA approved a pill to treat high blood preassure only in African Americans. This so-called miracle drug was named BiDil, and it became the first race-specific drug in the United States. It might sound like a good a good thing, but it had the unintended consequence of perpetuating the myth that race is a biological construct.
Credits
Hosts: Alexis Pedrick and Elisabeth Berry Drago
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Padmini Raghunath
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer
“Innate Theme” composed by Jonathan Pfeffer. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Resource List
Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century, by Dorothy Roberts
Oprah’s Unhealthy Mistake, by Osagie K. Obasogie
Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age, by Jonathan Kahn
Saving Sam: Drugs, Race, and Discovering the Secrets of Heart Disease, by Jay Cohn
The Slavery Hypertension Hypothesis: Dissemination and Appeal of a Modern Race Theory, by Jay S Kaufman, Susan A Hall
Superior: The Return of Race Science, by Angela Saini