Welcome to Karen Hunter is awesome.

I am Karen Hunter and the people I speak with are the awesome ones.

Well, sometimes the conversations get so heated or amazing that we have to do a part

too.

So stay tuned for the next part of my conversation.

We're talking with Dr. Rupa Maria. She is the co-author of inflamed deep medicine and the

anatomy of injustice. The connection of black bodies in particular, indigenous bodies,

to modern medicine and how I think about all of the black women who go in to have babies whose pain is

ignored with people, black people in general who are afraid to go to the doctors because they do

not feel seen or heard. Tuskegee radiation experiments, gynecological experiments in slavery.

I can't imagine there's probably so many more experiments done on those black bodies because

not everyone told the stuff that they were doing, like the modern, the father of gynecology.

A lot of people were experimenting on black bodies during enslavement, which led them to many

breakthroughs, I'm sure. How should we assess this? And as a person from the black community,

it's hard. I'll be honest. Me, myself,

affluent. I feel very nervous going to doctors and even doctors who look like me because y'all

have all been colonized in a very similar way. How do we navigate that when we need to trust

this field to take care of us.

This is such an important question, a critical question, and it's not just simply folks who are enslaved. So this isn't distant history. At UCSF or I work, there's a professor

Howard Maybach, who's still on faculty. He still shows up to dermatology.

Well, recently, maybe not because he's been ill. But as of a couple months ago, he was coming to

the dermatology grand rounds. And this doctor was injecting black and brown in prison people

...