
Keisha Shantel RayThe University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston · McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics
Keisha Shantel Ray
Doctor of Philosophy
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33
Publications
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (33)
An argument in the cognitive enhancement literature is that using stimulants in populations of healthy but socially disadvantaged individuals mistakenly attributes pathology to nonpathological individuals who experience social inequalities. As the argument goes, using stimulants as cognitive-enhancing drugs to solve the social problem of poorly edu...
When health professions learners’ primary pedagogical experience of Black people and how they become patients is through statistics, it becomes very easy for learners to think of Black people as data points rather than as individuals whose health is often at the mercy of racist institutions. When the human dimension of Black people’s health is igno...
Background
This study aims to fill the gap in large-scale, registry-based assessments by examining postoperative outcomes across diverse races/ethnicities. The focus is on identifying disparities and comparing them with socioeconomic demographics.
Methods
In a registry-based cohort study using the 2008 to 2020 American College of Surgeons National...
Using the example of Black people’s inequitable COVID-19 outcomes and their health outcomes prior to the pandemic, I argue that the pandemic has forever changed how we should think about the conceptual and practical nature of health equity. From here on, we can no longer think of health equity without the concept of intersectionality. In particular...
Juneteenth commemorates the freeing of the last large group of enslaved people in 1865 at the end of the American Civil War. We asked several Black scientists what Juneteenth means to them in the context of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM)? Their answers run the emotional gamut.
Why do American Black people generally have worse health than American White people? To answer this question, “Black Health” dispels any notion that Black people have inferior bodies that are inherently susceptible to disease. This is simply false racial science that has been used to abuse Black people since our African ancestors were brought to Am...
Environmental health remains a niche topic in bioethics, despite being a prominent social determinant of health. In this paper we argue that if bioethicists are to take the project of health justice as a serious one, then we have to address environmental injustices and the threats they pose to our bioethics principles, health equity, and clinical c...
Why do American Black people generally have worse health than American White people? To answer this question, “Black Health” dispels any notion that Black people have inferior bodies that are inherently susceptible to disease. This is simply false racial science that has been used to abuse Black people since our African ancestors were brought to Am...
Poor health is not inherently a part of Black Americans’ bodies; poor health is not in our DNA. But as Linda Villarosa says in Under the Skin “ something about being Black has led to the documented poor health of Black Americans.” ¹ Like many other scholars of Black health have said, Villarosa proposes, and evidence supports, that “the something is...
When health professions learners’ primary pedagogical experience of Black people and how they become patients is through statistics, it becomes very easy for learners to think of Black people as data points rather than as individuals whose health is often at the mercy of racist institutions. When the human dimension of Black people’s health is igno...
How often a researcher is cited usually plays a decisive role in that person's career advancement, because academic institutions often use citation metrics, either explicitly or implicitly, to estimate research impact and productivity. Research has shown, however, that citation patterns and practices are affected by various biases, including the pr...
Access to care is a health determinant because health care resources, interventions, and personnel help maintain health and well-being. In addition to social determinants' roles in health inequity, clinicians' racial bias undermines the quality of Black persons' health care experiences and is a pathway to iatrogenic harm. This article considers pai...
In this essay, I detail commitments that some of the major health organizations—the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—have made to addressing anti‐Black racism and discuss their policies meant to curtail racism's effects on health equity. Although these organizat...
As a field concerned with ethical issues in health and health care, particularly how structures, policies, and practices unfairly advantage some and disadvantage others, bioethics has a moral obligation to address the long‐standing challenges that racism has posed to the overall health and well‐being of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people and othe...
Addressing racial disparities in health outcomes is an urgent priority for many health care organizations, leading health care managers to explore the potential for organization-level interventions to yield substantive health gains. In recent literature, it is suggested that Black patients who are treated by Black physicians may achieve superior he...
Black people experience lower quality and lesser quantity of sleep than white people. Researchers, however, do not believe that racial disparities in sleep sufficiency are caused by biological differences, but rather by various social differences, such as differences in sleeping environments and socioeconomic status. Racial disparities in sleep suf...
Facilities that emit hazardous toxins, such as toxic landfills, oil refineries, and chemical plants, are disproportionately located in predominantly Black, Latinx, and Indigenous neighborhoods. Environmental injustices like these threaten just distribution of health itself, including access to health that is not dependent on having the right skin c...
Some proponents of moral bioenhancement propose that people should utilize biomedical practices to enhance the faculties and traits that are associated with moral agency, such as empathy and a sense of justice. The hope is that doing so will improve our ability to meet the moral challenges that have emerged in our contemporary, globalized world. In...
Finding comprehensive texts that help instructors teach the relationship between race and medicine can be difficult. If medical education texts do include a discussion of race, it typically recounts some historical and famous cases of racially motivated abuse, such as the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” but not much else....
Teaching Health Humanities expands our understanding of what health humanities teaching currently does and what it could do. Its contributors describe the variety of degree programs where they teach, the politics and perspectives that inform how they teach, and methods for incorporating newer digital and multimodal technologies into their teaching...