Work-in-Progress talk with Cera Smith, Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies; and 2025–26 OHC Faculty Research Fellow. 

Scientific racism and discrimination in American healthcare make bioscience seem irredeemable for many Black Studies scholars. Consequently, critics often attempt to disassociate race from biology, instead emphasizing Black people’s psychological, emotional, and intellectual complexity to reject racist dehumanization. This approach, however, overlooks Black people’s creative engagements with bioscience. I argue that Black American writers and artists use bioscience to chronicle racism’s biology, undermine the naturalization of race, and convey strategies for surviving anti-Blackness.