The terrifying brilliance of contemporary white supremacy is
that its breathtaking uneven distribution of life and death
operates under an epistemological structure of invisibility.
Premature death is cloaked under the rubric of choice, obscured
by stories of personal failure, and narrated into naturalness by
discourses of inevitability. For example, from 1991-2000 nearly
one million African-American deaths could have been prevented
were they provided the same access to medical technologies as
their white counterparts. These deaths were not the outcome of
random chance. As the authors of a 2004 article published in the
American Journal of Public Health observe, the U.S. health
system focuses more on medical advances than equity in care.
While advances in medical technology in the 1990s averted
176,633 deaths, the deaths of 886,202 black people would have
been prevented had systems of medical care been equalized
instead of improved. The magnitude of these “slow deaths”
confounds response because it is difficul