Racial Scripts and Pandemics with Keith Wailoo
Episode 85 - January 20, 2022
Keith Wailoo (Princeton University) talks to Merle and Lee about his work on racial scripts and the racialization of pandemics with a focus on Covid. He begins by discussing the idea of pandemics unfolding in dramatic acts and then explains the role of race in this story. Keith examines the deeper history of these racial scripts, along with the impact various disparities play in other pandemics. Finally, he reflects upon the highly differentiated Covid story in the US based on geography and offers a future for the academic study of the history of medicine.
Further Reading
- Keith Wailoo and Michael McGovern, “Epidemic Inequities: Social and Racial Inequality in the History of Pandemics,” in Stephen Weldon, ed., ISIS Current Bibliography: Special Issue on Pandemics.
- Keith Wailoo, “Spectacles of Difference: The Racial Scripting of Epidemic Disparities,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (Winter 2020: Special Pandemic Issue), 602-625.
- Charles Rosenberg, "What is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective," Daedalus 118 No 2 Living with AIDS (Spring 1989): 1-17.
- Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago, 1962, 1987).
Our Guest
Keith Wailoo
Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs, Princeton University
