Browsing by Author "Oyarzun, Yesmar S"

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    “All You See Is White Skin”: Race and Dermatology in the United States
    (2024-07-23) Oyarzun, Yesmar S; Ballestero, Andrea; Georges, Eugenia
    In the United States, dermatology education has lagged with respect to including learning materials that feature people with darker skin, leading to divergent outcomes for these patients and gaps in knowledge for trainees and providers. “All You See Is White Skin” engages the voices of dermatologists and dermatology trainees to contextualize, clarify, and critique what has been referred to as dermatology’s “problem with skin color.” This dissertation provides a nuanced understanding of the practices through which dermatologists come to understand skin and understand it differently with regard to skin color and race. I document and critique how the field of dermatology understands dark skin to always be abnormal, whether in a pathological or nonpathological state. Chapter 1 argues that learning how to see and describe skin lesions, in particular, is critical to dermatology trainees’ professionalization. Chapter 2 introduces the concept of “dark bodies,” the depersonalized bodies of people with dark skin, and shows how dark bodies are typically posed and understood to be abnormal: either pathological and diseased, or super and able to avoid damage. Both of these allow for abdication of responsibility for people with dark skin. In Chapter 3, I argue that a constellation of antiblack devices reproduce antiblackness in the specialty. Chapters 4 and 5 attend to the work that especially dermatologists of color have done since the mid 20th century to make people with dark skin visible in dermatology. Overall, this project destabilizes contemporary understandings of biomedical epistemology by showing how both seeing and not seeing are crucial to contemporary biomedicine.