Anne Pollock

This book manuscript explores a series of distinct, evocative twenty-first-century events to illuminate wide-ranging elements of racial health disparities in the contemporary United States. Each chapter is grounded in close attention to a specific event: the deaths of postal workers in the 2001 anthrax attacks; the increase in chronic disease after Hurricane Katrina; the Scott sisters case, in which prison sentences were suspended conditional upon kidney donation; a teenage girl subjected to excessive force by a police officer at a suburban pool party; the differential protection of machines over people in the Flint water crisis; the life-threatening childbirth experience of Serena Williams. These extraordinary crises reveal fundamental racialization of access to citizenship and health in the contemporary United States.