UC Davis

From 1983 to 1985, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), under the leadership of Margaret Heckler, created a Task Force on Black and Minority Health that sought to catalog and detail information never before systematically compiled regarding health disparities among minority populations in the U.S. The goal of the Task Force was to build a roadmap to eliminating health disparities among the American public. With this research, I study the changing historical memory of the Task Force of Black and Minority Health across the late twentieth-century using feminist theory, methods of racial capitalism and science and technology study’s framework of “co-production”. I seek to understand how the Task force’s place within a larger history of racialized public health initiatives and Reagan era austerity politics coded the methods of researchers in ways that re-pathologized the very communities the Task Force sought to aid. I elucidate how the Task Force offered little material change to the health status of Black, Native, Latinx, and Asian/Pacific Islander communities in the U.S., despite the Task Force’s memorialization as a crucial step forward in the history of U.S. public health. The resulting project will use the Task Force’s multivolume reports to analyze race, science, and politics in the context of twentieth-century public health initiatives, their structural binds, and their subsequenthistorical memory.