Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States

In Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States, Anne Pollock draws on six ‘‘extraordinary’’ events to highlight the ‘‘ordinary’’ racialization of citizenship and health in the United States. Pollock’s analysis of these public events, some better known than others, not only illustrates how emergencies exacerbate inequalities, but also describes some of the everyday elements of anti-Black racism. Pollock describes her analytic approach as a ‘‘close reading’’ of public events that involves an evaluation of ‘‘journalistic and academic accounts of each case to retell the stories while putting them into a broader frame’’ (p. 14). The seeming juxtaposition of relying on unique events to outline the routine mechanisms that maintain and reproduce health inequality effectively illuminates the intersecting and wideranging elements of racism. In her analysis, Pollock outlines how racial disparities do not simply appear during times of crisis but are made more visible by crises. Pollock begins the book by drawing on the deaths of Black postal workers in the 2001 anthrax attacks to discuss how Black individuals’ care is not prioritized due to a ‘‘reluctance to recognize Black suffering’’ by political and medical systems (p. 22). Pointing to the historic significance of the September 11 attacks, Pollock highlights the hypocrisy of touting that we ‘‘are all in this together’’ given the indifference toward the health and well-being of Black men and women. In Chapter Two, Pollock focuses on the lack of access to pharmaceuticals during and after Hurricane Katrina to illustrate the unequal distribution of the impact of natural disasters across racial groups. The author argues that events like Hurricane Katrina highlight the racialization of citizenship in which racial minorities are framed as ‘‘outside the American mainstream’’ and thus unworthy of ‘‘fair treatment, swift response, and unchallenged rescue’’ (pp. 49, 59). In Chapters Three and Four, Pollock uses the notion of racialized biopolitics to highlight how our society ‘‘fosters some life and lets others die’’ (p. 10). She draws on the suspended sentence of the Scott sisters, who were given conditional freedom on the basis of organ donation, as well as the poisoning of the people of Flint as examples of how some lives are cultivated and prioritized while others are abandoned. Pollock describes how the neglect of the well-being of Black men and women is a type of ‘‘slow violence’’ that ‘‘often goes unnoticed but is fundamental to how bodily well-being becomes unequal’’ (p. 6). Chapters Five and Six bring additional attention to issues of gender in the surveillance and regulation of Black bodies, particularly the bodies of Black women. Pollock discusses the violent encounter of Dajerria Becton with law enforcement at a pool party in addition to Serena Williams’s traumatic birth story to reflect on how ‘‘Black women’s bodies are simultaneously hyper surveilled and inadequately cared for’’ (p. 117). Pollock emphasizes how the intersection of racism and sexism has made the bodies of Black women more visible, as they are always being ‘‘watched,’’ while at the same time also rendering them invisible in that they are made ‘‘silent and powerless to speak for themselves’’ (pp. 127–28). There are many strengths to this book. First, the decision for Pollock to focus on more recent public events to underscore the present racialization contributing to social inequities makes a necessary contribution in the discussion of health disparities. Rather than contextualizing her book with historical events prior to the twenty-first century, Pollock uses more timely examples to point out how anti-Black racism is not only a ‘‘lingering legacy but a constantly re-created present’’ (p. 22). Second, the integration of diverse fields and scholarship in the book provides for a much broader lens that is more inclusive of readers from various academic backgrounds. Pollock combines 74 Reviews