White Health and International Law

Abstract

Global health cannot and should not be divorced, decontextualized, nor depoliticized from its historical roots and governing logics. This chapter surfaces the role of international law through omission and commission in structuring and reifying racialized hierarchies of care and concern. The COVID-19 pandemic has created an opening to not only recognize, but to potentially reshape the relationship between race and global health. At the time of writing, two major reforms in international law are taking place: one that focuses on revising the International Health Regulations of 2005 and the other on creating a new Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response treaty. The urgency of the current moment cannot be overstated. If COVID-19 has shown us anything, it should be that it is in all of our interests that widespread recognition of the need to rectify the relationship between race, racism and global public health, and that specifically remedying the privileging of White interests in international law is long overdue.

This chapter explores the connections, legacies, and important disjunctions between tropical medicine and global public health. It argues that the primacy given to White health is one of the animating purposes behind the emergence of the global public health regime. White health as a concept, reflects the “racialization of diseases,” which attaches racial meaning to illnesses based on the racial groups that tend to be socially associated with a given disease. White health refers to the health concerns of those racialized as White, not because these concerns are unique biologically, but to draw attention to the signifying role of race and the political, legal, and social privileging and salience given to ailments thought to touch and concern White people. This chapter considers the role of international law in facilitating this prioritization. The central question this chapter grapples with is to what extent White health and White interests then and now have informed the global health agenda. It begins by exploring the creation of racialized states. It then discusses how these states’ burgeoning public health efforts were racialized. Subsequently, it resurfaces the path from tropical or colonial medicine to international health to illustrate the fundamental role of race and racism in the field’s development. The piece then considers how the vestiges of colonial medicine in global health remain with current efforts to contain infectious diseases. It brings the failure of international law to adequately regulate medical experimentation on historically subordinated groups under heightened scrutiny. Next, it considers the theoretical, legal and policy implications of the persistence of coloniality in global health. It concludes that understanding the nexus between White health and global health is crucial for rendering race visible and for assessing current legal reform efforts taking place in international law today.

Note:

Funding Information: No Funding Information to declare.

Conflict of Interests: No Competing Interest Declaration.

Keywords: race, racism, colonialism, global public health, tropical medicine, colonial medicine, Global South, communicable diseases, infectious diseases, White Health, international sanitary conventions, global public health law, global public health regime, World Health Organization, medical experimentation