Black skin, white coats: racism, body and ethics in anthropological fieldwork

Abstract

During doctoral field research, I followed the work of a few White doctors while they conducted clinical research protocols. My presence in their offices was conditioned to the use of a white lab coat, which sometimes put me in a position to explain to patients that I was not a medical intern and, at other times, made the limits of supposedly automatic confusions between me and a medical professional explicit. By analyzing situations of gendered racism that I experienced during the fieldwork while dressing a white coat, I characterize medicine as a space marked by Whiteness and, extending this reflection to anthropology, I argue that the ethical issues on anthropological fieldwork must necessarily take into account the racial and gender hierarchies that make up interactions with research interlocutors-in particular, those experienced by Black ethnographers in contexts where Whiteness is normalized.