Pills for Prejudice: Implicit Bias and the Perils of Biologizing Racism

Join the McGill Research Group on Health and Law (RGHL) for its Annual Lecture, which will be delivered by Jonathan Kahn, Professor of Law at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law. His talk, entitled Pills for Prejudice: Implicit Bias and the Perils of Biologizing Racism, will critically evaluate trends that may reduce understandings of racism to a mere biological phenomenon of mental health to be addressed primarily through individualized biomedical interventions – rather than as a social problem for which the entire polity bears responsibility.

RSVP: rghl.law [at] mcgill.ca

About the speaker

Jonathan Kahn is the James E. Kelley Professor of Law at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law. He holds a Ph.D. in U.S. History from Cornell University and a J.D. from the Boalt Hall School of Law, U. of California, Berkeley. His current research focuses on the intersections of law and biotechnology, with particular attention to how regulatory mandates intersect with scientific, clinical and commercial practice in producing legal understandings of race and racism in American society. He is the author of Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age (Columbia University Press, 2012). His newest book is Race on the Brain: What Implicit Bias Gets Wrong About the Struggle for Racial Justice (Columbia University Press, 2018).

This event has been accredited for 1.5 hours of Continuing Legal Education by a recognized provider.