A key to Black Americans’ health may lie in a misunderstanding of the slave trade

In the summer of 2008, with only two weeks left before returning home from a visiting Fulbright professorship in Japan, I made a doctor’s appointment for a checkup to take advantage of that nation’s inexpensive health care system. My only complaint was arthritic joint pain. But the physician I saw focused on a laboratory test that came back with an unexpected and grim diagnosis: advanced kidney disease. It surprised him, too: He said he had never seen someone who displayed such health and vigor at so late a stage in the disease. Before leaving the consulting room, he implored me to see a specialist as soon as I got back to the United States. advertisement When I returned home to Texas, my primary care physician told me I had been misdiagnosed because, unlike the lab report in Japan, the tests he ordered had included a checkbox for ethnicity, in which I was identified as African American. While relieved on account of the positive health report, I was still confused that the use of race had somehow protected me from a diagnosis of kidney failure. How could being identified as Black change a diagnosis? For years, I had taught my students...