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Karen L Spencer, Review of Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes, Social Forces, Volume 100, Issue 4, June 2022, Page e2, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab138
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In Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes, James Doucet-Battle offers a sweeping indictment of ways in which racial essentialism infiltrates the science and industry surrounding modern diabetes. He systematically unpackages racialized assumptions that have been gradually built into the epidemiology of type 2 diabetes and the pharmaceuticals designed to diagnosis and treat it. In so doing, Doucet-Battle confronts and challenges an assumption that has become practically ubiquitous in recent years in medical and clinical contexts: The assumption that Black people are at higher risk not only for diabetes but also for other upstream matters such as pre-diabetes and metabolic syndrome. Conceptualizing physiologic risk in terms of racial demographics appears to offer a straightforward strategy for defining the parameters of diabetes risk, identifying existing patients, and for creating and recruiting potential patients. Indeed, entire capitalistic ventures are built on this premise, ranging from diabetes management tools (insulin, Metformin, glucometers, and pumps) to clinical trials to the medicalization of various “pre-” diabetes states.