"Examining Thanatopolitics: The Socio-Medical Impact of Intergenerational Racialization"

Abstract

This article is a discussion of thanatopolitics -social, political, and economic systems of power that facilitate and perpetuate death -relative to medical inequity and health disparities. The article retraces some of the history of molecularized and biologized racial and racialized dogma as a means of articulating how those ideas have worked to cultivate institutionalized systems of death. This is accomplished by putting Nietzsche's philosophies of "great politics" and "great health" into conversation with Michel Foucault's biopolitics. The interplay between Nietzsche's and Foucault's work (relative to medical inequity and health disparities) evidence a differentiation between the ideals of politics and health that work to sustain life and make live for the betterment of society and the reality of socio-medical systems that make live and let die for the betterment of a few members of society. What follows is thus a discussion of how their work and the rhetoric of race and racialization have informed the epistemologies and praxis of medicine and fortified the legitimization and normalization of medical inequity and health disparities as thanatopolitics.