“My emotions and insecurities were at an all-time high, so much so that I was no longer comfortable coming into work. Do my coworkers also joke about my culture, my skin tone? Do my patients and families feel uncomfortable with me being their nurse? These were the questions I frequently asked myself as I anxiously braced myself for my next shift. I could no longer walk the streets, sidewalks, or even the hospital lobby without believing someone was looking at me because of the color of my skin.” ¬ This quote from Cecilia Igwe-Kalu describes her experience as a nurse confronting racism in health care.

The field of bioethics has a moral responsibility to respond to the continued racial and health inequities confronting Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. Along with several colleagues, we formed an antiracism task force to interrogate that moral responsibility. Here are key takeaways from a recent panel discussion that we organized.

It would be easy for bioethicists, to ignore attacks on critical race theory—not in our wheelhouse, too politically charged, and so on. But the attacks on CRT are squarely relevant to our work.

The television show The Good Doctor has always focused on issues of diversity and inclusion in medicine from its storylines to its casting. This week’s episode “Irresponsible Salad Bar Practices” asked an important question: Is medical practice inherently racist?

Dilemmas that clinicians face in the coronavirus pandemic–who gets the ventilator, the 80-year-old grandmother or the 20-year-old student?–are the bread and butter of mainstream bioethics. In medical school, my classmates and I memorized the four principles (beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, and autonomy), which we were told would help us make hard clinical decisions in ethically ambiguous terrain. But Covid-19 shows that medical ethics means much more than what generally falls under bioethics. Medical ethics is deeply political, and to act ethically in medicine means engaging the larger context in which it operates.

It’s been painful to watch health leaders twist themselves into moral knots denying that recently created ventilator rationing guidance will differentially affect Blacks, Latinx, and other people of color. On television, in newspapers, and on listservs, when the predicted disproportionate impacts of these policies are raised, some bioethicists-often white, stonewall. Or repeat a policy’s assertions that race, ethnicity, disability, etc. are irrelevant to care decisions. Or default to the intent of the policymakers.