Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation

(University of North Carolina Press) This book uses the tuberculosis crisis among urban African Americans in the first half of the 20th century to illuminate the limits of racialized medicine and the roots of modern health disparities. As reactionary white politicians and health officials attempted to control TB with Jim Crow quarantines, African Americans protested the segregated, overcrowded housing that was the true cause of the tuberculosis problem. Roberts is associate professor of history at Columbia University and assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health.