How do you measure racism inside a healthcare system?

In this powerful episode of The Emerging Scholar Podcast, Dr. Marcia Anderson joins host John McGavock for a wide-ranging conversation about race-based data, scientific racism, public health, and the structures that continue to shape healthcare outcomes in Canada.

Drawing on her leadership during Manitoba’s First Nations COVID-19 response — and her role in helping Manitoba become the first province in Canada to systematically collect race, ethnicity, and Indigenous identity data in hospital settings — Dr. Anderson explains why race is not a biological risk factor, but a social measure of how racism operates through systems, policies, institutions, and everyday care.

Together, they unpack the long history of science being used to justify inequality — from the “thrifty gene” theory once taught in Canadian medical schools to pandemic-era claims that framed Indigenous vulnerability as biological rather than the result of colonization, overcrowded housing, poverty, food insecurity, and generations of structural neglect.

The conversation moves from theory to evidence. The data collected in Winnipeg’s emergency rooms revealed that Indigenous patients wait significantly longer for care than white patients with the same triage scores and are more likely to leave without being seen at all. The findings also dismantled one of the most persistent and damaging myths in emergency medicine: that Indigenous patients disproportionately misuse emergency departments.

But this episode goes deeper than statistics. Dr. Anderson reflects on her experiences navigating medicine as one of the few Indigenous medical students in Manitoba in the late 1990s, the racism her family encountered inside the healthcare system, and the importance of Indigenous leadership in interpreting and governing race-based data.

At its core, this is a conversation about power: who gets to define what counts as evidence, whose stories are believed, and what becomes possible when communities themselves shape the research intended to describe their lives.

More insight into this great interview, and the foundational work underlying it can be found in this post on our Substack!

Papers & Resources That We Touched On In This Episode:

• Ibram X. Kendi - Stamped From The Beginning (book)
• Ibram X. Kendi - Stamped From The Beginning documentary review (NPR)
• First Nation Health & Social Secretariat of Manitoba (FNHSSM)
• Critical Race Theory, Race Equity, and Public Health: Toward Antiracism Praxis
• An Introduction to the Intersection of Structural Racism, Biased Mental Models, Stigma, Weight Bias, and Effective Health Communication with Obesity Solutions
• Anti-Racism and Health: Levels of Health Intervention by Professor Camara Jones
• The Invention of Aboriginal Diabetes: The Role of the Thrifty Gene Hypothesis in Canadian Health Care Provision
• The Geneticization of Aboriginal Diabetes and Obesity: Adding Another Scene to the Story of the Thrifty Gene
• Dr. Anderson's experience of racism with her father in the ER: 'It's the hardest conversation we can have': Confronting racism in health care (CBC)
• Indigenous, Black patients wait longer for care in Winnipeg ERs (CBC)
• Indigenous, Black people face longer ER wait times: Full Press Conference (CBC)
• Race, Ethnicity & Indigenous Data Identity: MB Shared Health
• How the legacy of Canada's tuberculosis sanatoriums haunts public health efforts in Pangnirtung (CBC)
• The dark past and injustices of tuberculosis sanatoria in Canada (APTN)
• Disrupting Racisim: MB Shared Health
• We Will Take Good Care of the People
• Dr. Marcia Anderson & Dr. Delia Douglas: Race Matters Blog