Drug Decriminalization in Maryland Through an African Centered Research Paradigm- Analysis and Recommendations

of critiquing power, the African Centered Research Paradigm attempts to understand the
specificity of how Anti-Black and Eurocentric thought systems function in the reproduction of
inequality and violence. The goal is not to avoid the wielding power, but instead, explicitly build
it for oppressed people. This is also not to say that all forms of oppression can be reduced to race;
white supremacy serves as an epistemological frame through which other forms of identity, such
as gender and sexuality, become salient.
The violence of the modern state formation has been so centrally formed by Eurocentric
institutions operationalized white supremacist violence. Having a grasp on the functioning of this
system is an essential part of guiding the approach of more comprehensive strategies of liberation.
For example, while acknowledging that medical violence has impacted all oppressed people, it is
also critical to analyze the unique ways in which chattel slavery changed the “doctor-patient”
relationship for people of African descent. As Harriet Washington notes, the very idea of a “doctorpatient”
relationship obscures the “master/slave relationship,” which was at the core of Black
people's relationship to the medical profession from the inception of American medicine
(Washington,2015). Washington explains that under American chattel slavery, the doctor had no
ethical obligation to the enslaved African they were treating, but solely to the owner, as the goal
of medicine was render the slave fit to work, not to return them to any abstract notion of true
“health” (ibd). John Hoberman writes in his analysis of racism in the medical professions that
doctors at times seem to mirror police officers in their authority over black bodies, exercising
freedom from democratic accountability that allows anti-Black ideologies to flourish among their
ranks. He writes:
As one physician-author noted in 1988, “doctors are unwilling to blow the whistle on other
doctors. It’s somehow bad manners or breaking the faith of the medical profession to report
a bad doctor.” In this sense, the practice of medicine, like police work, is more of a
fraternal order than a scientific community that recognizes and acts upon its responsibility
to monitor and correct the deviant and dangerous misconduct of its practitioners.
Another powerful factor that shields doctors from scrutiny is the “halo effect” that wraps
physicians in an aura of benevolent power. “Doctors,” a New York Times writer noted in
2009, “have a degree of professional autonomy that is probably unmatched outside of
academia. And that is how we like it. We think of our doctors as wise men and women who
can combine knowledge and instinct to land on just the right treatment.” The combination
of benevolent intent and the power to heal has traditionally conferred upon doctors “a
degree of professional autonomy” that can make them appear as sages who have earned
a status that puts them beyond the judgments of observers who do not belong to the guild.
The physician’s authority and autonomy can promote a socially conservative identity that
resists both personal self-examination and social reforms. Social conservatives may not
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