Hospitals and the History of Structural Racism in the United States.

This article examines the role of hospitals in perpetuating racial health disparities in the United States, drawing on W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton’s two-volume work *An American Health Dilemma*, which analyzes how racism has historically shaped the US health care system. It highlights how hospitals enforced segregation through legal and structural means, marginalized Black patients and physicians, and contributed to ongoing inequities, while also discussing the rise and decline of Black-run hospitals like Chicago’s Provident Hospital as critical sites of care and resistance. The article integrates recent scholarship on community activism, legal challenges, and the market-driven transformation of hospitals since the 1980s, emphasizing that hospitals remain contested institutions central to both the maintenance and potential dismantling of systemic racial injustice in health care.