Applying Race and Ethnicity in Health Disparities Research

Health professionals commonly reference race and ethnicity to inform health care and administrative decisions. However, health researchers (and, arguably, society at large) misapply race and ethnicity when assuming an inherent relationship of these concepts with biological and health outcomes of interest. Misapplication of race potentially results from socially embedded identification predicated upon race essentialism, the belief that people within a racial group share "inherent" biological traits that define them as distinct from other racial groups. This false belief is often associated with implied racial hierarchies obscuring authentic causal disease relationships. Similarly, ethnicity is a socially and politically constructed group descriptor for people from a similar national or regional background who may share common cultural, historical, and social experiences. Thus, as for race, no inherent biological information is contained within such group definitions. This article summarizes the Research Centers for Minority Institutions (RCMI) 2025 Annual Grantee Meeting keynote session on Race and Ethnicity in Medicine. The session described how society originated and subsequently applied/misapplied race and ethnicity in various domains of policy and public health. The keynote session also considered the use of race and ethnicity in describing and envisioning biomedical research, clinical trials, clinical practice, and health services research. The authors summarize a more tenable use of race and ethnicity to advance biomedical research and health by focusing upon social and environmental drivers of health, population representation in clinical trials, and other factors. Associated recommendations from the keynote session are provided.