One shared breath

In the 19th century, scholars put their instruments to work for a hierarchy of races. In Philadelphia, the physician Samuel Morton, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, gathered 867 human skulls. In Crania Americana (1839), he divided humanity into five races ranked by their supposed intellectual capacity; the book quickly became the reference on "racial difference." In 1851, the physician Samuel Cartwright invented "drapetomania," a supposed mental illness that would drive enslaved people to run away.

Cartwright, himself a slaveholder, also claimed that Black people's lungs had a 20% "deficiency." The idea lasted. In 2015, researcher Lundy Braun noted that most spirometers, the devices that measure breathing, applied a correction factor to non-white people: 10 to 15% in the United States for people classified as "Black." A weaker breath could thus pass for "normal."

In 2023, the American Thoracic Society recommended abandoning these race-based equations in favour of an average equation common to everyone. According to the society, adjusting for race can delay diagnosis and access to treatment for racialized people. From now on, it is up to those who would keep these corrections to prove they are useful.

Science corrects itself when we dare to question it. Ubuntu reminds us that to care for someone is first to recognize them as fully human: one shared breath, one shared dignity.