A New Solution to Inequity in Healthcare: Honors College Guest Lecturer Dr. Eric R. Jackson
(Walker, 2025) News & Notes

Honors College Guest Lecturer Dr. Eric R. Jackson, Professor of History and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Northern Kentuckey University, recently hosted a talk on zoom called “Black Studies, Health Disparities, and AI.” Dr. Jackson began the talk by describing how Black Studies emerged from segregation as a response to the need to understand how the African American community has coped with a history of oppression in the United States of America. He believes that Black Studies began due to the culmination of events that occurred during the Civil Rights movement. During this time, if African Americans had access to healthcare, which many did not, they were treated in segregated facilities, or they were being experimented upon without their consent, which has led to a deep distrust of the healthcare industry that survives in Black communities even today. Following the momentum of the Civil Rights Movement, students of color and their allies began to take over campuses and demanded that academia include curricula that reflected the experiences and contributions of African Americans to connect academia and communities in a way that would benefit both parties.   

While Black Studies has become available in sociology, psychology, and history, it remains absent from STEM fields. In this talk, Dr. Jackson addressed the issue of how Black Studies can connect to and enhance healthcare. His proposed medium for this inclusion is AI, or artificial intelligence, which involves the programming of computers to learn and create like humans do. In healthcare, AI has been useful in diagnosing diseases and providing patients with prognosis and highly individualized treatments, but the bias that AI learns from our history hinders its ability to benefit marginalized communities. Dr. Jackson suggests that we expand the advantages of this new tool by analyzing AI’s use in healthcare in an academic environment. Scholars and practitioners will work together to formulate ways AI can be used to decrease healthcare disparities for African Americans and other marginalized groups, who continue to be victimized by healthcare injustice.   

Dr. Jackson’s hope is that this project will unite Black Studies within academia, healthcare practitioners, and communities to approach and remedy healthcare inequity using AI as a tool that could benefit all parties involved.  

To read more of Dr. Jackson’s work visit his Oxford University Press website: https://oxfordaasc.com/page/focus-on-african-americans-in-cincinnati