As a Board, we want to begin by celebrating the leadership and invaluable contributions of Black scholars — including Black bioethicists and those in related fields — who have shaped the study and practice of ethics through scholarship, advocacy and resistance, mentorship, community engagement, innovation and leadership. Their invaluable work has offered essential guidance as bioethics continues to learn and reflect on its history and ongoing reality. 

Black history is inseparable from the history of medicine, public health, and bioethics — in Canada, the U.S., and across colonial states more broadly. While unethical practices by the U.S. Public Health Service, including the decades-long denial of treatment to Black patients in Tuskegee, Alabama, are often cited in bioethics, these events are emblematic of a broader pattern: medical knowledge, clinical practice, and public health systems have frequently been shaped by the exploitation, experimentation, and disposability of Black bodies.  Black communities, Indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups have also been subjected to unethical research, medical experimentation, and systemic neglect.

Across medical disciplines, foundational practices and knowledge were developed through procedures performed without consent, experiments on enslaved and marginalized people, and the systematic exclusion of Black communities from the benefits of scientific progress. These histories are not peripheral to bioethics; they are constitutive of it.

In Canada, the colonial project was built on the theft of land from First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples, intertwined with the enslavement, displacement and forced labour of Black people. Anti-Indigenous racism and anti-Black racism are different in experience, purpose, and impact, yet they are interwoven, as both served the broader colonial project and the consolidation of state power. The intentional erasure of Afro-Indigenous identities — the overlapping and intersecting experiences of people who are both Black and Indigenous — has been central to sustaining these hierarchies, deflecting attention from the unique realities and compounded marginalization faced by these communities and individuals.

While slavery has been legally prohibited, it persists in transformed forms through carceral systems, racialized poverty, labour exploitation, environmental injustice, militarization, and inequitable access to health. Black communities continue to experience disproportionate burdens in social and structural determinants of health, including housing, income, education, environmental safety, food insecurity, etc.

Bioethics has been concerned with social justice issues from its very inception, and has developed important frameworks for consent, autonomy, and research oversight. Yet as a field, it has not consistently incorporated the experiences of Black peoples into its structures, principles, and priorities. This includes: what bioethics focuses on, whose needs are framed as problems to be addressed, how ethical issues are understood and resolved, what counts as ethical knowledge or tools, and who is recognized as part of the field. In practice, structural racism continues to shape whose suffering is acknowledged, whose knowledge is valued, and whose lives are protected.

As a Board, we have been reflecting on these histories and their ongoing implications for our work. Black History Month is not only a time for recognition, but a call for accountability and reflection. We offer the following prompts for consideration:

• What is our relationship to white supremacy and Black history — personally, professionally, and institutionally?
• How has Black history shaped the foundations of bioethics and research ethics?
• In what ways must bioethics evolve to confront structural racism, rather than merely respond to its most visible harms?
• What clear first and next steps can we take in our personal lives, in our practice and in our institutions? 

These reflections are an invitation to ongoing engagement, humility, and action in how we practice, teach, research, and lead as a field.