Today most commercially available spirometers, used around the world to diagnose and monitor respiratory illness, have a “race correction” built into the software, to control for the assumption that Black people have less lung capacity than white people. In her 2014 book Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics, Lundy Braun, a Brown University professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and Africana studies, as well as a professor of medical science at Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School, notes that the “race correction” is
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