Purpose: Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a chronic disease process and a public health concern that disproportionately impacts Black populations. While there is an abundance of literature on race and TBI outcomes, there is a lack of scholarship that addresses racism within rehabilitation care, and it remains untheorized. This article aims to illuminate how racism becomes institutionalized in the scientific scholarship that can potentially inform rehabilitation care for persons with TBI and what the implications are, particularly for Black populations.
Material and methods: Applying Bacchi's What's the Problem Represented to be approach, the writings of critical race theory (CRT) are used to examine the research about race and TBI rehabilitation comparable to CRT in other disciplines, including education and legal scholarship.
Results: A CRT examination illustrates that racism is institutionalized in the research about race and TBI rehabilitation through colourblind ideologies, meritocracy, reinforcement of a deficit perspective, and intersections of race and the property functions of whiteness. A conceptual framework for understanding institutional racism in TBI rehabilitation scholarship is presented.
Conclusions: The findings from this article speak to the future of TBI rehabilitation research for Black populations, the potential for an anti-racist agenda, and implications for research and practice.
Keywords: Black populations; Traumatic brain injury; anti-racism; critical race theory; institutional racism.
Critical race theory contributes to a comprehensive understanding of racism in the literature about race and traumatic brain injury (TBI) rehabilitation by asking how racism operates in the scholarship, including methods, analyses, interpretations, and conclusions.Applying a critical race theory lens in TBI rehabilitation has the potential to inform antiracist scholarship that holds important implications for critical rehabilitation research, practice, professional training, and policy.Implications for rehabilitation practice include opening up opportunities to address how race and racism shape rehabilitation outcomes to imagine different possibilities, programs, and futures for Black people with TBI with various communities of practice.