Equity and Quality of Care Through Racial Profiling (Issues in Medicine‪)‬

Addressing racial profiling in South African medical research, (1) Dan Ncayiyana highlighted the debate over the past decade: from the position that data should not routinely be collected according to population group, (2) through editorial policies that rejected unwarranted reference to race or use of race as an explanatory variable, to the current position that identifying health disparities of social groups is important. One should be clear as to causation of disparities, and not attribute differences to race or ethnicity when they are the result of social, educational or environmental deprivation. Having justified categorisation, Ncayiyana warns that while the goal of race-based data collection might be to monitor post-apartheid transformation, it risks becoming an affirmation of the validity of race classification rather than a means to erase it. Race classification in South African health care