Black Americans are reluctant to participate in cancer clinical trials in spite of a decade of focus on this issue by the scientific community. Many factors, according to the authors of this paper resulted in this current dilemma with racism being the fundamental unit.
They discuss some current challenges and proposed solutions to help in increasing the enrollment of Black Americans in cancer clinical trials. One of the most important suggestions is to implement the least acceptable race-specific percentage as a new bar that registrational clinical trials need to pass before cancer drugs approval.
Why This Is Important: I believe that any strategy should be considered if it is effective in increasing the number of African Americans in clinical trials. However, the current arguments and policies that do not consider race important in scientific research will not help.