Throughout history, there have been many different ideas about how a person’s race should be defined, however, these ideas have been proven to be irrelevant to the process of defining race. By calling race a “biological fiction” Freund means that there are not any particular aspects of a person that can completely determine their race. López says that “biological race is an illusion. Social race, however, is not…” (61). By this statement, he means that although one’s race is not “determined by a single gene or gene cluster…”, the idea of people belonging to different races “...mediates every aspect of our lives” (11, 4). One of the most important aspects of our lives, health, is mediated by the idea of people belonging to different races. According to the report titled Missing Persons: Minorities in the Health Professions, “enrollment of racial and ethnic minorities in nursing, medicine, and dentistry has stagnated despite America’s growing diversity” (i). The report says that “to increase diversity in the health professions, the culture of health professions schools must change” and suggests that “diversity should be a core value in the health professions” (3,4). To improve health professions schools the report recommends working to “...increase the number of multilingual students, and health systems should provide language training to health professionals” (5). It is extremely unfortunate that something as important as having multilingual students is an aspect of health professions schools that needs to be improved. In the article Race, Disadvantage and Faculty Experiences in Academic Medicine, common themes among the experiences of faculty included isolation and feeling invisible, discrimination and being identified with affirmative action or diversity efforts (1365). After these readings, I am left with the question of what is really being done to improve the issues caused by the idea of race that impact the field of health and medicine.