“It’s harder for the likes of us”: racially minoritised stem cell donation as ethico-racial imperative

How best are we to understand appeals to participate in a biomedical project that are based both on invoking shared racial identity, and on framing engagement as the clear moral course of action? Stem cell donor recruitment, which often focuses on engaging racially minoritised communities, provides useful insight into this question. This article proposes that it is not an essential mutual racial identity between the person asking and the person asked at play. Rather, it is the creative ‘doing’ of relatedness between people at the scale of race as well as family that coalesces into powerful appeals to participate. Through analysis of ethnographic, documentary and social media data, the paper argues that this work relies at least partly on framing donation as a duty of being part of a racialised community, which I describe here as an ethico-racial imperative, in which both race and responsibility become intertwined to compel participation in the biomedical project of donor registration. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41292-021-00241-9.