Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

In hospitals, bias can literally determine whether a person lives or dies. According to Eliminating Racial Disparities in Maternal and Infant Mortality, a 2019 report published by the Center for American Progress, black women across the income spectrum and from all walks of life are dying from preventable pregnancy-related complications at three to four times—I REPEAT: THREE TO FOUR TIMES!—the rate of non-Hispanic white women. The death rate for black infants is twice that of infants born to non-Hispanic white mothers. If we assume the doctors and nurses of this nation mean well, what’s going on? Black women have long been thought capable of bearing more physical pain, have received less careful, attentive, thorough health care, and have failed to be treated with dignity by health care professionals. Those factors create a chain of biological processes known as weathering that undermines black women’s physical and mental health. It is literally killing their babies. And a major reason for why it’s happening is implicit bias.