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Too frequently, rather than taking into account these structural inequities, we blame the individuals, by insisting they wouldn’t be poor if they worked harder and wouldn’t be sick if they were educated and simply took better care of themselves.
Even when income, education, and access to health care are matched, African Americans remain disadvantaged and racial disparities in health cut lives short. College-educated Black mothers, for example, are more likely to die, almost die, or lose their babies than white mothers who haven’t finished high school.
They used their expertise and even empirical evidence to create deeply flawed theories, presented as fact, to justify forced labor and unspeakable cruelty and lend support to racist ideology and discriminatory public policies.
Today, most commercially available spirometers, used by medical providers around the world to diagnose and monitor respiratory illness, have a “race correction” built into the software, which controls for the false notion that Black people have less lung capacity than whites.
Blacks in the United States have the highest rate of hypertension, with more than half affected, and African Americans aged eighteen to forty-nine are twice as likely as whites to die from heart disease.
infants born to college-educated Black parents were twice as likely to die as infants born of similarly educated white parents. In
It works this way: stress, the body’s response to a perceived threat, prompts the brain to release hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol. This, in turn, causes blood pressure to increase and the heart rate to speed up. Short, infrequent bursts of this fight-or-flight response are normal, but when it happens again and again, it can turn deadly, eroding health and accelerating aging. Also, as the stressors pile up and feed on each other, they can lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms—drinking, smoking, poor food choices, and drug use. Those who are economically disadvantaged have added
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Black people have long been blamed for the health problems that plague them, with little acknowledgment of the condition of their communities.
Black men are still four times more likely than white men to be diagnosed with schizophrenia, according to an often-cited 2019 Rutgers University study; the researchers concluded that clinicians put more emphasis on psychotic than on depressive symptoms in African Americans, leading to an overuse of diagnoses of schizophrenia.
U.S. culture overemphasizes personal responsibility, creating the false notion that poor Americans are largely to blame for their own poverty, with little interrogation of an unequal system that is beyond the control of the individual.
But someone made these decisions; human beings are responsible for deciding when to cut off another person’s leg or his testicles and for making that crushing choice more often in Black patients than white even when other factors seem to be equal.
Most acts of racism and bias arise in people with blind spots, not Proud Boys memberships.
