Hey, what is up this is another special edition of the “Yo, Is This Racist” column. Guest writing for us today is me, a third-year nursing student from Cincinnati, Nick Longbottom. Now I know what you are thinking, “what is some middle-class white guy from suburban Cincinnati going to teach me about racism?” And you would be correct in assuming that my upbringing and background did not lead me to many problems with racism firsthand. However, I am not blind, and I am not going to sit back and ignore something when I know it to be inherently bad and evil.
Now through my studies, I took a course on the issues the plague the healthcare system across the world. This course looked at everything from the big cities of wealthy countries to the food deserts of developing nations. In the process of doing some background research for this course, I came across an interesting statistic that ranked the state of Ohio as the third-worst state in the country in the category of health disparity based on a patient’s skin color and wealth. Now, this was a tough pill to swallow. First of all, it was hard enough for me to wrap my head around the fact that we are in the twenty-first century and we still have issues with inequality in healthcare just based on race alone. Like is there not some type of standard that medical professionals should have to hold themselves to? Was this really a field that I wanted to go into? And second of all, how could this have happened here in Ohio? I had grown up here, known so many different people both medical professionals and not. None of them were racist. At the very least not outwardly.
Therein lies the problem. Despite the Civil Rights movement being mainstream almost 60 years ago, we as a country have not eradicated racism. The racism that exists today in our society is so dangerous and deadly because of how it shows itself. It is ingrained in our society and does not often appear in the traditional ways that we tend to think about. It is ingrained in the very bones of our society and snakes through the foundations of our country like roots. So as I dove deeper into the topic I realized just how big of an issue this was.
A large reason that the inequality in health care and patient outcomes stems from an individual’s environment and socioeconomic status. For example, a wealthier person is much more likely to have access to clean water, healthy food, and a safe shelter. They do not have to worry about having enough healthy food or affording a healthy and nutritious meal for their children. Poor people on the other hand do not get to enjoy this perk. Many people also live in what is known as a food desert. This is any area where the residents do not have access to affordable, healthy food options, specifically fruits and vegetables. One statistic that blew my mind was how over 2 million people in the US live over a mile from a grocery store and do not own a car. How are they supposed to have access to food? Food is such an important denominator in overall health and patient outcomes.
Now, this bleeds over to racism as Black Ohioans are more than two and a half times more likely than white Ohioans to live below the poverty line. So, we have just learned how detrimental that poverty can be for health, and Black Ohioans are poor at more than double the rate of white Ohioans. That is a recipe for disaster. It is massive gaps such as this that lead to African Americans also being thirty times more likely to die of heart disease. And the facts do not stop there. In America as a whole, black children have a 500% higher death rate from asthma-related issues than white children. It is heartbreaking to know that even children are unable to escape from these disparities. They are caused by a multitude of issues that are completely out of their control, and yet they are the ones that suffer the consequences.
To get to the root of these issues, we must look at why there are massive gaps in class and socioeconomic status in the country. These all stem back to systemic issues that plague our society. The simple fact that not all people today are given the same opportunities for success is hard to understand for some. Many people that benefit from this racism tend to not even know it. The healthcare disparities could also be helped by expanding more opportunities to both women and minorities to have positions in healthcare. For example, a white, male doctor does not have any idea about the daily struggles and responsibilities that a young black mother could have. Because of this, he may not be the best person equipped to be making the healthcare decisions for that particular young woman. By bringing in people from all different backgrounds and walks of life, we would also open up a more diverse discussion for a good exchange of ideas. This would undoubtedly push us in the right direction as a society and help to minimize many of the health disparities that we have discussed here today.
There is a clear issue that needs to be addressed. The only question is how. I believe that we need to make healthy food more affordable and accessible to everyone. Doing this would make it so that struggling families do not feel the need to get cheap and unhealthy food just to survive. Also, by providing more social programs to allow access to healthcare, we could ensure that more people are able to see a doctor regularly to decrease their chances of severe diseases developing. In relation to the class content, I keep thinking back to the short story “Recitatif” and how it tackles the idea of speaking and being heard. There is clearly a large issue with healthcare disparities in America, and yet I had no idea until I took a class on the subject. This is an issue with being heard and speaking out about social injustices that need massive change to undo centuries of unfair and unequal treatment that is systemic in our society.