Racism is embedded in our social, political, and economic framework, for some people it is what “keeps America, America”. Some thrive on the fact that they are white or not a person of color, that this was and will always be THEIR country. But these differences and hierarchies tend to leave people of color in the dust, especially in healthcare. Members of racial and ethnic minorities are less likely to receive preventive health services and are more likely to receive lower quality of care. Minorities often feel that the quality of healthcare that they receive comes from misrepresentation of their culture, and not the reality of who they actually are. They feel as though health care providers take one look at them and treat them differently, assuming that they are less educated, poor or deserve less respect because of their race.
There have been racial disparities in health care for many years but more recently this imbalance has been putting many racial and ethnic minority groups at an increased risk of getting sick and dying from the coronavirus. The inequalities that have been placed on minorities groups for years such as poverty and the lack of healthcare access has been affecting the health and quality of life of these individuals. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention lists multiple reasons that minorities actually have a higher possibility of exposure and death from COVID-19.
One of the first reasons the the CDC lists is discrimination. Discrimination exists all over the world but healthcare of all places should definitely not be one. Everyone deserves a chance at fair and quality healthcare. There are a wide range of sources for discrimination like age, gender, obesity, or sexual orientation but race and ethnicity based discriminations is the most common. There was actually an experiment done at the Geneva University Hospital in 2007 that tested patients opinions on discrimination during their visit with a questionnaire, the study was conducted with 1,537 adult patients. “A total of 171 (11.1%) respondents reported at least one source of discriminations. Most (93, 54.4%) reported a single cause of discrimination. The Most frequent causes of discrimination were language, age, nationality and having a disease that is viewed negatively by others.” (Hudelson, Kolly and Perneger). The study goes to show that of the non-European participants reported discriminations as language barriers, nationality, choice of religion and skin color. This collection of data helps to show that individuals who get the impression of discrimination by their health care provider receive lower quality of care than those individuals who do not.
The CDC also accounts for Healthcare access being one of the reasons minorities are at an increased risk. Individuals who are a part of a minority group might be under protected because they do not have health insurance. “Healthcare access can also be limited for the groups by many other factors, such as lack of transportation, child care, ability to take time off of work; communication and language barriers; cultural differences between patients and providers; and historical and current discrimination in the health care systems.” (CDC). A lot of groups are actually afraid to seek health care and insurance because they do not trust our current health care systems and the government. The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male still sits in the minds of some minorities which makes it very difficult for them to trust that they are actually being treated and given the same quality of care as white individuals. The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis was an experimentation to try and observe the natural history of untreated syphilis in black populations. The “subject” had been uninformed because they were told they were receiving all of the necessary treatment for bad blood, in reality they received zero treatment. This experiment started 1932 and lasted until 1972, six hundred men joined the study of scientific experimentation of syphilis. There is a long history about why and how this study started that dates all the way back to 1865, basically when Social Darwinism was on the rise along with the theory of “scientific racism”. White people thought of themselves as high-caliber than African Americans and “science and medicine was all too happy to reinforce this hierarchy”. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were phony scientific concepts stating that while the brain of an African American male was underdeveloped, their genitals were actually overdeveloped. This “scientific theory” led to this study because individuals thought Black men were seen to have an inherent deviance towards white women and all African Americans were seen as having urgent “sexual appetites”. “This all matters because it was these understandings of race, sexuality and health that researchers undertook the Tuskegee study. They believed, largely due to their fundamentally flawed scientific understandings of race, that black people were extremely prone to sexually transmitted infections (like syphilis).” (McVean). During the study, instead of observing and documenting the natural progression of syphilis, the researchers interfered with the study. They would tell the subjects that they were being treated, which was a lie, and the researchers would prevent the subjects at any cost from seeking treatment that could save their life. By the time this study was shut down one hundred twenty eight patients died of syphilis, forty of their wives have been infected, and nineteen of their children have also acquired syphilis. The long wave of distrust between minorities and the government/healthcare can cause a greater exposure risk to COVID-19 because they would not trust receiving any type of treatment for the virus.
One of the last reasons the CDC states is education and income gaps in minorities. Some minorities do not get fair access to quality education which may lead to reduced high school graduates and less individuals going to college. Not graduating high school and/or not attending college can be shown to lead to lower paying jobs. These lower paying jobs also might not have the freedom of a flexible schedule which can prevent them from making health care a priority. These rigid working hours can cause a greater exposure risk to the COVID-19 virus and even if/when they are infected minorities cannot risk missing work because they already do not make enough money for support.
Racism in healthcare and the sense that minorities have been at a greater exposure risk to the coronavirus follows the concept of “The One and The Other”. Minorities are always going to feel like the other in our communities and government because of the way they have been treated for centuries. White individuals feel as though they have an “upper hand” in this country. Granted, it is not all white individuals that feel and act this way but until everyone changes their mind set, African Americans and other minorities are going to feel inferior or that they come in “last place”.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5060520/table/t1/?report=objectonly LINK SHOWING PATIENTS PERCEPTION OF DISCRIMINATION.
Works Cited
Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “Health Equity Considerations and Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups”. February 12, 2021
National Library of Medicine. Patricia Hudelson, Veronique Kolly and Thomas Perneger. “Patients Perceptions of Discrimination During Hospitalization”.
Ada McVean B.Sc.. “40 Years of Human Experimentation in America: The Tuskegee Study”. McGill, Office of Science and Society. January 25, 2019.