It is not enough to say we are anti-racist. We must address glaring disparities in treatment.

By Jane Gagliardi, MD, MHS

In a recent op-ed on KevinMD.com, Jane Gagliardi, MD, MHS, discusses the need to eradicate racial disparities in patient care and outcomes. She writes:

Sometimes structural racism surfaces in a way that even those of us who would like to be “color-blind” cannot help but see.

In the spring of 2020, the video-recorded death of George Floyd (who was Black) at the hands of a law enforcement officer (who was white) brought millions of witnesses to the kind of hostility that is all-too-familiar to individuals of color. Individuals, many non-white, took to our nation’s capital in protest; there, they met a clear demonstration of force by individuals in military garb. In the fall of 2020, our presidential election included legal votes from a larger proportion of individuals of color than ever before. False cries of fraudulence ensued. On January 6, 2021, a group of individuals, many white (some carrying the flag of the explicitly racist Confederacy), breached our nation’s actual Capitol Building to protest the election.  Congress was in joint session, presided over by the vice president. The individuals met many fewer, less severe immediate consequences than would seem justified.

As Roxanne Jones writes in an opinion article, “To be Black in America is to live with constant trauma … Black folk across the nation watched that siege and we knew in our souls that had those rioters been Black they would have faced deadly force long before they got inside …”.

Decades of robust evidence point to disparate health outcomes, with worse Black and Latinx outcomes than for white patients. We work to add some sensitivity trainings, but health care delivery remains largely unchanged – and biased. Once privileged eyes learn to see structural racism, it becomes visible in the very fabric of our institutions, even the ones grounded in “objective science.”

Read the full op-ed.

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