‘Health care in America is not a right but a commodity,” says Jeneen Interlandi, a contributor to “The 1619 Project,” a book edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Interlandi believes the system is designed to treat those with access to good insurance, to well-funded hospitals, to convenient, high-quality primary care, and to living environments that promote good health overall. Historically, this has not included people of color — especially Black people. Starting in colonial times and continuing through to today, Black people were not afforded the right to the same health care as were the white colonists. In fact, their care was often based on false claims created to demonstrate that the Black race was inferior and thus could be treated differently. These falsehoods provided justifications to keep them enslaved and, later, to maintain their status as second-class citizens.

The persistence of these false assumptions is still affecting health care and medicine for Black people today. Even the world’s most famous women’s tennis star, Serena Williams, was recently misdiagnosed, mistreated, and nearly died when giving birth to her daughter because of some of these false assumptions. In fact, Black women are three times more likely to die during childbirth than white women, in a country where we have the highest maternal death rate and poorest health outcomes among western countries as well.

“The 1619 Project” helps us understand how, over 400 years, the legacy of slavery has had a profound influence on the way our country has evolved into its present form. In this best-selling New York Times book, journalists Linda Villarosa and Jeneen Interlandi focus our attention on these issues. Villarosa observes: “Black Americans disproportionately contracted COVID-19 because of the many ways America’s history of racial violence and inequality are baked into the institutions and structures of our society. Black Americans are more likely to work in low-wage jobs and to live in segregated, crowded, polluted neighborhoods that lack adequate health care facilities and transportation; they are far less likely than white Americans to live near safe outdoor spaces and have access to healthful and affordable food.” All these are important determinants of health that explain the racial disparities of health outcomes for Americans today.

We cannot ignore slavery. It is not a historical aberration. If we want to understand where America is today and how we got here, we must accept that slavery is not just something that happened in the distant past. Slavery was founded on a racist construct that still casts a long shadow — even up to and including the present day.

We live in a multi-tiered society in which Black people have to confront a medical system that provides so-called “care” based on erroneous and racially biased assumptions. For four centuries, these assumptions have been used as the basis for treating Black people as inferior to the dominant white population, not counting them as fully human. Through heinous experimentation, it was theorized they had thicker skin, a greater tolerance for pain, and weaker lung capacity — all of which provided convenient justifications for the inhumane treatment of enslaved people, throughout the Jim Crow era and up through the present day. These assumptions and many others are still taught in medical schools today! As Villarosa states repeatedly in her essay, “This is how Black people get killed.”

The racial bias in today’s health care system differs from the in-your-face racism of the Ku Klux Klan or of other white nationalist organizations like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys. It is a form of institutionalized racism that most practitioners in the health care industry are not even aware of. Ms. Villarosa does not say that individual doctors are racists. Rather, she asserts that doctors have inherited a racist medical system and have gone through a racially biased medical education that has gone largely unexamined.

On Jan. 16, to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, at 6 p.m., the Sunderland Human Rights Task Force, in collaboration with the Deerfield Inclusion Group and the Hatfield Equity Alliance, will sponsor an online program exploring this very issue — namely, the impact of racism on health care and medicine. The program will begin by viewing a video interview with Linda Villarosa expanding on these ideas, followed by large and small group discussions.

To register, contact Kim Audette at audette7@comcast.net. Please write “1619 Project” in the subject line of your email.

Kim Audette, Susan Triolo and Aaron Falbel are members of the Sunderland Human Rights Task Force.

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