Black people, like other human beings, are just mere mortals.
Black people do not have the strength of Superman.
Black people do not possess the speed of the Flash. Black people lack the healing powers of Wolverine.
Shakespeare wrote, “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”
According to new research from the University of Virginia and published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, many white medical students and residents do not share his belief in the common bond of human suffering and existence.
America’s health care system often functions as a type of medical Apartheid.
As reported in the Washington Post:
African Americans are routinely under-treated for their pain compared with whites, according to research. A study released Monday sheds some disturbing light on why that might be the case.
Researchers at the University of Virginia quizzed white medical students and residents to see how many believed inaccurate and at times "fantastical" differences about the two races -- for example, that blacks have less sensitive nerve endings than whites or that black people's blood coagulates more quickly. They found that fully half thought at least one of the false statements presented was possibly, probably or definitely true…
Even more disturbing:
"We were expecting some endorsement" of the false beliefs, said Kelly Hoffman, a U-Va. doctoral candidate in psychology who led the study. But she said the researchers were surprised so many in the group with medical training endorsed the false beliefs, some of which she called "more outlandish."
For example, 58 percent of the study's general group said they believed that "blacks' skin is thicker than whites'." About 40 percent of first- and second-year medical students also thought that was true, as did 25 percent of residents -- doctors who recently completed their studies and now are receiving more specialized training.
The practical effect of racial bias in health care is that black people are made to suffer.
A 2000 study out of Emory University found that at a hospital emergency department in Atlanta, 74 percent of white patients with bone fractures received painkillers compared with 50 percent of black patients. Similarly, a paper last year found that black children with appendicitis were less likely to receive pain medication than their white counterparts. And a 2007 study found that physicians were more likely to underestimate the pain of black patients compared with other patients.
The University of Virginia’s new research complements other work that shows how African Americans and Latinos wait longer than whites in hospitals and are also likely to receive worse quality care. Residents in many predominantly black and brown neighborhoods also wait longer for emergency services such as the fire department, paramedics, and police as compared to white communities. The University of Virginia’s new study also fits with earlier findings published in a recent edition of the Social Psychological and Personality Science journal that a large percentage of white people think that blacks possess magical and superhuman abilities.
In all, matters of health care are inherently political.
They reflect a society’s values: Whose lives are deemed worthy? How are resources to be allocated? What are the priorities put on human rights and dignity?
The political nature of health care can be conceptualized in several different ways. For example, biopolitics is the study of how life processes are managed by authority and its relationship to knowledge and subjectivity. Necropolitics seeks to explore how authority and sovereignty are related to decisions regarding who is to live and who is to die. Philosopher Henry Giroux frames these questions of human dignity and care in an era of neolilberalism, surveillance, the culture of cruelty, and violence, as “the politics of disposability.” In Giroux’s model, the United States of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is a country where the market, plutocrats, and casino capitalism decide what lives have value and how those others are to be exploited and/or left to die by corporations, the prison industrial complex, and other means of punishment and training.
Together, necropolitics, biopolitics, and the politics of disposability reflect how public policy is inexorably linked to fundamental questions about State power, democracy, the human body, and justice.
To wit: Rampant police brutality against black Americans and other people of color is enabled and legitimated by a belief that black people are biologically different than whites and perhaps, as found by the University of Virginia’s study on the racial attitudes of medical students and residents, are less susceptible to pain, have thicker skin, and are thus more bestial and dangerous. Here, the white racial paranoiac gaze is able to look at black people as some type of Other, who even while being illegally brutalized by the police, security forces, or white vigilantes, somehow deserves their unjust punishment
The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, demonstrates how classism and racism intersect in American society with lethal results. The lives of the poor and working class people in Flint are deemed as less “valuable” than those of the middle class, rich, and 1 percent by politicians, the corporate news media, and other elites. The lives of black and brown people are also systematically devalued in a society built upon white supremacy and where white privilege is a quotidian reality. The result is that a poor majority black community like Flint is allowed to suffer privations that would be unthinkable if its residents were mostly white, middle class, or rich.
Environmental racism is an additional example of how some lives and communities are valued and others are viewed as expendable. Predominantly black and brown neighborhoods are more likely to be places for garbage dumps, incinerators, and biomedical waste disposal. First Nations people face those and other dangers: Their communities are more likely to host nuclear waste disposal and storage sites. The sum effect of environmental racism is that black, brown, and First Nations peoples have higher rates of asthma, cancer, and other diseases. This dynamic contributes to a disparity in mortality rates in the United States, where whites live an average of four years longer than blacks.
The University of Virginia’s findings about the racist fantasies of white medical professionals reflect a society where the color line still over-determines life outcomes and “old fashioned” racism commingles with its more “modern,” “color blind” form. This research is also a reminder of the importance of the slogan and movement known as Black Lives Matter. In an American society where black people are subjected to ugly stereotypes and their lives systematically devalued—even by white medical professionals and other caregivers—“Black Lives Matter!” is both a corrective against white supremacy, and an affirmation of the inherent value of black folks’ lives and humanity.