Dying While Black by Vernellia Randall is a book about the disparities between the health care administered to African Americans and that administered to European Americans. She states that these disparities, the black health deficit, are caused by the continuation of the slave health deficit. She encourages reparation in the form of long term monetary and legal commitments and a comprehensive civil rights health care law.
The book begins with statistics of short life expectancy, high death rates, high infant mortality, low birth weight rates, and high disease rates as compared to European Americans. Randall states that they are a direct result of slavery and the lack of health care that was provided from the time of slavery to the Jim Crow laws, the Affirmative Action time, and to the Racial Entrenchment time of the present. She points out the racial barriers to the access of health care, nursing homes, hospitals, physicians, and other professionals. In addition, she acknowledges a lack of minority health professionals and thus a shortage of minority input into the health care system. She insists that the health care system rid itself of intentional and inadvertent racism. The managed care organizations entice providers and facilitators to engage in discrimination. This has also led to a mistrust of the health care system by blacks. Randall insists that this is not simply paranoia but is based on a history of experimentation, Sickle Cell Screening Initiative, planning/involuntary sterilization, and the excuses that the medical system gave to justify its discriminations. These abuses contribute to her accusation of the human rights violations by institutional racism in the health care system, the large inequality in health status, and the lack of legal protection. She concludes her book with the authenticity of her call for reparations from the American government. The slave health deficit will continue to negatively impact African Americans unless a well planned legal program is enacted.
Racial discrimination is any discrimination against any individual on the basis of their race, ancestry, ethnic or national origin, and/or skin color and hair texture. Individuals can discriminate by refusing to do business with, socialize with, or share resources with people of a certain group. Governments can discriminate explicitly in law, for example through policies of racial segregation, disparate enforcement of laws, or disproportionate allocation of resources. Some jurisdictions have anti-discrimination laws which prohibit the government or individuals from being discriminated based on race in various circumstances. Some institutions and laws use affirmative action to attempt to overcome or compensate for the effects of racial discrimination. In some cases, this is simply enhanced recruitment of members of underrepresented groups; in other cases, there are firm racial quotas. Opponents of strong remedies like quotas characterize them as reverse discrimination, where members of a dominant or majority group are discriminated against.
Reparations for slavery is the application of the concept of reparations to victims of slavery or their descendants. There are concepts for reparations in legal philosophy and reparations in transitional justice. In the US, reparations for slavery have been both given by legal ruling in court and/or given voluntarily by individuals and institutions.
Discrimination based on skin tone, also known as colorism or shadeism, is a form of prejudice and discrimination in which people of certain ethnic groups, or people who are perceived as belonging to a different-skinned racial group, are treated differently based on their different skin tone.
Health equity arises from access to the social determinants of health, specifically from wealth, power and prestige. Individuals who have consistently been deprived of these three determinants are significantly disadvantaged from health inequities, and face worse health outcomes than those who are able to access certain resources. It is not equity to simply provide every individual with the same resources; that would be equality. In order to achieve health equity, resources must be allocated based on an individual need-based principle.
Racism has been reflected in discriminatory laws, practices, and actions against racial or ethnic groups, throughout the history of the United States. Since the early colonial era, White Americans have generally enjoyed legally or socially sanctioned privileges and rights, which have been denied to members of various ethnic or minority groups at various times. European Americans have enjoyed advantages in matters of citizenship, criminal procedure, education, immigration, land acquisition, and voting rights.
Anti-Black racism, also called anti-Black sentiment, anti-Blackness, colourphobia or Negrophobia, is characterised by prejudice, collective hatred, and discrimination or extreme aversion towards people who are racialised as Black people, especially those people from sub-Saharan Africa and its diasporas, as well as a loathing of Black culture worldwide. Such sentiment includes, but is not limited to: the attribution of negative characteristics to Black people; the fear, strong dislike or dehumanization of Black men; and the objectification of Black women.
Oppositional culture, also known as the "blocked opportunities framework" or the "caste theory of education", is a term most commonly used in studying the sociology of education to explain racial disparities in educational achievement, particularly between white and black Americans. However, the term refers to any subculture's rejection of conformity to prevailing norms and values, not just nonconformity within the educational system. Thus many criminal gangs and religious cults could also be considered oppositional cultures.
Mental distress or psychological distress encompasses the symptoms and experiences of a person's internal life that are commonly held to be troubling, confusing or out of the ordinary. Mental distress can potentially lead to a change of behavior, affect a person's emotions in a negative way, and affect their relationships with the people around them.
Racial whitening, or "whitening" (branqueamento), is an ideology that was widely accepted in Brazil between 1889 and 1914, as the solution to the "Negro problem". Whitening in Brazil is a sociological term to explain the change in perception of one's race, from darker to lighter identifiers, as a person rises in the class structure of Brazil. Racial mixing in Brazilian society entailed that minority races ought to adopt the characteristics of the white race, with the goal of creating a singular Brazilian race that emulates the white race, striving to create a society best emulating that of Europe.
Black women generally refers to women of sub-Saharan African, Aboriginal Australian, and Melanesian descent.
Research shows many health disparities among different racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Different outcomes in mental and physical health exist between all U.S. Census-recognized racial groups, but these differences stem from different historical and current factors, including genetics, socioeconomic factors, and racism. Research has demonstrated that numerous health care professionals show implicit bias in the way that they treat patients. Certain diseases have a higher prevalence among specific racial groups, and life expectancy also varies across groups.
Racism has been present in Brazil since its colonial period and is pointed as one of the major and most widespread types of discrimination, if not the most, in the country by several anthropologists, sociologists, jurists, historians and others. The myth of a racial democracy, a term originally coined by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in his 1933 work Casa-Grande & Senzala, is used by many people in the country to deny or downplay the existence and the broad extension of racism in Brazil.
In the United States, racial inequality refers to the social inequality and advantages and disparities that affect different races. These can also be seen as a result of historic oppression, inequality of inheritance, or racism and prejudice, especially against minority groups.
Societal racism is a type of racism based on a set of institutional, historical, cultural and interpersonal practices within a society that places one or more social or ethnic groups in a better position to succeed and disadvantages other groups so that disparities develop between the groups. Societal racism has also been called structural racism, because, according to Carl E. James, society is structured in a way that excludes substantial numbers of people from minority backgrounds from taking part in social institutions. Societal racism is sometimes referred to as systemic racism as well. Societal racism is a form of societal discrimination.
Arline Geronimus wrote about the weathering hypothesis the early 1990s to account for health disparities of newborn babies and birth mothers due to decades and generations of racism and social, economic, and political oppression. It is well documented that people of color and other marginalized communities have worse health outcomes than white people. This is due to multiple stressors including prejudice, social alienation, institutional bias, political oppression, economic exclusion, and racial discrimination. The weathering hypothesis proposes that the cumulative burden of these stressors as individuals age is "weathering", and the increased weathering experienced by minority groups compared to others can account for differences in health outcomes. In recent years, social scientists investigated the biological plausibility of the weathering hypothesis in studies evaluating the physiological effects of social, environmental and political stressors among marginalized communities. The weathering hypothesis is more widely accepted as a framework for explaining health disparities on the basis of differential exposure to racially based stressors. Researchers have also identified patterns connecting weathering to biological phenomena associated with stress and aging, such as allostatic load, epigenetics, telomere shortening, and accelerated brain aging.
Racial capitalism is a concept reframing the history of capitalism as grounded in the extraction of social and economic value from people of marginalized racial identities, typically from black people. It was described by Cedric J. Robinson in his book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, published in 1983, which, in contrast to both his predecessors and successors, theorized that all capitalism is inherently racial capitalism, and racialism is present in all layers of capitalism's socioeconomic stratification. Jodi Melamed has summarized the concept, explaining that capitalism "can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups", and therefore, for capitalism to survive, it must exploit and prey upon the "unequal differentiation of human value."
Black maternal mortality in the United States refers to the disproportionately high rate of maternal death among those who identify as Black or African American women. Maternal death is often linked to both direct obstetric complications and indirect obstetric deaths that exacerbate pre-existing health conditions. In general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines maternal mortality as a death occurring within 42 days of the end of pregnancy from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management. In the United States, around 700 women die from pregnancy-related complications per year, with Black women facing a mortality rate nearly three times more than the rate for white women.
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed race-based health care disparities in many countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Canada, and Singapore. These disparities are believed to originate from structural racism in these countries which pre-dates the pandemic; a commentary in The BMJ noted that "ethnoracialised differences in health outcomes have become the new normal across the world" as a result of ethnic and racial disparities in COVID-19 healthcare, determined by social factors. Data from the United States and elsewhere shows that minorities, especially black people, have been infected and killed at a disproportionate rate to white people.
Medical racism in the United States encompasses discriminatory and targeted medical practices and misrepresentations in medical teachings driven by biases based on characteristics of patients' race and ethnicity. In American history, it has impacted various racial and ethnic groups and affected their health outcomes. Vulnerable subgroups within these racial and ethnic groups such as women, children and the poor have been especially endangered over the years. An ongoing phenomenon since at least the 18th century in the United States, medical racism has been evident on a widespread basis through various unethical studies, forced procedures, and differential treatments administered by health care providers, researchers, and even sometimes government entities. Whether medical racism is always caused by explicitly prejudiced beliefs about patients based on race or by unconscious bias is not widely agreed upon.
Patent racism refers to systemic barriers and discriminatory practices within patent law in the United States that disproportionately affect minority groups, particularly African-American inventors.