In the 19th century, the white man believed the Africans he enslaved and exploited were immune to Western diseases. Today, the white doctor believes his patient, a woman of color, is not worthy of comprehensive treatment.
Women of color, particularly African American women, are often dismissed by healthcare providers when they complain of pain. Why?
Many of us fall prey to systemically ingrained, inherently racist stereotypes. My black power movement professor links those stereotypes back to Jim Crow ideology. “Why do you think all black people are athletic? — because slave owners bred them to entertain with sport. Why do we think black people feel less pain? That’s how the white man justified his atrocities.”
In class, we catch our breath and pull sympathetic faces. We, as forward-thinking intellectuals, are repulsed by the barbarity of those times. Yet, we, as forward-thinking intellectuals, fail to realize that we haven’t moved as far forward as we think.
A 2012 review study — analyzing over 20 years worth of data — published that African American patients reporting pain were 22% less likely than their white counterparts to receive medication.
Roslyn Lewis, a dollar store employee, injured her back to the point of nerve damage. The ER physicians sent her home with motrin. A 2006 NCBI study defines trust as a key determinant in a doctor-patient relationship. The same study reports a high rate of African American distrust in the healthcare system.
Implicit bias is not a problem to solve in a blog post. So if we must accept this issue as an inevitable for the time being, what can we do to alleviate it? The answer lies in representation. As women of color, we can capitalize on our own implicit bias and better serve our communities.
The healthcare landscape is still dominated by white men, who believe certain medical myths, including “the nerve endings of black people were less sensitive than those of white people.”
Dr. Salimah Meghani, a researcher and professor at the University of Pennsylvania says that people are naturally more empathetic to those they can relate to.
Let’s put the pieces together: If white men take up most seats at the health care table, and if white men can relate to other white men, then only white men are being served. That’s a lot of white men.
In this time, when implicit racial biases are significantly impacting WOC lives, our voices in the medical field are crucial. We are responsible for ourselves and for each other. To any WOC seeking treatment: until we represent a larger part of the healthcare industry, take your pain seriously because nobody else will.
Art: TJ Agbo, Everything Under The Sun (2019)
