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Health Sciences Library

CSLL - Community Service Learning and Leadership: Race

A guide to the longitudinal partnering with AHEC for students to work with the underserved populations and learn leadership skills while conducting a much needed community service.

Race & Racism

Race - a social category individuals self-assign or are assigned by others usually based on physical characteristics; established for the purpose of creating/maintaining power and privilege hierarchies

Racism - system of judgements, beliefs, actions, norms, policies, and practices that protect white supremacy, racial privilege and hierarchy

Race does not equal biology and all of the many ways that it is treated as biological only feeds into the systemic racism common in medicine.

Racial Bias

Racial bias results in significant morbidity and mortality. 

Some stats:

  • AIAN (21%) and Hispanic (19%) non-elderly people were more than twice as likely as their White counterparts (7%) to be uninsured 
  • At birth, AIAN and Black people had a shorter life expectancy (65.2 and 70.8 years, respectively) compared to White people (76.4) as of 2021
  • Black infants were more than 2x as likely to die as White infants (10.4 vs 4.4 per 1,000) and AIAN infants were nearly twice as likely to die as White infants (7.7 vs 4.4 per 1,000) as of 2021
  • Black and AIAN women had the highest rates of pregnancy related mortality
  • Black (13%) and Hispanic (11%) children were over twice as likely to be food insecure than White children (4%) as of 2021

How did "Black" come to equal "Bad"?

[Exterminate all the Brutes, a four part miniseries] offers, in effect, a unifying theory of white supremacy and its manifestations—in conquest, in genocide, and in the myths and the pseudoscience by which the killers have justified themselves and continue to do so. As Peck says, “The road to Auschwitz was paved in the earliest days of Christendom, and this road also leads straight to the heart of America.”

What’s more, working with historians, Peck puts the very writing of history at the core of the story; he understands history as the victors’ record of events, and sees American national mythology as a fiction that depends on an assumed racism.

New Yorker Review

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Racism in Healthcare

Be Aware

Having an awareness of systemic racism changes how you interact with patients and will make it less likely that you will behave in ways that support these systemic and structural inequities.  But, you have to be aware and acknowledge those biases, otherwise, you'll remain part of the problem.