Racism & Healthcare

Racism & Healthcare

A not-so-secret history of violence

Chattel Slavery

The foundations of systemic racism

Slavery

• European colonizers brought Chattel Slavery officially in 1619
• This U.S. economy flourished on the labor of people enslaved by race
• Many sought to justify & perpetuate slavery through medicine

"I advance it therefore, as a suspicion only, that blacks ...are inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind"

Thomas Jefferson 3rd President of the United States Primary author of The Declaration of Independence

Race

Research

Fertility

A lot of current medical knowledge comes from research of doctors on enslaved people and other Black Americans without their free and knowing consent. This research affects modern day mortality rates of POC patients. Additionally, doctors traded black bodies for medical schools and museums.

Slavery could legally be passed through generations by partus sequitir ventrum. Especially after the African slave trade became illegal in 1807 slave owners and their doctors raped and assaulted enslaved people to increase the number of people they controlled.

Race did not exist in common vernacular until the European colonialization of America. Doctors such as Samuel Cartwright published papers which noted physical maladies and inferiorities to justify slavery which still influence medical diagnostics today.

Emancipation...

Does it really mean Freedom?

Not yet

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

13th Ammendment to the U.S. Constitution

Research

Henrietta Lacks

Tuskegee Syphilis Study

Access to Care

› Reconstruction & Independence

› Jim Crow & the Hills-Burton Act

› Sheppard-Towner Act

› Civil Rights & Planned Parenthood

Today

Black Lives Matter

Access

No effective universal healthcare exists & POC still suffer economically making them most vulnerable

Quality

The system still holds onto many of its racist practices and suffers from a lack of diversity.

Black Lives Matter

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