Nowadays, there are still many social problems that people cannot solve entirely and successfully. One of them is the difference in treating persons of various races. The fact that some unexpected areas use this factor as a measurement of one’s abilities, skills, diseases, and treatments is rather disturbing. It is scientifically proven that race is not a reliable shortcut or proxy but simply a distraction that does not let see the real and the whole picture of one’s condition and situation. However, practice shows that specifying race plays a significant role in treating patients, which means that probably not all people get equal and fair treatment.
Unfortunately, not many people know that the health care area supports and promotes stereotypes about people with different skin color. Precisely race runs deeply throughout all of medical practice, including “shaping physicians’ diagnoses, measurements, treatments, prescriptions, and even the very definition of diseases” (“The Problem with Race-Based Medicine”). The question of why this happens bothers many feminists, journalists, sociologists, and other researchers like Linda Villarosa and Dorothy Roberts. They find it rather strange and disturbing that a person’s race plays a crucial role in defining his or her diagnosis, treatment, and condition.
One may not believe it, but medicine was used to support and justify slavery. Back in the 1850s, “Negro medicine” promoted the racial concept of disease, meaning that “people of different races suffer from different diseases” and never experience common ones in the same ways (“The Problem with Race-Based Medicine”). What is more, slavery was announced to be beneficial for medical reasons (“The Problem with Race-Based Medicine”). It sounds absurd and made up, but this is actually our past. Of course, it cannot be changed, but every effort must be made to prevent this from happening in the present. According to Dorothy, “human beings are not divided into races in the biological sense of the term” (14). The importance of this statement is hard to be overestimated.
People of other races have to feel relaxed when going to a hospital or participating in a research study. African-Americans need to be completely sure that their treatment is as effective and strong as it would be for white patients. Asians and Native Americans have to stop doubting whether their treatment is primarily based on the color of their skin or their individual and current condition (“The Problem with Race-Based Medicine”). The ideas of black people having more muscles, being predisposed to drug addictions, or feeling less pain lead to even more injustice, hatred, harmful biases, and stereotypes. Linda Villarosa, an American journalist, writes about these problems, tells about the link between slavery and medicine, and draws public attention to the necessity of making the health industry get rid of stereotypes and racial prejudges.
There are some evident connections between the information we study in class and the ideas of Linda Villarosa and Dorothy Roberts. The purpose of our interdisciplinary course is to emphasize the dynamic interaction of biological and sociocultural factors in women’s health. This course is based on the critical feminist analyses of medicine, as well as current research in epidemiology, biomedicine, and gender studies. Applying a number of multidisciplinary approaches in order to consider how sex and gender affect health in a variety of specific domains is simultaneously the aim of this course and some significant sociologists and feminists. Villarosa and Roberts prove that race cannot play an essential role in medicine since there are no significant differences between the bodies of white, African-American, or Native American people. Such journalists’ and sociologists’ research is necessary for younger generations to help them see the problem from other perspectives and contribute to its elimination.
Works Cited
“The Problem with Race-Based Medicine | Dorothy Roberts.” YouTube, uploaded by TED Talk, 2016, Web.
Roberts, Dorothy. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century. The New Press, 2011.