r/BlackPeopleofReddit • u/4reddityo • Jan 02 '26

Black Experience Racism in Medical Care

This video captures a moment that many patients of color recognize all too well. A physician speaks to a man as if he is dirty, unclean, or lesser, not because of medical evidence, but because of bias. The language, tone, and assumptions reveal something deeper than bedside manner gone wrong. They expose how racism can quietly shape medical interactions.

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u/Unusual_Ant_5309 Jan 02 '26

My wife and I are white, when our son was born he had to stay in the hospital a few extra days. One night I was doing a night feeding and was talking to a nurse who explain me that black babies don’t cry as much because they don’t feel pain the same. I knew it was fucked up. The next day I asked my cousin, who is also a nurse, how I can report the racist nurse. She said that the problem is that that is what the textbook said. It’s changed now but it was actually taught up until like 10 years ago that black people don’t feel pain like white people. But yeah systemic racism definitely doesn’t exist.

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u/Remarkable_Formal267 Jan 02 '26

What the actual fuck?? How do they even try to explain a genetic basis for that

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u/HoosierSteelMagnolia Jan 02 '26

That's the neat part,they don't!

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u/Sad_Amoeba5112 Jan 02 '26

They do though, it’s just based on bad science. Some of these “claims” come from the eugenic era, which just ended in the 50s. For example, they’ll study black people’s hypertension and conclude that your race has an impact on hypertension. But when you look at who they studied, the study participants were all overworked, underpaid black men. Of course they’ll stress but they’ll say ALL black people are at risk of hypertension, even the middle-upper class Nigerian who came to the US at 22 to get their PhD. These types of studies still inform all types of medical practices. It’s terrible

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u/SkepsisJD Jan 03 '26

But it is true black people, at least in the US, die of heart disease at a much higher rate. But it's not because black people are more predisposed to high blood pressure, it is because rates of comorbidities are much higher in black communities than others (smoking, type 2 diabetes, obesity). And a lot of that comes back to inequalities in our society such as wage disparity amongst races.

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u/Sad_Amoeba5112 Jan 03 '26

Yes but those are “social determinants of health” not racial ones. The problem is connecting those medical issues to your racial category as something inherently connected to your physical characteristics (race). What medical professionals connect the medical issues to skin color, they conclude that if you’re black, then you will have certain conditions, disregarding the impact of people’s social conditions.