From 2023 to 2024, the United Network for Organ Sharing notified 14,000 Black kidney patients that they had been placed at lower priority for kidney transplants, due to a racially biased algorithm used to determine eligibility. Many Black patients were pushed years back on the transplant list. What was so unusual about the kidney transplant list was not the biased algorithm itself, which applied different standards to Black patients based on false ideas about muscle mass as a biological racial distinction, but, rather, the fact that something was being done to address it. Unfortunately, many other algorithms and formulas used to make medical decisions are deeply embedded into software used by hospitals and doctors. They continue to disadvantage Black patients by applying different standards to “grade” our level of disease and our levels of pain or suffering.
The scope and breadth of the toll of racism on our health can be hard to comprehend and even harder to adequately grieve. As a nation, we have not memorialized over a million lives lost in the Covid pandemic, much less the additional suffering faced by Black Covid patients whose care was compromised by pulse oximeters that had not been tested on people with dark skin. We know, too, that bans on abortion care disproportionately worsen already horrifying Black maternal and infant mortality rates that have not been adequately studied. The cost to our mental health is only beginning to be understood.
Today, we take time to grieve the historical and ongoing effects of racism on our physical, mental, and emotional health. We acknowledge the harm of toxic racism in medicine, naming it for what it is. We deepen our understanding of how to recognize racism, even in its subtler forms, and we empower ourselves to speak out against what we see and experience.
TODAY’S PRACTICE: Light a candle to consider and to give yourself a few moments to mourn the cost of racism on our health.
What toll has racism taken on your mental and physical health? What costs to our health as individuals and as a people have never been adequately acknowledged or counted?