Original sins, like slavery, tend to linger in the body politic and the physical nation.

For a very long time, clear disparities between blacks and whites in medical outcomes were dismissed as the fault of African American ignorance, superstition, or bad diets…writes Glen Ford.

The peculiar and pervasive white American psychological syndrome of denial of the facts and implications of racial oppression never succeeds in making the original, race-based problem go away. Rather, the pathological fruits of past racism constantly re-emerge to wreak havoc on the human condition. Such is the case in all areas of society, most tragically so in the area of public health.

A recent study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation finds huge disparities in the way blacks and whites fare under doctors' care. White women are substantially more likely to receive breast cancer screening than are black women - 64 percent versus 57 percent, respectively. And blacks are four times more likely to suffer amputations because of diabetes. In all but two states of the Union, Colorado and Massachusetts, blacks are less likely than whites to undergo haemoglobin screening, to detect diabetes. The worst states for black amputations are South Carolina, Louisiana and Mississippi. Until recently, researchers were inclined to blame much of the disparity on African American education levels and diets.

However, surveys that accounted for these differences among racial groups still found that racism on the part of doctors and other health care workers played an irreducible role in creating relatively poor medical outcomes for blacks. Medical racism is a fact. The Robert Wood Johnson study, however, found that even larger disparities exist between different geographic areas. In the case of cancer screening, the disparity between the states of Maine and Mississippi is greater than the national racial gap in screening. Utah has the lowest incidence of amputations in the nation, Louisiana, the highest. Researchers speculate that the regional disparities are caused by differences among states in poverty and educational levels.

No doubt they are at least partially correct, but education and poverty are also directly related to race, both past and present. The states of the Old Confederacy share the distinction of providing the worst medical outcomes by both race, and region. It is clear that regional health care is directly related to the racial past, as well as present, of the backward southern states. So too are problems of poverty and poor education, which cannot be separated from race. During the brief era of Reconstruction, progressive governments tried to bring the South not only back into the Union, but into civilization in terms of education, public health, and economic reforms.

But whites destroyed Reconstruction through terror, and ever since have resisted economic, medical and educational reforms that might benefit blacks. They starved white families and children of good schools and hospitals, in order to deny such services to African Americans.

Researchers who are anxious to find reasons other than race for regional disparities wind up ignoring the past and racist legacies as they exist in the present. Original sins, like slavery, tend to linger in the body politic and the physical nation. Unless the legacy is systematically eliminated, root and branch, the social symptoms return with unexpected virulence. Race crimes don't go away; they metastasize, like cancer.


Article reprinted with kind permission of www.blackagendareport.com