NYBREAKING.COM – A guest doctor on MSNBC claimed that [black] people are only 20 percent capable of protecting their own health and that racism is to blame for the remaining 80 percent.
Charles Coleman Jr., who signed on for Ali Velshi on MSNBC on Saturday, brought Dr. Uche Blackstock and Dr. L. Ebony Boulware joins the show to discuss Boulware’s recently published research on racism and health issues.
Blackstock, who will release a memoir next month titled Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine, commented on how structural racism affects health outcomes.
‘Individuals are only responsible for about 20% of what makes them healthy. The other 80% are these systemic factors that Dr. Boulware and her colleagues have studied in this very important research,” Blackstock said.
‘I think we so often think of health as individual choices that patients make. And instead, we must truly understand how practices and policies, the legacy of slavery, the legacy of Jim Crow, and today’s systemic racism, impact the health of our communities.”
“More Black adults consumed fast food, consumed the largest percentage of daily calories from fast food, and consumed the greatest number of daily calories from fast food than adults of other racial/ethnic groups. Young Black adults had the highest level of fast-food consumption.” – American Journal of Preventive Medicine, August 2021
Blackstock said, “Because of discriminatory housing policies and other racist practices, we are seeing what we are seeing now in terms of these high burdens of chronic disease in our communities. Diabetes, high blood pressure, chronic kidney disease, it’s basically killing us.”
Boulware’s research called Residential structural racism and the prevalence of chronic health conditionspublished last week, is the first of its kind to examine how racism is linked to poor health.
The study looked at 150 neighborhoods in Durham County, North Carolina and used public data from 2012-2018 and de-identified electronic health records from 2017-2018 to examine whether structural racism is associated with higher levels of chronic health problems.
Some of the factors of structural racism that are looked at include the percentage of white residents in a neighborhood, the number of trees, crime rates, electoral participation, median income, poverty rates, unemployment and police shootings …
