The Experiences of Black Women in the Health Care Field
As demonstrated in the last page, White and Black people are treated differently purely based on the assumption that there is different genetic makeup between races. Not only do many physicians believe that race is a fundamental difference in genetics, they also believe that Black women and White women need different maternal care. Black mothers are not treated with the same respect and care that is shown towards White women. This is because of systematic racism that has made Black women uncomfortable with the care provided to a point where they begin to develop fear and mistrust towards health providers based on hearing others' negative experiences. One example of this is from that article by PBS (2018) where it describes how African American women in the 1960s were given government-funded birth control, then after consumption, Black women feared that the purpose of the birth control was to limit Black population growth and stunt Black political power and that the ultimate goal was to use birth control as a means of sterilization of an inferior race (Black Genocide, 2018). In American society, White life is valued and seen as precious and irreplaceable, but Black lives are viewed as disposable, non-human, and in degrading ways. A change to move towards a health-care system where no one is categorized as more deserving of care is necessary in helping remove binding characteristics that label and limit those impacted by disparities as a result of this categorization.
Passing is when a member of one racial group passes as a member of another racial group in order to gain privileges or to avoid discrimination. People whose perceived phenotypic identity looks like that of another race are able to pass due to how people assume and categorize race. A Time magazine story by Kelly McWilliams (2021) explains how mistrust towards physicians is learned socially through experiences and stories of mistreatment towards Black women. The story is about a light-skinned Black baby who was taken from her mother after birth at the hospital and given to another parent because her mother was much darker than her, so they assumed only a Black person should go with an equally Black person. This harmful assumption led to the wrong baby almost going with the wrong parent. This story goes one step further and the light-skinned Black baby grew up and had her own child, but when handed an intake form that asked about race, she panicked out of fear of what happened to her as a child and marked “White.” Normally this woman identifies herself as Black and corrects people that assume she is White, but in this moment she quickly said that she was White out of a fear-driven instinct because of what had happened to her as a baby. She explains how she and her brother always get told how they must not be real siblings because of the skin tone differences between them; however, their mother is Black and their father is White so it makes sense they wouldn’t have the exact same complement.
This goes to show how strictly society views someone as being either Black or White, and people often fail to consider being multi-racial as a real identity because someone either belongs in a category or they don’t. According to an article by The National Library of Medicine (2018), non-Hispanic Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than White women. One explanation for this is that people experience different levels of support based on their perceived race and ethnicity. Patient factors, community/neighborhood, provider factors, and system factors all play a role in what disparities a “person of color” may experience. Say that someone doesn’t have the knowledge they need about their baby because they missed a few appointments due to public transportation getting canceled. Now this parent is likely seen as irresponsible and undeserving of free health-care services and they do not have insurance to pay for the prenatal care they need. The chances of adverse negative outcomes, such as morbidity and mortality, are increased due to the lack of care at the various stages of becoming a mother. These systematic barriers are harmful to anyone who is not White and need to be addressed so Black mothers have the same access to adequate prenatal care to ensure the best chance at a healthy pregnancy.