Racism and Antiracism - echo excerpt

As a professional nurse, I believe this excerpt from the book "How To Be An Antiracist" matches with my understanding about the sociology of medicine, and how racism is a public heath risk for poor health and early death. 

This blog is an echo excerpt from the book by Author Ibram X. Kendi.  His concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America--but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. Instead of working with the policies and system we have in place, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it.

In his memoir, Kendi weaves together an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science--including the story of his own awakening to antiracism--bringing it all together in a cogent, accessible form. He begins by helping us rethink our most deeply held, if implicit, beliefs and our most intimate personal relationships (including beliefs about race and IQ and interracial social relations) and reexamines the policies and larger social arrangements we support. How to Be an Antiracist promises to become an essential book for anyone who wants to go beyond an awareness of racism to the next step of contributing to the formation of a truly just and equitable society.

Kendi wrote (p. 21-22) this autobiographical segue to the data he presents that correlates race with poor health and life expectancy:

I am one generation removed from picking cotton for pocket change under the warming climate in Guyton, outside of Savannah, GA.  That's where we buried my grandmother in 1993. Memories of her comforting calmness, her dark green thrum, and her large trash bags filled with Christmas gifts lived on as we drove back to New York from her funeral.  The next day, my father ventured up to Flushng, Queens, to see his single mother, also named Mary Ann. She had the clearest dark-brown skin, a smile that hugged you and a wit that smacked you.

When my father opened the door of her apartment, he smelled the fumes coming from the stove she'd left on, and some other fumes.  His mother was nowhere in sight, he rushed down the hallway and into her back bedroom. That's where he found his mother, as if sleeping, but dead.  Her struggle with Alzheimer's, a disease more prevalent among African Americans, was over.

There may be no more consequential White privilege than life itself. White lives matter to the tune of 3.5 additional years over Black lives in the United States, which is just the most glaring of a host of health disparities starting from infancy, where Black infants die at twice the rate of White infants. But, at least my grandmother and I met, we shared, we loved. I never met my paternal grandfather. I never met my maternal grandfather, Alvin, killed by cancer three years before my birth. In the United States, African Americans are 25 percent more likely to die of cancer than Whites. My father survived prostate cancer, which kills twice as many Black men as it does White men. Breast cancer disproportionately kills Black women.

Three million African Americans and four million Latinx, secured health insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), dropping the uninsured rates for both groups to around 11 percent before President Barack Obama left office. But, a staggering 28.5 million Americans remained uninsured, a number primed for growth after the Republican Congress repealed the individual mandate in 2017. And, it is becoming harder for people of color to vote out of office the politicians crafting these policies designed to shorten their lives.  Racist voting policy has evolved from disenfranchising by Jim Crow voting laws to disenfranchising by mass incarceration and voter-ID laws. Sometimes these efforts are so blatant that they are struck down: North Carolina enacted one of these targeted voter-ID laws, but in July 2017, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck it down ruling that its various provision "target African Americans with almost surgical precision." 

Nevertheless, others have remained and been successful. In fact, Wisconsin's strict voter-ID law suppressed approximately two hundred thousand votes- again primarily targeting voters of color, in the 2016 election. Donald Trump won that critical swing state by 22,748 votes.  

In Maine Writer's  summary about the above excerpt: Race and politics and health share a negative correlation for people of color. Data demonstrates how people of color are obstructed from voting for the people who could improve their human condition.