Dr Susan Moore died of COVID-19 in December, after making a video and declaring: “I put forth and I maintain: If I was white, I wouldn’t have to go through that.”
Four female African American medical professionals put it bluntly in a Washington Post Op-Ed on December 26: “Susan Moore’s death underscores the racism embedded in the United States health care system.”
Aletha Maybank is chief health equity officer at the American Medical Association. Camara Phyllis Jones is a family physician, epidemiologist and past president of the American Public Health Association. Uché Blackstock is founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity. Joia Crear Perry is president of the National Birth Equity Collaborative.
They wrote that Moore, “a family physician, University of Michigan Medical School graduate, Black woman” had described in the video “how the white doctor treating her ‘made me feel like I was a drug addict’, refusing to prescribe her additional narcotics when she complained of pain — even though he knew she was a fellow physician.”
In the video, Moore “related how he rejected her plea for additional doses of remdesivir; how ‘he did not even listen to my lungs; he didn’t touch me in any way’; how he suggested she should just go home.
‘This is how Black people get killed, when you send them home and they don’t know how to fight for themselves,’ Moore said.”
Racism in Medicine
The deeply racist way Blacks are still treated by the medical system is rooted in the structural discrimination based on 401 years of national oppression. Black professionals, including medical doctors and nurses, continue to face treatments that are inferior to white men and women.
COVID-19 has exposed the devastating realities of long-standing structural inequities experienced by Black and brown people. They are more likely than whites to be infected, and more likely to die.
As the Op-ed authors wrote: “If anyone knew how to fight for herself, it would have been Moore. Still, she was sent home. Less than three weeks later, she was dead, at 52.”
“Her experience,” they continue, “offers stark confirmation that there remains a system of structuring opportunity and assigning value based on skin colour in this country. That system has a name: racism.
“No matter how well-intentioned our health-care system is, it has not rooted out the false idea of a hierarchy of human valuation based on skin color and the falser idea that, if there were such a hierarchy, ‘White’ people would be at the top.
“This white supremacist ideology has long shaped our values and practices, even in the health-care sector. Moore’s educational background makes her experience slightly more nuanced: Her being a physician brings the privilege of credibility and attracts the attention of many who do not believe that such mistreatment is pervasive.”