If you need a good, easily understood example of Institutional Racism, here ya go.

[TalkingDog]

Black children consistently aren't given pain meds in the same situations as white children.

It's not a conscious thing. Nobody sat down and said: "Let's let black children suffer." Institutionalized racism comes from unconscious biases. They only way to change them is to make them conscious.

Evidently that offends some people.

http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2015/09/14/Study-Black-patients-less-likely-to-get-pain-meds-in-ER/7751442255084/?spt=sec&or=hn

Black children are prescribed less pain medication than white children during treatment for appendicitis at the emergency room, researchers found in a review of national data.

snip

Just over half, 56.8 percent, of all children were found to be treated for appendicitis with any kind of painkiller at the emergency room, and only 41.3 percent received at least one dose of an opioid, according to the study, which is published in Pediatrics.

But of black children who were treated, only 12.2 percent received an opioid -- 20 percent less than white children.

"Although there is limited research that identifies subtle genetic variability in pain perception, the likelihood that physiological differences explain these phenomena is negligible," researchers wrote in a commentary also published alongside the study in Pediatrics. "If there is no physiological explanation for differing treatment of the same phenomena, we are left with the notion that subtle biases, implicit and explicit, conscious and unconscious, influence the clinician's judgment."

[Gormy Cuss]

1. And this builds on other studies showing differences by race in pain medication administration

As noted in the summary, this study used a narrow focus (children and appendicitis) rather than the broad studies done in the past.

[Matariki]

2. "The only way to change them is to make them conscious."

[jwirr]

3. This is a good definition. One thing: If my NA great

grandchild went to a doctor and needed pain pills it is almost a certainty that my addicted grandson would get most if not all of them for himself.

Now this still plays into the institutional racist idea because that could happen in a white home just as easily as any other home. And the fact that the ER doctors discriminate on what they think MIGHT happen is definitely institutional racism.

[csziggy]

20. The article is discussing opiods dispensed at the ER

Not medications to be taken home. Appendicitis is not something they write a prescription for and treated later.

I can understand caution in cases like your great grand child and your grandson. But to give less pain reliever while IN a hospital in an emergency situation where misuse or appropriation by another family member could never happen is absurd.

[jwirr]

23. I said nothing about what your last sentence implies.

I was using the case of my family to tell you that what happens in my family can and does happen regardless of race. And that to keep medications from the child of poc is discrimination.

I also was not aware that the ER treats this on site instead of sending meds home. If that is the case then some ER doctors are NOT good doctors. They are practicing racism.

[graegoyle]

7. Simple discrepancy...

...based on race.

[jtuck004]

25. Whitesplaining. n/t

[gregcrawford]

9. Did you even read the article?

an 8-year study of a million kids is NOT a "descrepancy."

[gollygee]

16. Wow, maybe someone should do a study or something.

[mercuryblues]

5. this also has its roots

in an belief dating back to slavery. Certain races or ethnicities felt less pain than the white, European person. Even after anesthesia became widely used Dr's would not use it on blacks and many Irish immigrants, cause you know they lived hard lives and were used to pain, so it wasn't needed for them.

[ToxMarz]

6. It doesn't mention differences in insurance coverage. Possibly poor children had poor coverage

Or were treated in emergency rooms without insurance

[gollygee]

14. The study mentions it

From the study (linked in the article)

The following covariates were included in our analyses to adjust for potential confounding: ethnicity, age, sex, insurance status, triage acuity level, pain score, geographic region, ED type, and survey year.

[Rilgin]

10. Good Post

I have mostly tried to bite my lip and not post on some of the posts here on DU about racism. Mostly because, some of the posters seem to have mixed motives and the posts are designed to provoke. This has led to heated flame threads.

I suspect your post will not have the same reaction. Your post discusses directly and provides a good example of one form racism that currently exists in our system and uses language that addresses the issue without side connotations. It does not try to attack either "black people" or "white people". It does not use awkward words such as privilege to describe a problem but uses words that everyone should understand "institutional racism" and "bias".

Thank you for your post. If asked, I could imagine this type of disparity existing but I would never have imagined the severity of the gap. Even if some of this is due to insurance since it was a study of emergency rooms, it still shows some of the inequality of the American System.

[greatlaurel]

11. Thank you for posting this.

So very sad for allowing children to suffer. I know a couple of medical students. I will be sharing this with them.

Thanks, again.

[Nye Bevan]

13. If this is due to racist ER doctors and nurses who want black children to suffer more pain

than white children, then that is just horrible.

[gollygee]

15. Why do you assume it's about anyone wanting anything

rather than a reflection of unintentional bias?

[Nye Bevan]

18. I don't know how valid the "unintentional" excuse is.

Doctors and nurses are generally smart people. One would expect them to notice this kind of pattern.

[LanternWaste]

19. How (and further, why) precisely would the individual doctor notice the pattern?

How (and further, why) precisely would the individual doctor notice the collective pattern?

[Nye Bevan]

21. If every individual doctor were to treat black and white children the same,

there would be no collective pattern. The question is, is it credible that some particular doctors would consistently treat children differently based upon their race, without realizing it?

[Nitram]

22. It makes no difference to the patient whether the under-medication is due to...

...intentional or unintentional bias. The point is that doctors and nurses should heed the research and carefully monitor their own administration of medication to minorities.

[gollygee]

24. Intelligence doesn't help with unintentional bias

This isn't written specifically about racial bias (because that would make how racist a person is a factor in the study,) but this is true for all biases. It isn't an issue of intelligence.

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/frontal-cortex/why-smart-people-are-stupid

The philosopher, it turns out, got it backward. A new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology led by Richard West at James Madison University and Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto suggests that, in many instances, smarter people are more vulnerable to these thinking errors. Although we assume that intelligence is a buffer against bias—that’s why those with higher S.A.T. scores think they are less prone to these universal thinking mistakes—it can actually be a subtle curse.

(snip)

The results were quite disturbing. For one thing, self-awareness was not particularly useful: as the scientists note, “people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” This finding wouldn’t surprise Kahneman, who admits in “Thinking, Fast and Slow” that his decades of groundbreaking research have failed to significantly improve his own mental performance. “My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy”—a tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task—“as it was before I made a study of these issues,” he writes.

Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias blind spot.” This “meta-bias” is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others—we excel at noticing the flaws of friends—and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves. Although the bias blind spot itself isn’t a new concept, West’s latest paper demonstrates that it applies to every single bias under consideration, from anchoring to so-called “framing effects.” In each instance, we readily forgive our own minds but look harshly upon the minds of other people.

And here’s the upsetting punch line: intelligence seems to make things worse. The scientists gave the students four measures of “cognitive sophistication.” As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” This trend held for many of the specific biases, indicating that smarter people (at least as measured by S.A.T. scores) and those more likely to engage in deliberation were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes. Education also isn’t a savior; as Kahneman and Shane Frederick first noted many years ago, more than fifty per cent of students at Harvard, Princeton, and M.I.T. gave the incorrect answer to the bat-and-ball question.

[fbc]

26. K&R

[Spitfire of ATJ]

27. This goes back to the old "they don't feel pain like we do"....

You'll also hear that on farms when they're slaughtering animals.