On top of creating the black community’s ongoing health crisis, systemic racism is also a barrier to treatment. According to Shervin Assari, a health inequality researcher at Charles R. Drew University, one of the only historically black medical schools in the nation, while white people prefer to get their health information from medical providers and the media, black people rate health-related information they receive from family members and churches more highly. The reason for this isn’t poor education (although it’s another structurally unequal factor), it’s due to longstanding and justified mistrust. “We found that racial prejudice amongst physicians affects how they interact with black patients,” Penner says. “Even in very short, highly structured interactions between physicians and patients, black patients pick up on this and react to it.”
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