Renowned author of Under the Skin and associate professor at CUNY’s Journalism School, Linda Villarosa delivers several key facts in her interview on Black American regarding racial health disparities in America. Villarosa discusses many factors of health disparities, such as the distrust African Americans have of the healthcare system, the unjust treatment of African Americans in the hands of healthcare practitioners, and the underrepresentation of African Americans in clinical trials. Villarosa makes it clear that there is a deep disparity between the treatment of black and white Americans in the healthcare system. The author uses statistics and anecdotal evidence to present a thorough evaluation of health disparities in America.
What was indeed most striking in this interview was the many instances of black people being mistreated at the hands of medical professionals. For instance, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in which the U.S. Public Health Service sponsored a study to observe the evolution of and consequences of
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Villarosa states that there is a misconstrued notion that black patients do not require the same kind of anesthesia or medication as their skin was thought to be tougher. This dates back to the enslavement of black individuals who were thought to have higher pain tolerance, thus, were forced to work in fields under life-threatening circumstances (CUNY TV, 2022, 9:50). This unfair treatment of African Americans is discussed in the article, ‘Poverty, Racism, and the Public Health Crisis in America’(Beech et al., 2021). The authors discuss WE Dubios’ work regarding the nature of black poverty in the U.S., stating that Dubois documented how actions that perpetuate white supremacy result in higher levels of disease for blacks in America (Beech et al.,