this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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[–] [email protected] 274 points 2 days ago (23 children)

I'm white, and married to a black woman. Gotta say, this is pretty accurate. Add shitty service from wait staff when the white person a table over gets regular checkups, and doctors not taking anything she says seriously, even when her symptoms are obvious. And people being rude to her when she asks a question, but nice to me when I ask them the same question a moment later.

It's one thing to know, in abstract, that racism exists. But experiencing it through what my wife goes through on a daily basis has really opened my eyes. It feels like we exist in 2 separate worlds when we're not out together.

[–] [email protected] 144 points 2 days ago (19 children)

doctors not taking anything she says seriously, even when her symptoms are obvious

I'm married to a white woman, and she also experiences this, so this might be a gender discrimination problem, rather than (or in addition to) a racial discrimination problem, sadly.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Older doctors were literally taught that black women have a higher pain tolerance. This in part originated from an early gynecologist doing experiments on black women slaves without bothering to give them any anesthetics. His justification for it was basically that they could handle the pain, and there are doctors practicing medicine today that still belive it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Yeah, lots of doctors that graduated university in 1870 running around

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

You might actually look into how long that was taught and pervaded into medical attitudes, how little women's anatomy has been studied compared to men's, and assumptions made about care for black people and women compared to white people and men, respectively, before making comments like this.

I don't have the time to look it up for you, but I will recommend the book Bonk by Mary Roach for the anatomy stuff. You will be very surprised.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

It's fun when people reveal they don't know how actual education and science works. They must think we just reinvent the wheel every time a kid decides to be a doctor or something.

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