The woke Lancet medical journal praises the Black Lives Matter protests in its latest issue, urging greater activism to overcome white supremacy.
In an article titled “Racism Is the Public Health Crisis,” UK-based Professor of Black Studies Kehinde Andrews asserts that the Black Lives Matter movement “needs to be seen in the wider context of the mobilisations during the 20th century, ranging from civil rights and Black Power to the Third World movements across the globe.”
Racism needs to be confronted as a systemic problem embedded in western society and its institutions, Andrews insists, rather than a problem of individual prejudice.
An unfortunate pattern can be detected in how western society deals with crises of racism involving “shock, hand-wringing, and commitment to change, but no commitment to systemic change,” Andrews laments.
“Racism is typically reduced to individual acts of prejudice or seen as a series of flashpoints, usually triggered by some violent act,” he writes. “When confronted with an unavoidable truth about the nature of inequality, some politicians and policy makers seem reluctant to come to terms with the realities of structural racism.”
As an example, Andrews asserts that “the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on racialised minority groups is not an issue of genetics but of racial oppression.”
“The fact that racialised minority communities are also far more likely to have comorbidities should be a reminder that racial health disparities exist for many health outcomes,” he maintains.
The racialised impact of the coronavirus is just a symptom of an underlying problem, Andrews suggests, which is in turn the result of “white supremacy.”
“Once we connect the dots between health inequalities and wider racial oppression, then we understand that racism is the underlying condition,” he declares.
“White supremacy is the idea that there is a hierarchy inherent to the chain of human beings, with those who are white at the top and Black people at the bottom,” Andrews states, which helps explain the poverty of sub-Saharan Africa.
“Global poverty maps neatly onto the framework of white supremacy, with the west the richest and some African countries the poorest,” he asserts. “That some countries in Africa have the lowest life expectancy on the planet is not a coincidence. The unjust racial order is a key contributor to the health challenges in Africa.”
“Racism is a defining feature of western countries, creating a society where Black life is devalued,” Andrews concludes. “The hierarchy of white supremacy creates an uneven distribution of resources and means that the majority of those who are not white are subject to various health inequalities.”
“To make Black lives matter, we need to understand that racism is the public health crisis,” he declares.
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