--- "B." <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> And I'm also the one who originally reported the
> JAMA
> study about ER doctors prescribing painkillers to
> blacks way less than whites for similar conditions.
> (A
> month ago, at least.) What choice is the
> African-American making here that results in this?
> There are innumerable examples, not all anecdotal:
> driving while black, for example. What choice is
> someone making there?
[WS:] Two points. First, what does prescribing or not prescribing pain killers have to do with a mother to neglect her children or a teenager to drop out of school or a young man to shoot someone who "dissed" him? These are all individual decisions that have a profound effect on one's and other lives - and blaming those choices on "diffciult childhood" "structural factors" or someone is is bullship, plain and simple.
I already explained that I am not denying the existence of structural factors. I am merely questioning the practice of using these factoprs as excuses for individual actions, such as those mentioned above.
Second, disparity in treatment that you mention does not necessarily mean "structural racism." The decision to use painkillers diffrently can be based on very different factors some of them not linked to race, others based on individual stereoptypes and perceprions of physicians, and still other on structural ones (e.g. hospital rules that govern theuse of painkillers). It is possible, for example, that blacks tend to minimize their pain when talking to doctors, while whites may tend to exaggerate it, so the doctors decions is influenced by these communications. It is possible that some doctors may have preconceptions or stereotypes about the need for pain killers by various ethnic groups, which is an individual factors that affects averages, but not a structural ones.
In short, to interpret the disparity as "racism" one needs to to do a fairly deteiled examination of possible motives, instead of jumping to needed conclusions.
Again, I am not denying the possibility that there might be racist motives there - i just object to jumping to conclusions in order to play a blame game.
Wojtek
____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ