Take Action Against Medical Racism
Achieving racial justice means reforming our institutions. Demand our medical establishments enact comprehensive cultural awareness training for medical professionals, as well as increased recruitment from the communities of Black, Indigenous and/or People of Color.
We need to teach our future generations about white privilege, white supremacy and to have honest conversations about race. To help kickstart your racial activism, we have drafted email templates for you adapt and send to traditional institutions within your own communities, to insist they take action to dismantle systemic racism.
Racial injustice is unique to each country and cannot be addressed with one broad-brush email. However our drafts can encourage you to think about these topics within your domain, to research some statistics within your communities and take action.
Fact 1: Black American women are dying from preventable pregnancy-related complications at 3-4 times the rate of white women.
Fact 2: British Black and Pakistani folks are more than 2.5 times more likely to die of COVID-19 in English hospitals than white folks.
Fact 3: The life expectancy of Indigenous Australian males is estimated to be 8.6 years lower than non-Indigenous males and 7.8 years lower for females.
How to use this email template
ADAPT • Edit the <italics> words, sentences and/or paragraphs with your appropriate text, adding your own details as well as researched statistics, experiences and data
EMAIL • Your local representative; your ministers/senators for Healthcare; local and state hospitals, clinics and doctors.
Please note
Where possible, please research and write about specific BIPOC communities. See our example here
The goal of racial justice is not to simply have white people accept that white supremacy and white privilege exist — rather the critical intent is to address racial inequity, uplift BIPOC communities, as well as have white folks comprehend how their personal lives actually support this oppression and then actively change that interaction
Intersectional justice to reform our institutions, amplifying the voices of BIPOC, and fighting for social justice is not about white people getting thank yous and personal recognition (i.e. white saviorism). White people need to be willing to take action from the sidelines, with no need for public acknowledgement — and encourage others within their communities to do the same.
Email draft
To whom it may concern,
My name is <insert name> of <insert community, state of country>.
Respect for culture and heritage is the provenance of personal strength, resilience, happiness and identity — with this strength and identity being inherently linked to our health and wellbeing. However, the intergenerational traumas of colonisation and enslavement — as well as ongoing white erasure — continues to condemn the culture of Black, Indigenous and People of Color, and this condemnation of culture feeds our constitutionally racist practices, as evidenced by the repulsive racial disparities within our healthcare systems.
Not all racism is overt — unconscious bias is a silent killer — and when our establishment and corresponding medical institutions operate in a manner that only serves the ‘majority culture’, they are acutely operating against those not within that dominant culture.
This systematic racism is bolstered by institutional policies and unconscious bias based on negative stereotypes and thus identifying and enacting effectual strategies to eradicate racial inequities in health status and medical care should be made a national priority.
<Include a paragraph with up-to-date fact/data on a specific incident/marginalized BIPOC community with your state/country>.
Effectively addressing the inequality in our universal healthcare requires: new initiatives to appropriately train healthcare professionals; increased and circumspect legislation; and the recruitment of more healthcare workers from within the Black, Indigenous and People of Color — or indeed all marginalized — communities.
If every healthcare worker across <your country> had appropriate cultural training — and consquently also understood the legislative ramifications of neglecting that training — then levels of care and compassion would not be compromised.
It is a national embarrassment to have such substantial and prevailing racism in our healthcare systems — and so I urge you to act accordingly to help save <Black, Indigenous and People of Color> lives.
Yours Sincerely,
<Your Name>
See more
Use our email template to demand our elected officials address the high proportion of incarcerated women and mothers from Black, Indigenous and/or People of Color communities
Use our email template to demand comprehensive history of Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) is taught in all our educational institutions.
