Here is my abstract and introductory paragraph for my AP project. Download the full file below!

Abstract

Black Americans have historically had a bad relationship with America’s healthcare system. Inequalities plague healthcare, ranging from lack of representation of black individuals in its profession to the health disparities seen in black communities. In light of the pandemic, these inequities are glaringly obvious and require immediate action to breach the trust barrier in the treatment of black patients in healthcare. To do so, advocates utilize both education and policy in their solutions. Solutions revolve around re-educating the medical field and making doctors more aware of strategies necessary to eliminate disparities. These strategies consist of placing more black doctors in the medical system to better understand the difficulties in the relationship between healthcare and the black community. Current doctors must not only be trained to be more sensitive to black patients, America’s medical institutes must also employ more black physicians in order to combat healthcare inequality and healthcare disparities.

A Cure for Medicine’s Institutionalized Racism

On May 25 in the summer of 2020, George Floyd took his last breath while pinned under a police officer’s knee. In the video chronicling Floyd’s fatal encounter with the police, he repeatedly utters, “I can’t breathe”. Those three words would spark protests across the entire American nation, starting with Minneaopolis and spanning to Los Angeles. Soon, the whole country would have riots bubbling in major cities and a Black Lives Matter movement that demanded justice from the police that had served to oppress them for decades. It calls the attention of the 45th President of the United States, who scorns the movement and deploys the military. It was not long until the calls for justice and equality seeped into other widespread systems of America. It was not long until those calls were met with an America that refused to change. COVID-19 and its potential spread amongst the protestors became one of the more vocalized arguments against the protests. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, noted that the demonstrations were “taking a risk” (Fauci). Yet a closer look at both the protests and George Floyd himself reveals a system as or even more broken than the law enforcement. The protests and demonstrations were not the true culprits behind a higher risk of death due to COVID-19 in the black community. George Floyd did not die only of asphyxiation but of a combination of police brutality and “underlying health conditions” (The New York Times). The media has focused exclusively on police brutality, but Floyd's health condition points to yet another powerful American institution that has failed to protect and serve black Americans: the healthcare system.