Black lives matter the history and existence of racial inequality in the united states Essay

Hands up. Dont shoot.1 This is a refrain sh come oned by BlackLives progeny activists throughout the United States. BlackLivesMatter is a achievement that gained national momentum in 2014 after acts of patrol brutality resulting in the death of black Americans such as Mike Brown and Eric Garner. In both of these cases, the respective police officers involved were no(prenominal)prenominal) indicted for the death of American citizens.2 This prompted the reaction black lives depicted object the livelihood of black pot should and must be as thorough as that of clearn people. Throughout history, people of African descent in the United States befuddle not equ completelyy enjoyed the same manner and opportunities as other Americans due to racialism, defined by unrestricted health scholars Jennifer Jee-Lyn Garcia and Mienah Zulfacar Sharif as dodging of structuring opportunity and assigning value based on race, that below the belt disadvantages both(prenominal) individuals a nd communities, and advantages others.3 In the untimely 1900s, multiple doctors brought attention to the disparity in the morbidity and mortality of diseases, many that result from poor reinforcement conditions, among black and white Americans. Lawrence Lee, a doctor writing in 1914, illustrious that tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases and still-births cause a death- post of 917.9 per 100,000 against a rate of 354.7 for whites.4 In 1927, a movement in favor of eugenics took hold, beginning with the commit v. buzzer ruling.5 This United States Supreme Court case gave doctors the authority to peg down certain people more fit to breed than others and support the bringing up of the so-called fit and restrain that of the unfit through means such as forced sterilization.6 During this time, forty percent of the unfit people disinfect were non-white.7 However, BlackLivesMatter activists demonstrate that racist agendas that ar viewed as history in true statement have ongo ing effects to this day that negatively impact the day by day lives and overt health of African Americans. Opponents use the social media hashtag AllLivesMatter, expressing the view that all people deserve equal rights and access to basic necessities, regardless of race. AllLivesMatter is diaphanous from the BlackLivesMatter movement in that it does not ac have a go at itledge the past and pre displace unfairness in the quality of life between white Americans and those of African descent. BlackLivesMatter has tending(p) voice to a historically oppressed class of people and receptive a discussion on how the eugenics movement has compromised that of black Americans and how this can be corrected and how future racially-charged infractions can be prevented.The racialization of medicine has had a large role in the development of the eugenics movement. Garcia and Sharif define racism as system of structuring opportunity and assigning value based on race, that unfairly disadvantage s some individuals and communities and claims that racism as a social condition is a fundamental cause of health and illness.8 The eugenics movement is one that is founded on the racist political theory that was detrimental to the African American community. electronegative eugenics was carried out through wedding restriction, forced sterilization, and confining the feeble-minded to colonies. The restriction of trades union through issuing marriage licenses was critical in the racist agenda of eugenics. It was illegal to have children outside of wedlock.9 Virginia in particular banned inter-racial marriage. By doing so, Virginia politicians and eugenicists were intentionally preventing people from having conflate race children, something they saw as undesirable.10 AllLivesMatter activists would argue that the eugenics movement was not centre on African Americans, as many of the dupes of eugenics were white. In Buck v. Bell, a case heard by the United States Supreme Court that s ecured eugenic doctors ability to forcibly sterilize the feeble-minded, the defendant was Carrie Buck, a white woman.11 Proponents of AllLivesMatter would bloodline that eugenic doctors instead targeted individuals of lower socio-economic status. Some of the diagnostic criteria for detecting feeble-mindedness include cold and clammy hands and excessive pallor or blushing.12 musical composition many of the victims of the application of negative eugenics were of lower socioeconomic status, it cannot be unattended that the eugenics movement grew from calls to improve black public health in the early 1900s. Advancements in germ theory allowed for doctors to understand that diseases atomic number 18 transmissible regardless of race as a result, doctors emphasized the need for sanitary living conditions for black Americans.13 Historian Andrea Patterson claims that public health measures were hijacked by eugenicists14 rather than these public health measures benefitting blacks, they, in part, created an environment in which eugenicists had reason to believe that people of particular racial background were predisposed to certain illnesses. Although Buck v. Bell enabled the eugenics movement to impact people of all races, the racist political regimes that preceded it supported the development of eugenics. Paternalism was a major contributing factor to eugenics establishment. In 1915, Doctor L. C. Allen posited that the negro health problem is one of the white mans burdens, and it is by no means the least of those burdens.15 It was his legal opinion that the disproportionately high morbidity and mortality rates of diseases such as tuberculosis and syphilis among black Americans were the responsibility of the white population to resolve. Allen impute the strict supervision of slave owners over black slaves for the lack of illnesses connect to an unclean living environment and sexually transmitted diseases small-arm slaveholding was legal.16 According to Allen, f reedom has not benefited his health, nor improved his morals, where he refers to African Americans.17 Without white slave owners to ensure that African Americans bathe, clean their living spaces, and do not engage in promiscuous sex, Allen claims that African Americans did not properly shoot for care of themselves. His answer to this perceived problem is for white Americans to champion a public health re counterfeit by way of changing the groomingal curriculum for blacks. Allens proposed industrial education would consist of teaching African American children proper hygiene and cater to their future career prospects, which mainly consist of service or manual labor roles.18 By singling out a meekity group to be segregated for the purpose of a different education based on race, Allens industrial education plan would have been an institutionalized instance of structural racism. Black Americans would have been denied access to an equal education, and by virtue of that, they would be further limited to the jobs available to them. Although this plan did not come to fruition, the ideas behind it lingered. Eugenic doctors matte up that it was for the betterment of all humankind to promote the procreation of those with what these doctors deemed desirable traits while simultaneously diminishing or altogether ceasing the procreation of the unfit.19 The widespread whimsey that eugenics existed in order to improve the global gene pool is paterna tendencyic. The socio-economic elite group utilized their position of power to further their self-interested ideology at the set down of those below them, particularly African Americans.Mass incarceration of African Americans is a modern practice that in many ways is a sequel of eugenics. Victims of eugenic sterilization told their stories in a 2011 deposition in mating Carolina arranged by The regulators Task Force to interpret the rule of Compensation for Victims of wedlock Carolinas Eugenics Board. One such victim w as Elaine Riddick, a black woman. Her son, Tony Riddick commented on the ongoing systemic racism in the United States, saying, A young man nineteen years old, source time convicted, nonviolent offense, you give him fifteen to twenty years in prison. Now look at what happens, now he can no longer be a father, his mother loses a child.20 Though the testimony took place a few years before the BlackLivesMatter movement gained momentum, these sentiments are the same as those felt by activists today. BlackLivesMatter advocate and doctor bloody shame Basset argues in BlackLivesMatter A quarrel to the Medical and habitual wellness Communities that there is the great injurist in the daily violence undergo by young black men. But the tragedy of lives cut before long is not accounted for entirely, or even mostly, by violence.21 Indeed, as Tony Riddick pointed out, systemic racism has cost many black Americans the ability to lead a robust life in society and often the ability to reproduc e. In the mid-twentieth century, this took the form of the eugenics movement. People designated feebleminded, a categorization for the so-called unfit of society, were often sent to colonies to live out their lives and forcibly sterilized.22 Though eugenics has been abolished, similar practices occur today. When a person is sentenced to a prison sentence that spans their prime reproductive years, they are segregated from the rest of society and are much less promising to raise a family.23 Tony Riddick drew a comparison between eugenics and volume incarceration, likening each to genocide.24 Flaws in todays criminal justice system have allowed a form of racial genocide to bear on in the United States.A quick internet search of the hashtag BlackLivesMatter go away bring up a sizable list of names that activists for the movement mourn as preventable deaths. Though many people know of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown, lesser-known but equally important people are added to the list of casualties regularly. One such person is Joyce Cornell, a fifty-year-old black woman who died in jail on July 22, 2015. Cornell was arrested for failing to pay court fines, a minor offense. Cornell experienced severe nausea and vomiting and was not granted medical examination treatment or water. She passed away one day later from dehydration.25 These people, every(prenominal) black person who has lost their life early from preventable causes, move a public health epidemic. Structural racism has decreased the life expectancy of black people living in the United States.26 As Garcia and Sharif argue, it is necessary to reshape our discourse and consider racism a public health issue in order to begin to combat its effects.27 It is racy that positive change happens for the betterment of our fellow Americans. This process begins with recognizing that racism exists and that BlackLivesMatter.BibliographyAllen, L. C., M.D. THE lightlessness wellness PROBLEM. The American diary of macrocosm Health, 1914. Accessed February 8, 2016.Bassett, Mary T., M.D., M.P.H. BlackLivesMatter A Challenge to the Medical and Public Health Communities. The New England journal of Medicine 372, no. 12 ( demonstrate 19, 2015) 1085-087. Accessed March 11, 2016.Buck v. Bell.274thed. Vol. 200. U.S. Supreme Court, 1927.Dorr, Gregory Michael. STERILIZE THE MISFITS PROMPTLY Virginia Controls the Feebleminded. In sequestrations Science Eugenics and Society in Virginia, 107-36. Charlottesville University of Virginia Press, 2008.Garca, Jennifer Jee-Lyn, Ph.D., and Mienah Zulfacar Sharif, MPH. Black Lives Matter A Commentary on racism and Public Health. Am J Public Health American Journal of Public Health 105, no. 8 (August 2015) E27-30. doi10.2105/ajph.2015.302706.regulators Task Force to come across the Method of Compensation for Victims of North Carolinas Eugenics Board. Final Report to the Governor of the State of North Caroline (Pursuant to Executive Order 83). Raleigh, NC, 201 1.Hutchinson, Woods. The Importance of forbid Eugenics Or the Prevention of Ill-Bornness.,. The American Journal of Public Health 3 (1913) 238-42.Knapp, Andrew, and Dave Munday. Lawyers Say Woman, 50, Died after Being deprive of Water at trip the light fantastic County Jail. Post and Courier. February 24, 2016. Accessed April 21, 2016. http//www.postandcourier.com/article/20160224/PC16/160229636.Lee, Lawrence, M.D. THE NEGRO AS A PROBLEM IN PUBLIC HEALTH CHARITY. The American Journal of Public Health 5 (1915) 207-10.Patterson, Andrea. Germs and Jim Crow The Impact of Microbiology on Public Health Policiesin industrial Era American South.Journal of the History of Biology42, no. 3 (Fall 2009) 529-59. doi10.1007/s10739-008-9164-x.1 Jennifer Jee-Lyn Garca, Ph.D. and Mienah Zulfacar Sharif, MPH, Black Lives Matter A Commentary on Racism and Public Health,Am J Public Health American Journal of Public Health105, no. 8 (August 2015) e27, doi10.2105/ajph.2015.302706.2 Garcia and Sharif, e273 Garcia and Sharif, e274 Lawrence Lee, M.D., THE NEGRO AS A PROBLEM IN PUBLIC HEALTH CHARITY.,The American Journal of Public Health5 (1915) 207.5 Buck v. Bell.274thed. Vol. 200. U.S. Supreme Court, 1927.6 Woods Hutchinson, The Importance of Negative Eugenics Or the Prevention of Ill-Bornness.,AJPH3 (1913) 238.7 Gregory Michael Dorr, STERILIZE THE MISFITS PROMPTLY Virginia Controls the Feebleminded., in Segregations Science Eugenics and Society in Virginia(University of Virginia Press, 2008).8 Garcia and Sharif, e279 Dorr, 11210 Dorr, 11111 Dorr, 12912 Dorr, 11313 Andrea Patterson, Germs and Jim Crow The Impact of Microbiology on Public Health Policies in Progressive Era American South,Journal of the History of Biology42, no. 3 (Fall 2009) 541, doi10.1007/s10739-008-9164-x.14 Patterson, 52915 L. C. Allen, M.D., THE NEGRO HEALTH PROBLEM.,The American Journal of Public Health5 (1915) 194.16 Allen, 19517 Allen, 19418 Allen, 20019 Hutchinson, 24020 Governors Task Force to Determine the Method of Compensation for Victims of North Carolinas EugenicsBoard. Final Report to the Governor of the State of North Caroline (Pursuant to Executive Order 83). Raleigh, NC,2011, D-1021 Mary T. Bassett, M.D., M.P.H., BlackLivesMatter A Challenge to the Medical and Public Health Communities,The New England Journal of Medicine372, no. 12 (March 19, 2015) 1085, accessed March 11, 2016.22 Dorr, 12023 Garcia and Sharif, e2824 Governors Task Force to Determine the Method of Compensation for Victims of North Carolinas EugenicsBoard, D-10.25 Andrew Knapp and Dave Munday, Lawyers Say Woman, 50, Died after Being deprived of Water at Charleston County Jail, Post and Courier, February 24, 2016, accessed April 21, 2016, http//www.postandcourier.com/article/20160224/PC16/160229636.26 Garcia and Sharif, e2827 Garcia and Sharif, e27