Ingrained social constructs and environmental factors have influenced health adversities in minorities. As an aspiring healthcare professional, it is vital that I expose myself and others in my community to such issues. Knowledge is the first step to lasting change.
Through a collaboration with the Medical Connections Club and SoCal Book Club, student leaders from Santiago High School strove to bring awareness to inequities within healthcare, with special attention to how the climate of the pandemic has highlighted such disparities.
Systemic racism is a withstanding aspect of American society. It has become a norm that makes participating and excelling in society and the economy harder for BIPOC— Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. System racism is a force that creates social constructs that purposefully limit prospective successes or well-beings of people of color—especially Black Americans and Hispanic Americans. These social constructs specifically restrict certain minority groups’ opportunities to receive proper healthcare, to have stable jobs that would ensure that work and living environments do not contribute to health problems, and to have a stress-free and healthy life.
In America, systemic racism exists. In America, systemic racism influences social constructs that disproportionately impact minorities in negative ways. In America, social constructs create misconceptions, distrust, discrepancies in job and living opportunities, and normalize cultural incompetency. Social constructs are behind inequities in the healthcare system that do not validate minorities’ pain, do not educate minorities on access to the system, and do not take cultural values into account, but instead lead to increased sicknesses and deaths of minorities. Social constructs—driven in part by the media—are behind the toxins that contaminate minorities’ water and air. They restrict minorities from receiving basic, proper, and equal healthcare.
