Calling Racism a Public Health Crisis Can Kill Black People

Baltimore, Cleveland, Denver, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh are among the cities that have officially declared that racism is a public health crisis. A number of states are also moving in that direction. Senator Sherrod Brown intends to push a similar resolution in the Senate.

The medicalization of racism has been backed by the American Medical Association, whose heads have called on “health institutions and physician organizations to explicitly denounce police violence” and urged “clinics, hospital and healthcare providers to review and reconsider their policies and relationships with law enforcement”.

Considering the already fraught state of emergency rooms in urban areas where the victims and perpetrators of gang violence show up every weekend, that would be catastrophic. It would lead to fewer doctors, fewer ERs, and worse outcomes for black patients in urban areas. But missing ERs and higher rates of young black men shot in urban areas are the AMA agenda.

The AMA statement claimed that, "law enforcement-involved deaths of unarmed black individuals were associated with adverse mental health among Black American adults."