I can’t imagine that anyone would be perplexed by the idea of a 7-year-old with racist tendencies. Are you asking this question sincerely, or is this a lame attempt at a “gotcha”? Because I ensure you that a 7-year-old can be racist. Especially if their parents are too.
What alternative explanation can you provide to account for a 7-year-old who believes a black person doesn’t feel pain the same way a white person does?
Ben Kingsley isn’t Indian?:dubious:
:dubious:
A few years back it was all over the news where a black woman died in an emergency room waiting for help. She was lying on the floor screaming and writhing in pain before she died. This was racism at its finest. She was ignored because healthcare workers assumed it was the cry wolf thing going on. A very bad situation!
What is the answer here, move the loudest screamer to the front of the line? This is generaly what is done now even though the loudest screamer is very often far from being the sickest. They have a rough job and as should be they are held accountable for thier decisions.Is this the only solution that exists to you?
Here’s an idea: Anyone who checks in at the front desk complaining of sharp acute pains in their chest or abdomen should be seen ASAP. If this isn’t possible, triage based on the other symptoms and high risk factors they show up with. If you still can’t figure out how to deliver services to the most in need, then something is very wrong with your system.
Also, the solution to the emergency room inequities may not lie in the emergency room. It’s possible that unfair housing practices, unequal drug prosecutions, and other systemic racist influences carry over into perceptions of black people in emergency rooms: workers there may tend to perceive black people as more criminal and less able to obtain regular medical care.
Many of the particular examples of racism in our society can’t be solved at their locus; we need broad systematic changes.
Not sure exactly who is saying what here but the Wikipedia page for Ben Kingsly indicates he was born with an Indian name, in England, with a father who was born in Kenya, of Indian descent.
So yes and no depending on what you mean… I don’t know what he says about himself.
In interviews, Ben Kingsley says “My father was a Gujarat,” in exactly those words.
However, the second paragraph of the linked article says this:
So no one has denied that Kingsley is half-Indian.
Imagine if someone were to put on a movie about the American Revolution starring an overwhelming black cast, with white people only serving as scenery. There would no doubt be complaints about how this not only misrepresents history, but that it conveys the message that white people are only useful as props.
Now imagine that someone’s response to this criticism is: “But Halle Berry’s in it! She’s half-white!”
That’s how I feel about pointing out Ben Kingsley. It’s a stupid response to a very reasonable argument.
Yeah, I was being a smart ass (surprise!). Never knew there was any argument in Sir Ben’s corner.
You know who would made a terrific Moses? Oded Fehr.
Not some schmuck named “Christian”.
I didn’t think you were that stupid, but Dopers never fail to surprise.
This is not the first time I’ve been whooshed, though.
Well, to make up for my Stoopid post, allow me to mention David Chen as a resource for racial problems in movie casting. It is his pet-peeve. He is a Chinese-American film reviewer at SlashFilm.
A few of his recent topics:
Ridley Scott and the Exodus controversy.
Racism in Transformers.
Fantastic Four racial backlash.
There is a ton more at the /film (SlashFilm) site.
It could be that black adults present as “difficult patients” BECAUSE they’ve spent their entire lives not being properly cared for by medical professionals. If I’m ignored every time I complain about pain in calm, dispassionate terms, I might very well scream my fool head off, just to see if that gets any attention.
If a person is dealing with chronic, persistent, under-treated pain, they will likely not do a good job tending to all the others of their life. They will likely not be good employees or students. They will likely not be attentive parents. They will likely not be very ambitious. They will likely perpetuate all the negative stereotypes assigned to their racial/ethnic identity–that they are lazy, stupid, and self-defeating. Which then only serves as a justification in the minds of others why their lives aren’t valuable…why no one should care about them.
If change has got to start somewhere, I say why SHOULDN’T it start in the ER or the doctor’s office.
Got it, I was just trying to make sure everyone’s on the same page as far as the facts were concerned. 
This issue is commonly discussed in drug and alcohol rehab. One thing abusers have in common is a general lack of tolerance for most anything they don’t like. Naturally this general lack of tolerance tends to affect all areas of thier lives excasperating the problem and creating even more less than desirable situations.
I’m not saying attitudes there shouldn’t change. What I’m suggesting is that it may be more difficult to make the change there than in some other places, places where you don’t have a whole lot of subjective moment-to-moment decisionmaking.
For example, if I’m correct that the unequal detention of black men contributes to pervasive negative societal attitudes toward black people, maybe that’s a good place for the change to start, since decisions about detention are made at a more deliberate speed and according to detailed protocols; it may be an easier place to change the decisions that are made.
Does that make sense? It’s not that ER policies are fine; it’s that changing them may prove really difficult if everything else stays the same.
Edit: also, I’m not really attached to this argument, and may well be wrong about teh relative priorities of emergency room pain medication prescription and other issues such as housing discrimination or penal system racism; I may even be wrong to try to prioritize them in the first place.
I know. I was just using what you said as a reason to get on a soap box. Not that ever need an excuse.
I think all institutions have their biases. Most people focus on the legal system, and for good reason. But there are inequities across the board. I think they are all important since they all perpetuate one another other. To wit, how many black males in the criminal justice system were misdiagnosed and/or maltreated by the medical establishment when they were children? It’s all well and good for the Right to talk about “personal responsibility”, but this is only a reasonable recommendation when the entire system isn’t rigged.
I agree–it’s a tricky problem to unravel.
Schools are infamous for giving more office referrals to black boys than to other groups, and I’m very uncomfortably aware of that. At the same time, if I have kids living in a high-crime housing project, those kids are likely to respond to perceived slights with more aggression than will kids living in safer neighborhoods; aggressive hyper-response is a rational response when there’s little protection from aggressors. Those kids are gonna get in more trouble at school if we don’t tolerate this sort of overreaction to perceived slights. And those kids, at least in my area, are overwhelmingly African American, and you can trace the reasons for this back to some crazy racist decisions made by city planners in the 1970s.
I know about the problem of too many office referrals for black boys. What do I do when it’s primarily black boys engaging in physical violence, the one behavior I’m really likely to write a referral for? Granted I spend a lot of time talking about different home and school behaviors in advance, trying to head off that sort of behavior transfer. Do I accept a higher level of physical aggression in the classroom than I otherwise would? Do I accept a different level from kids in poverty than I accept from middle-class kids? Do I become part of the problem by writing a disproportionate number of referrals for black kids? Is there another solution I can enact?
It’s an ugly problem, and I really don’t know a good answer to it.
Well, we could tackle this issue at a different point. The same kinds of studies that show that black children are more likely to be subject to administrative discipline also show that administrators are likely to get the cops involved with respect to infractions by black students.
We could start at that point—stop the schools from calling the cops so quickly on black kids for the same kinds of infractions that white kids engage in without getting the legal system involved.