Speaking as someone who’s visited Presbyterian’s ER twice in the past few years, I’d guess it wasn’t so much Duncan being black, as Presby being utterly unprepared to deal with exotic and fatal communicable diseases like Ebola.
The place is geared primarily toward 3 things- baby birthing, orthopedic surgery, and neurosurgery.
Their ER is most likely geared toward urgent care for the local area, which is predominantly white and suburban, with one low-income area literally down Greenville Avenue, which is where Duncan was staying. I suspect that critical care situations are stabilized at Presby and shipped to Parkland or Baylor, since they’re the local level 1 trauma centers, and I also suspect that the vast majority of uninsured non-ambulance ER people go to Parkland, since it’s the public hospital.
So Presby just flat out doesn’t see those things. They did a stellar job with my knee injury and subsequent surgery and with my wife’s pregnancy bleeding, for what that’s worth.
I seriously doubt there’s any consideration of color going on; more than likely it was just some perfect storm of incompetence, unpreparedness and Duncan having a high viral load, and being much farther along the disease timeline before he showed up than the nurses who were already being watched closely.