Race

You have a very inspiring post ghannaba! While it may not be as realistic as we'd like it to be, it's always good to remind ourselves of our motivations and intentions for the future of society and to use that as our determination to keep trying, even when faced with obstacles. It is this passion that we as a collective society need to hold dear to our hearts to help us work together and collaborate for a better tomorrow. To Dr. Lu's credit, he does state that "health care alone cannot close the gap, [however] it's a good place to start." Steps 1, 2, 3, and 8 seem like good places to start that would be the less challenging of the twelve. However, when it comes to steps 4, 9, 10, and 12, we start to see some of the more challenging tasks. Ever since this country has become more aware of the socioeconomic gaps between the wealthy and the poor, as well as the inequalities between races, we as a nation have been striving to "close the education gap," to "undo racism," and much more. The problem is that these issues are so deep rooted (since the ending of slavery "freed" African Americans, while setting them on an even playing field with the rest of the nation without any help from the government to get back on their feet) and are so complex in nature that, even if we narrowed it down to thirty different causes of these gaps and inequalities, we still wouldn't even have scratched the surface. I think your points and Megan's about starting to move away from identifying each other by race are very important, however, first we need to acknowledge that some races are heavily disadvantaged against. For instance, many African American communities hold distrust for scientific research since the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and Henrietta Lacks' story, and because of that, African Americans are underrepresented in today's research and perhaps are benefiting less from these scientific advances. For instance, a particular drug trial might have indicated that more African Americans with heart disease are benefiting than caucasians or hispanics, and this drug might be able to help close some of these gaps by improving health in those communities. I would personally love to move away from the idea of "race," but as my Biomedical Ethics professor in college taught me, it is much more tricky than it sounds.