The following ideas from Module 1 stood out to me the most, either because the information was new to me or was presented differently than I've previously heard:
It surprised me that 25% of modern medical residents still have inaccurate beliefs about black patients. Without corrective schooling for these future doctors, equitable medical treatment is impossible to achieve.
I appreciated the discussion of incarceration as an inherited trait, and was surprised to learn that 70% of black men who drop out of high school will at some point serve time in prison. This prompted me to think then about how these people, as prisoners or former prisoners, are denied the right to vote and as such have less power to change the system oppressing them.
I was surprised that race is a variable more important than socioeconomic status when determining who is eligible for a loan. I tend to overvalue SES as a variable when I'm interpreting statistics and undervalue the impact of racism.
I liked the point of the Jim Crowe Museum curator that, when we talk too much about the KKK, it implies that those were the only racists in America's history. People (myself included) have come to wrongly believe that they are not racist simply because they aren't as racist as the extremists we learn about in school.
I took away many of the same points, specifically, the extremists point you made as well. Growing up in the South you learn that there is a gradient to racism, but that it could always be worse. It allows you to excuse other types of behaviors as not as bad because often there would be someone around the corner saying or doing something much more offensive. Unfortunately, working in the medical field I was much more aware of the systemic issues in this field including a lack of diversity.