Racial Inequalities in Healthcare is about uncovering and discovering the historical and more recent racial disparities in healthcare.   Learning about the past is relevant to our awareness and sensitivity to communities of color in the present.  We need to be aware about what people have been capable of doing to others in the name of medicine. We need to know the thought and ideology that has led to those actions.  We also need to be able to identify the actions and how they happened.  All to make us more aware of how people of color experience issues of health unequally.  

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Course Units:

Unit 1 History of Pain and the perception and treatment of People of Color (78 minutes)- 1.25 CEUs

Objective 1: Learn how the ideology of race and images of the “other” influence the consideration of pain and treatment of people of color. Objective 2: Understand the origins of how European views of race and how it changed during the Enlightenment to dehumanize nonwhites by conceiving of a racial hierarchy. Objective 3: Identify how ideas about race influenced how Europeans and people of European descent viewed enslaved black people as feeling less pain. ​Objective 4: Analyze the perception of viewing black folk as feeling less pain will result in cruel treatment and inhumane medical experimentation and other practices.

 

Unit 2 The consequences of not legitimizing pain and humanity in medicine (55 minutes)- 1 CEU

Objective 1: Learn how the concepts about race and pain dehumanized people of color as subjects of medical experimentation. Objective 2: Learn how that experience is intersectional with class, race, and gender. Objective 3: Learn how this was part of international imperialist experience. Objective 4: Learn about the violation of consent. Objective 5: Learn about the eugenics movement and how that influenced medical treatment. Objective 6: Learn about the continuation of these practices and beliefs in the 20th century through the case of Henrietta Lacks and the Tuskegee Study.

 

Unit 3 Modern Day Continuation: Racial Disparity in Pain (53 minutes)- 1 CEU

Objective 1: Learn how older notions of race and pain continue to influence the under treatment and neglect of pain for people of color.

Objective 2: Learn how Black and Latinx people’s pain is not treated as seriously as white people.

Objective 3: Learn about how myths about perception and false beliefs of Black people are held by advanced medical students.

Objective 4: Learn how false perceptions affect the treatment of Black and Latinx people.

 

Unit 4 Robbing Women Their Womb and Robbing the Future of People of Color (67 minutes)- 1 CEU

Objective 1: Learn how racial ideologies affect sterilization and attempts at population control of people of color. Objective 2: Learn that the ideology of the eugenics movement became implemented into government programs and medical institutions.

Objective 3: Learn about how the eugenics movement affected multiple groups such as people with disabilities, Black people, Latinx people, and Native Americans.

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Unit 5 Racial Disparity In Addressing drug abuse:  the criminal approach vs. the Healthcare approach- 1 CEU

Objective 1: Identify the relationship between social narratives (19th century  ideas about race) and public policy/laws, specifically related to drug use.

Objective 2:  Identify ways the enforcement of Prohibition targeted various groups of people that were viewed as racially inferior.

Objective 3: Learn about ways that anti- Cannabis laws in the 1930s targeted people of color.

Objective 4: Examine ways that the war on drugs was implemented as a deterrent to keep communities of color from organizing.

Objective 5: Analyze the impact of narratives surrounding race on treatment of drug abuse as a disease vs. a crime.

 

Unit 6: Immigration, Disease, and the specter of Fear- 1 CEU

Objective 1: Discuss the use of public health concerns as  reasoning for dehumanizing immigration policy and lack of care.

Objective 2:  Learn about Nativism and the impact of this perspective on immigrants.

Objective 3: Examine the use of stereotypes and propaganda as justification for the 1917 gas baths of El Paso.

Objective 4:  Learn about Title 42 and the use of public health to halt the asylum system.

 

Unit 7  Medical Neglect of Migrant Children in Detention- 1.75 CEUs

Objective 1: Learn about how the health of migrant children in detention is impacted by racial disparities in healthcare and by stereotypes of migrants.

Objective 2: Discuss the lack of medical resources for migrant children in detention.

Objective 3: Learn about the Flores Settlement Agreement and its impact

Objective 4: Identify the different types of detention facilities that hold migrant children

Objective 5: Discuss the delay in healthcare for migrant children and identify the impact of that delay.

 

Unit 8  Racial Disparity In The Time of COVID-19- 1.75 CEUs

Objective 1: Learn about how the failings of the healthcare system have left people of color more vulnerable to COVID.

Objective 2: Learn how efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID  were purposely impeded in communities of color.

Objective 3: Identify the impact of pervasive narratives regarding immigration and disease on the AAPI community during the COVID 19 period.

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Get to know your facilitator: Diana Martinez, M.A. in History

I was born and raised in El Paso, Texas by immigrant parents from Juarez.  I come from a large extended family that is binational. My parents named me after the statue of the huntress in Mexico City on Reforma Street. I graduated from the University of Texas at El Paso with a BA in History and a minor in Secondary Education. My focus was in Native American and Latin American history.  After graduation, I taught in public, private, and charter schools.   I have taught from 6th to 12th grade levels before teaching college.  At the high school level,  I taught world geography, art history, world history, American history, American literature, British literature, world literature, government, and economics.  At the middle school, I taught writing composition, Texas History, and American history.  In 2009  I graduated with a Master’s in History.  Most of my courses were both Latin American history, Borderland history, and Orientalism.  My thesis paper was about the Western perception of Tibetan from 1900 to 1950.   In 2005 I was licensed as a massage therapist.

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Since 2010 I taught at the college level at both at El Paso Community College and at the University of Texas at El Paso. At UTEP I taught Humanities 3303 Challenges in Modern Culture, from 1600 to present and Humanities 3303 Intellectuals on the Edge from 1900 – the present.  I taught American History 1301 and American History 1302 at both institutions.  I grew up with a strong passion for art, history, and literature that goes into my teaching. My students remark that my enthusiasm inspires them to learn.   

I have worked with others to organize community actions to stand up for the rights of immigrants and immigrant children in detention.  Part of the community organizing involved public speaking and presenting about immigration and Latinx history in America.   I did one presentation on the Flores Settlement Agreement as it pertains to the rights of children in detention at the El Paso Community College for Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education.  The other two presentations I did at El Paso Community College for the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education was on Jaime Escalante and Rosita the Riveter the Latina Contribution to World War II.  I made contributions and spoke at the following community actions: Lights for Liberty, Mother’s Day protest, Christmas at Tornillo, and Witness at Tornillo documentary premier at the Alamo Draft House.   

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