final blog post

At the start of the Race, Medicine and Society course, I was most interested in learning more about white privilege and the ways in which people show racism without ever even realizing that they were being racist. I found our conversations about white privilege, implicit bias and the ways in which people tend to say or do racist things without realizing amongst some of the most interesting. However, we learned mostly about African Americans, I can not say that I am disappointed by this, but I do wish that we would have had the chance to, as a class, learn more about implicit bias and medical malpractice in all different races and ethnicities. For this reason, I am very glad that we were given the opportunity to choose a final project on any race and any current epidemic that sparked our interest. Through this chance, I was able to learn an abundance of information on the diabetes epidemic in the Native American communities, something that had we not done this final project, I would still be clueless about.
I think that the reasoning behind my interest in learning about white privilege and implicit bias has a lot to do with the fact that I grew up in a small community that had almost no racial diversity, and because of this lack of diversity, we never learned much about different races. This course was a huge eyeopener for me. Since I grew up in such a small, white community, I always heard people say these things that they shouldn't, lines as little as "that black kid" and I never thought them to be racist at the time. Now that I have read things like "Unpacking the Invisible Backpack" and "Black Man in a White Coat", I see how such an "insignificant" statement could be so racist. Those two pieces were ones that really hit me hard and blew my mind and for that purpose, I considered them to be two of the most important works we discussed in this class. Tweedy really showed through his own personal experiences in the medical field how much implicit bias people have towards others of a different race, and through class discussion, we really showed ourselves how much privilege white people have while not even realizing it.
In conclusion, I think that the topics we learned are ones that I will never forget and am glad to have covered, as I would have never learned of them prior. I found learning about past racial experiences in the medical field to be extremely interesting and heartbreaking at the same time, however, I still feel as though learning about the current issues was the most beneficial because these are problems that our generation has the ability to change. The biggest lesson I have personally taken from this course is that we can not change all of the horrible things that went on in the past, but we can put our best foot forward with efforts to change the racial issues that are still occurring today.