I’ve done that from one site to another - before Lemmy, Reddit, and before that FaceBook - and yeah Lemmy is by far the best one that I have seen.

You brought an excellent counter-point too, that severely complicates the issues. It is something that e.g. black police officers struggle with on a daily basis as they police mostly black neighborhoods: should they NOT do this or that action, b/c of fear of “profiling” someone, even/especially if they are literally acting suspiciously? And sadly, much of the “tough guy/gal” culture brings things upon itself. So is the demeanor of the person asking a contributing factor? Then again, white people (especially older ones) can say the absolute meanist shit imaginable, yet they often get a free pass?

In this case, not so much health care professionals but rather the pencil-pushing administrators may be the ones doing the actual denying of care, likely due to financial reasons - poorer health care facilities, in poorer neighborhoods, just treat poor people like they are… I dunno, poor? And sometimes they happen to be black, go figure, it’s almost like those two things are sometimes related, and therefore show up in any study that does not properly distinguish between the varying factors. Any such correlation-based study will have such issues with it. And while actual attempts at causation studies can be done in other areas - e.g. swap resumes and switch a man’s name to a woman’s, or a white-sounding one with a black-sounding one, and see if that change impacts the decision (you might be surprised at how often it does, I’ve literally sat in on phone calls where someone “axed” for a particular person by name, only to be told that there is no such person at that office, then rather than ask for clarification in case of a pronunciation issue we were hung up on instantly, so we called back mere seconds later and this time I was the one who “asked” - notice my own pronunciation there? - and we were put through immediately), with healthcare you can’t (ethically) fake an illness, diagnosis, or treatment plan, so we are back to correlation studies as the only things that can illuminate the situation.

And supposedly there is something more to it than merely poverty, where black people report being “believed” less often when they say that they are in great pain - particularly women. Whatever the complex set of underlying reasons entails, I have no idea, but it strains credulity to think that racism is not somewhere in the heart of it all. I liken it to the “me too” movement, where women report being groped and sexually abused in all manner of ways (sometimes literally raped) but men who have not seen it happen first-hand do not wish to believe those horror stories, especially about their buddies who even if they engage in “locker talk”, SURELY would not do something like THAT!? So until you see it happen with your own eyes, or else just choose to believe those who you know well and are relating their stories to you, you won’t know, not REALLY. Those buddies don’t show that side of their personality with you, which is probably a good thing, b/c they realize that you do not share that aspect with them.

Anyway, based on everything else that I have seen and heard over the years, I have no trouble at all believing these claims, though in this particular type of scenario I have no direct or even indirect experiences, only stories I have heard from people I do not know first-hand. Though there are a LOT of such stories, some conducted by the utmost authority sources including the DOJ, and they tell a pretty damning trend that racism is alive and well in certain parts of the country. I used to question that too but… yeah, it’s real.

Here’s a fun video covering a related topic, in case you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v0XiUQlRLw