Racial discrimination is any discrimination against any individual on the basis of their skin color, race or ethnic origin. Individuals can discriminate by refusing to do business with, socialize with, or share resources with people of a certain group. Governments can discriminate in a de facto fashion or explicitly in law, for example through policies of racial segregation, disparate enforcement of laws, or disproportionate allocation of resources. Some jurisdictions have anti-discrimination laws which prohibit the government or individuals from discriminating based on race (and sometimes other factors) in various circumstances. Some institutions and laws use affirmative action to attempt to overcome or compensate for the effects of racial discrimination. In some cases, this is simply enhanced recruitment of members of underrepresented groups; in other cases, there are firm racial quotas. Opponents of strong remedies like quotas characterize them as reverse discrimination, where members of a dominant or majority group are discriminated against.
Boundary problems and related forms of discrimination :
Racial boundaries can involve many factors (such as ancestry, physical appearance, national origin, language, religion, and culture), and can be set in law by governments, or may depend on local cultural norms.
Discrimination based on skin color,(measured for example on the Fitzpatrick scale) is closely related to racial discrimination, as skin color is often used as a proxy for race in everyday interactions, and is one factor used by legal systems that apply detailed criteria. For example, the Population Registration Act, 1950 was used to enforce the apartheid system in South Africa, and Brazil has set up boards to assign a racial category to people for the purpose of enforcing racial quotas. Because of genetic variation, skin color, and other physical appearance can vary considerably even among siblings. Some children with the same parents either self-identify or are identified by others as being of different races. In some cases, the same person is identified as a different race on a birth certificate versus a death certificate. Different rules (such as hypodescent vs. hyperdescent) classify the same people differently, and for various reasons some people “pass” as a member of a different race than they would otherwise be classified in, possibly avoiding legal or interpersonal discrimination.
A given race is sometimes defined as a set of ethnicities from populations in neighboring geographic areas (such as a continent like Australia or a subcontinental region like South Asia) that are typically similar in appearance. In such cases, racial discrimination can occur because someone is of an ethnicity defined as outside that race, or ethnic discrimination (or ethnic hatred, ethnic conflict, and ethnic violence) can occur between groups who consider each other to be the same race. Discrimination based on caste is similar; because caste is hereditary, people of the same caste are usually considered to be of the same race and ethnicity.
Effects On Health : Racism in healthcare system
Racial bias exists in the medical field affecting the way patients are treated and the way they are diagnosed. There are instances where patients’ words are not taken seriously, an example would be the recent case with Serena Williams. After the birth of her daughter via C-section, the tennis player began to feel pain and shortness of breath. It took her several times to convince the nurse they actually took her self-said symptoms seriously. Had she not been persistent and demanded a CT scan, which showed a clot resulting in blood thinning, Williams might have not been alive. This is just one of hundreds of cases where systemic racism can affect women of color in pregnancy complications.
One of the factors that lead to higher mortality rates amongst black mothers is the poorly conditioned hospitals and lack of standard healthcare facilities. Along with having deliveries done in underdeveloped areas, the situation becomes complicated when the pain dealt by patients are not taken seriously by healthcare providers. Pain heard from patients of color are underestimated by doctors compared to pain told by patients who are white leading them to misdiagnose.
Many say that the education level of people affect whether or not they admit to healthcare facilities, leaning to the argument that people of color purposefully avoid hospitals compared to white counterparts[citation needed] however, this is not the case. Even Serena Williams, a well-known athlete, was not taken seriously when she described her pain. It is true that the experiences of patients in hospital settings influence whether or not they return to healthcare facilities. Black people are less likely to admit to hospitals however those that are admitted have longer stays than white people.