How to be a Perfect Stranger Except for Targets and

Agents: Racial Justice and Health

By Shawnee M. Daniels-Sykes, SSND, RN, Ph.D.

Racial Justice and Health Care

The Institution of Slavery

The Indian Removal Act of 1830

Racial Justice and Health Care

The following are the five objectives for this webinar:

1. To discuss the reality of racism, through a definition and sharing extensive historical contexts

Racial Justice and Health Care

2. To discuss racism and methodological individualism and its impact on health promotion and primary prevention

Racial Justice and Health Care

3. To discuss unconscious racism and health care

4. To offer that we must see and believe that racism in and of itself is not innate in human personalities, but is culturally and institutionally acquired

Racial Justice and Health Care

5. To offer that by focusing on our Target Social Groups and our Agent Social Groups, we have something to say about racial sensitivity and consciousness raising as we move toward racial justice and health care

Racial Justice and Health Care

My main argument is: I maintain that powerful decision-making

health care leaders, administrators, providers, clinicians, medical researchers, social workers, chaplains, among many others, in conjunction with political, governmental, lobbyists, stakeholders, ecclesial groups, etc. must become progressively self-critical about health care institutions racist ideologies and unconscious racism.

Racial Justice and Health Care

We must continue to examine who we are personally and individually in relationship to our Target and Agent Group Membership and dialogue together.

Racial Justice and Health Care

According to Allan Aubrey Boesak in Farewell to Innocence, an ideology includes the following five criteria:

1. It makes claims of absoluteness and exclusivity, constituting a comprehensive pretension to know all of reality.

Racial Justice and Health Care

2. It is a complete schism with the world of the real daily experiences that exist. Here the ideology will remain unaffected by the counter-experiences of others even with the results of medical or scientific research.

Racial Justice and Health Care

3. The ideology resides within a closed, isolated, fossilized system of ideas with no room for change.

Racial Justice and Health Care

4. The ideology lives on presuppositions that are purposefully kept unclear and vague.

5. The ideology needs prejudices and clichés to survive.

Racial Justice and Health Care

A definition of racism for this presentation:

Prejudice + Power + Privilege or Unearned Advantages that one inherits and/or holds in order to systematically enforce racial prejudices…

Racial Justice and Health Care

The fifth edition of The Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Services, namely, directives three and seven, call us to address grave issues surrounding racial and social injustices wherever and whenever they exist.

Racial Justice and Health Care

Yes, for the United States, in a liberal democracy, the autonomous individual person is of primary normative value.

Racial Justice and Health Care

For the most part, individuals are:thinking, breathing, rational, logical,

intellectual, feeling, judging, choosing, communicating, perceiving persons who freely live their lives, desiring minimal government intervention,

Racial Justice and Health Care

prohibiting another to trespass on their private property, having freedom to think and believe whatever and however they choose, among others, while enjoying life despite a culture of racism.

Racial Justice and Health Care

Moral philosopher Daniel Goldberg argues in his article, Social Justice, Health Inequalities, and Methodological Individualism, that methodological individualism promotes health inequalities and health disparities, despite concerted efforts to prevent these social injustices.

Racial Justice and Health Care

Furthermore, he observes that this allows for racial and ethnic prejudices, too, that widen the gap in health inequalities between the haves and the have nots, between the advantaged and the disadvantaged, between the privileged and unprivileged.

Racial Justice and Health Care

Hence, racism is embedded in a methodological individualism that has a direct influence on the system of health care.

Racial Justice and Health Care

Given the fact that institutionalized racism does persist in our health care system, at times it exists overtly and at other times covertly.

Racial Justice and Health Care

Despite the best intentions to assist others in need of health care in the clinical arena or hospital setting, unconscious racist ideologies remain quite conceivable.

They might emerge spontaneously and automatically with any effortful thoughts or ponderings.

Racial Justice and Health Care

In defining unconscious racism, Catholic moral theologian Bryan N. Massingale claims that:

“…unconscious racism connotes how race can operate as a negative—yet not conscious, deliberate, or intentional—decision-making factor, due to the pervasive cultural stigma attached, for example, to dark skinned people in Western culture.

Racial Justice and Health Care

Race functions as a largely unconscious or preconscious frame or perception, developed through cultural conditioning and instilled by socialization.

In essence, because of a racialized set of meanings and values that permeate all of our society’s cultural products, we learn our culture’s “racial code” almost by osmosis.”

Racial Justice and Health Care

Massingale further observes that “unconscious racism denotes the influence of a cultural frame or lens that we have learned and act out of in unintentional and preconscious ways. It is a shorthand for the concrete effects that result from a racial conditioning that is transmitted through unconscious socialization…”

Racial Justice and Health Care

I maintain, too, that racism has become unconscious racism is a sickness that is/was culturally and institutionally acquired.

The following diagram, The Cycle of Prejudice and Oppression captures the mechanism that is involved to create and sustain a culture of racism and institutionalized racism:

Racial Justice and Health Care

I argue that the destructive historical events that affront human life, human dignity, and human rights devalued, or disempowered, or marginalized groups of people.

Yet, theologically and spiritually in the face of our Creator God, human beings cannot be destroyed, human dignity cannot be taken away from something that is of God.

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To repeat, our task then is to interrupt the cycle of prejudice and oppression:

-We must UnLearn the UnTruths -We must replace the UnTruths with

new attitudes and knowledge -We must develop skills -We must take action

Racial Justice and Health Care

In Leticia Nieto’s and Margot F. Boyer’s book, Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment, they describe an exercise that examines what it means to be a part of a Target Group and an Agent Group.

Racial Justice and Health Care

The Target Group Membership is comprised of people who experience oppression/limitations. Socially undervalued. May hold Agent Group Membership as well. Examples include:

females, People of Color, LGBTQ

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Agent Group Membership includes those who experience privilege/advantages/benefits. Socially overvalued. May hold Target Group Membership as well. Examples are:

males, white or Caucasian people, heterosexuals, high skilled professionals and executives, rich, wealthy, famous.

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The Exercise1. Get in a relaxed position, breathe in

and breathe out.2. Think of an area in your life where

you have Agent Group Membership status and an area where you have Target Group Membership status.

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3. As you tune into your Target Group Membership status, remain focused on it for a while.

4. Notice how the focus on your Target Group Membership brings you inward, perhaps creating a certain tension and resistance and restricts the space you take up.

Racial Justice and Health Care

5. Next tune into your Agent Group Membership, and remain focused on it for a while. Breathe in and Breath out.

6. Notice how your body relaxes; you are able to find relief and the space you take up is bigger.

Racial Justice and Health Care

If you find this exercise useful, please feel free to repeat it as necessary until you are able to embody the tension(s) of a Target experience (s), the ease of the Agent experience (s), and the difference in space that you take up.

Racial Justice and Health Care

The authors, Nieto and Boyer, believe that owning our membership in socially over valued groups where we have it, tends to wake us up from our unconsciousness about the Rank system.

Racial Justice and Health Care

This exercise, I believe, can also help us become more aware of the many aspects of our lives that we usually do not pay attention.

Waking up is an essential step in moving away from unconscious racism to racial justice and liberation—one way we can free up our own energies, space, and potential for growth, peaceful, unifying and harmonious relationships.

Racial Justice and Health Care

Questions, Comments, Thoughts, Insights

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Thank You!