{"id":13450,"date":"2020-06-23T16:52:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-23T13:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/collecting-race-based-data-during-pandemic-may-fuel-dangerous-prejudices\/"},"modified":"2020-06-23T16:52:00","modified_gmt":"2020-06-23T13:52:00","slug":"collecting-race-based-data-during-pandemic-may-fuel-dangerous-prejudices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/collecting-race-based-data-during-pandemic-may-fuel-dangerous-prejudices\/","title":{"rendered":"#Collecting race-based data during pandemic may fuel dangerous prejudices"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Collecting race-based data during pandemic may fuel dangerous prejudices<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\n Racially sorted patients are surveilled, often with negative consequences. Credit: Shutterstock
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Brian Sinclair wheeled himself into a Winnipeg emergency room in September 2008 seeking assistance with his catheter bag. He had a bladder infection, but instead of receiving treatment, remained in the waiting room for 34 hours until his body\u2014now lifeless\u2014finally received medical attention.<\/p>\n

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Sinclair was an Indigenous man who hospital staff believed was there “to watch TV,” app<\/a>eared “intoxicated” and was simply “sleeping it off.” He was arguably triaged within what scholars of Indigenous histories Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry call a “highly racialized” health-care system. <\/p>\n

Sinclair’s case shows how stereotypes of indigeneity in Canada can influence patient care with fatal consequences. More broadly, this adds to trends of cumulative disadvantage, where negative circumstances that affected population groups in the past continue to affect the same groups today.
\nIs there a risk that the COVID-19 pandemic will fuel such trends in Canada, especially against the backdrop of the country’s racialized past? As a sociologist, my answer to this question is yes.
\nAs a researcher affiliated with the Surveillance Studies Centre, I am also concerned with how racially sorted patients are surveilled, often with negative consequences. Therefore, as a privacy and ethics officer evaluating health data for Ontario’s Pandemic Threat Response (PANTHR), I caution the Ministry of Health and its partners against the use of race- and ethnicity-based health data in dealing with COVID-19.
\nCollecting race data for good medicine?<\/b>
\nCanada’s attention to race during the first 100 years of immigration policy shaped aspirations of a settler colonial “White Canada Forever.” Unsurprisingly, historical racial inequalities shape Canadian experiences in health care. <\/p>\n

Dr. Kwame McKenzie of Toronto’s Wellesley Institute believes that race-based data is essential for “good medicine.” And many additional doctors and scholars believe that collecting race data might improve understandings of the social<\/a> determinants of health.
\nHowever, when race data is collected to understand the social determinants of health, it could inadvertently legitimate biological understandings of race. This is an essentialist position that necessarily ties the racial attributes and behaviors of one person to another.
\nFurther, when race data is used in these circumstances, it creates more scope to arrive at racist responses to a pandemic than it does to address social vulnerabilities like the poor work conditions of minority populations in essential services.
\nLinking race and health<\/b>
\nAlberta’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, acknowledges that systematic racism disadvantages certain populations. However, Hinshaw has not yet committed to collecting such data. Initially, her Ontario counterpart, Dr. David Williams, said the province would focus on age and chronic illness “regardless of race, ethnic or other backgrounds.” Ontario now says it will collect race-based data during the pandemic.
\nWilliams’ revised position certainly eases tensions with a coalition of Black health leaders that has called for attention to race.
\nEndorsed by 192 organizations and 1,612 individuals, the coalition wrote an open letter to Ontario Premier Doug Ford and other provincial officials. It argues for “the collection and use of socio-demographic and race-based data in health and social services \u2026 as it relates to COVID-19.”
\nBut the use of race data may be problematic because links between health conditions and race have been connected to discriminatory outcomes in the past.<\/p>\n

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