Abstract
Recently, our medical school hosted Dr. Linda Rae Murray to give a talk on structural racism and medicine. A former president of the American Public Health Association, Dr. Murray gave a powerful presentation on the history of racism in the United States and its lingering impact upon health disparities. In one of her more provocative slides, she graphically conveyed the long history of racism toward African Americans in the United States (before and after the founding of the republic). For 250 years, legalized slavery existed. After a brief period of Reconstruction, institutionalized racism persisted for another 75 years during the Jim Crow era. During the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, civil rights legislation was finally passed. We have now been living for nearly 50 years in a post-civil-rights era (a mere fraction of the overall history recounted by Murray). Today, racial discrimination is clearly illegal. We even have a black President. Yet structural racism persists. Why is that?