To go without medical attention because a hospital is overburdened or unwilling to admit the poor, or for lack of a doctor willing to treat the poor, or for lack of insurance or income to pay fees, is obscene. The public should scorn doctoring for dollars, hospitaling for profit, and governing without giving a damn about most people's health. If demonstrations disrupt wealthy people's hospitals and clinics and expose greedy medical administrators and doctors as promoters of disease, change will come. But should our city's ghettos explode this summer, even all this might fall short. To ensure that the white community opposes rather than supports police repression will also require public organizing to counter racist views, feelings, and behavior in ways that inform and liberate white communities.
Institutional racism is the subordination of any one cultural community relative to another.
It is unequal incomes, housing, schooling, jobs, education, health care, political participation, and access to media. Racist ideology, in turn, rationalizes these inequalities by denigrating mistreated ethnic groups, religious groups, nations, or races based on differences of culture, origin, or skin color. It emphasizes descriptions of one community as superior or more humane, and of another as inferior or less humane. It says that the oppressed are lazy, ugly, stupid, gullible, impatient, and suitable for manual, dangerous, or service tasks. It says that their oppressors are industrious, beautiful, intelligent, cautious, patient, and suitable for administrative and conceptual tasks.