Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) has been on my mind a lot these past few days. For those readers unfamiliar with US history, this particular Supreme Court decision supported -- and by its support, institutionalized -- racial segregation in the post-Reconstruction era. The words of the ruling -- that maintaining "separate but equal" facilities did not abrogate the rights of peoples of African descent -- were observed much more in the "separate" than the "equal". One of the unfortunate results of this policy was that blacks were denied most of the educational, legal, and employment opportunities afforded to people of completely European descent (look up "Jim Crow laws").
As example often breeds expectation, and expectation, the next generation of example, by the time Brown v. Topeka (1954) legally recognized the inherent inequality in racial separation, there was belief among many Americans of European descent that persons of African descent were -- despite stellar examples to the contrary -- incapable of responsible behavior and of understanding higher learning.
I had been considering using Plessy to examine the premise of "handicapped by society, based solely on physical appearance" (or medical history) in the context of public-school "special education programs". The discussion waits; I'm not sure how close the use of Plessy as analogy to the "separate and not equal" treatment of children with special medical needs would come to "invoking Godwin's Law".
While it's been more than fifty years since the Brown decision effectively overturned Plessy, and closing in on a half-century since the Civil Rights movements and legislation of the 1960's and 1970's (including school integration, Affirmative Action, and Equal Opportunity Employment) abolished legalized racial segregation, attitudes seem to be taking a bit longer to change. Issues too often in the news include "racial profiling" and the half-tongue-in-cheek descriptions of "reasons" for disproportionately stopping and detaining African-Americans going about their everyday lives.
These attitudes are fatal. We've all heard of young men cut down in their prime for "Driving While Black". Monday's news added another burden of sorrow to these attitudes -- in the words of @lilisea, "DKA while black".
To give due diligence to the reportage, the late Todd Johnson had not known he had diabetes -- and being too ill to have shaved and dressed, may have been mistaken by hospital personnel for "just some bum", as his brother Torre was quoted. (A disproportionate percentage of the homeless and homeless-addicted in New York City are African-American.) One would think that there should have been other clues to the seriousness of Mr. Johnson's condition -- clues that may have been ignored. While there is no indication that race was an issue in this particular incident, expectations of previous generations and current examples allow the reader to accept the possibility without a second thought. (Reporter Alex Nichols' comparison of Mr. Johnson's case to that of a Jamaican woman who died of a difficult-to-detect-without-examination blood clot, similarly ignored in the emergency room, strengthens this association.)
Having to wait over seven hours for medical attention in an emergency room is all kinds of unacceptable -- regardless of the color of one's skin or the apparent level of one's sobriety. But if Mr. Johnson's appointment with Destiny was in any way hastened by his African heritage, then we must ask ourselves why, fifty-five years after Brown v. Topeka, we still see "separate and (un)equal" as acceptable treatment.
