Their pain must be unbearable, I can't imagine. But we should not encourage or publish this kind of casual racism. If there is indeed a racial divide in deaths after tonsillectomy, then gather those statistics and publish them.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448914/ ("Black patients have higher operative mortality risks across a wide range of surgical procedures, in large part because of higher mortality rates at the hospitals they attend.")
[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/401... ("Race and insurance status each independently predicts outcome disparities after trauma. African American, Hispanic, and uninsured patients have worse outcomes.")
Expressing the belief that a person of another race would be treated better than you does not involve a belief in the inferiority of the other race or the superiority of your own, so is not racist.
This story hits very close to home for me. I had my tonsils and adenoids removed 37 years ago at the same hospital in Oakland. Waking up from the surgery is still one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. I was strapped to my bed in the recovery room because they feared 3-year-old me would remove his IV. I tried to make a noise, but my throat was so swollen and in such pain that I couldn't vocalize. I lay there in agony for over 2 hours before a nurse realized I was awake. They sent me home a day later despite the fact that I couldn't swallow food beyond a couple of spoonfuls of ice cream. My mom had to take me back to the emergency room a week later to get an IV because I was basically starving.
All-in-all, I also feel I got substandard care there. And while 3-year-old me and the girl in the article likely shared some things in common--I'm guessing we both came from somewhat poor families with insufficient health coverage--race isn't one of those things.
So as a white person who went through a not-nearly-as-terrible-but-still-pretty-terrible version of what they went through, I think it's important that we acknowledge that the hospital may have had completely different reasons for supplying substandard care and that jumping straight to race as a root cause isn't constructive.
But no such belief was expressed in the article. They only said "No one was listening to us, and I can’t prove it, but I really feel in my heart: if Jahi was a little white girl, I feel we would have gotten a little more help and attention."
There's nothing in that statement expressing a view that the hospital staff was inherently racist because of the hospital staff's race.
"White girl" seems to be a differentiating factor in their opinion, does whiteness not have anything to do with racism?
"Casual racism" is what the author perceives based on living their life and observing their surroundings; it is not their giving voice to their interpretation.
>Racism will make you crazy, man. (boss name) will walk into the room and shake everyone's hand, but not yours, and he's already walking out and so you're thinking "did he skip me on purpose cause he's racist? Maybe he just didn't see me cause I'm tucked back in here in the corner? Why am I tucked back here in the corner, anyway?" You're at starbucks and the barista shoots you a weird look - is it cause she hates black people? Maybe she just had some shit in her eye or maybe you're just imagining it.
He told me that while everyone knows racism is still alive, as a black man he's caught between detecting real racism and being an alarmist playing "the race card." It's an impossible fight, it "made him crazy."
On the other hand, I do think that much of the racial tension described in this article can be more charitably attributed to, for lack of a better word, a bad hospital. The quality of care this family experienced is one of the reasons I (speaking as a white guy) won’t go to certain hospitals in my area unless it’s an emergency. In fact, most recently a relative of mine broke her femur and I was asking the EMTs if we could choose the hospital (we couldn’t, which is probably better for society, but unfortunate for my family).
On a broader note I dislike the New Yorker setting this article up to be about the medical concept of death in the headline, then making it a story of racial tension in medical treatment. The story explicitly mentions the races and professions of various people involved, even going so far as to refer to a sympathetic staff member as African American.
I was interested in reading a new perspective about brain death, but this just seems to be trying to develop a story.