According to a new study, Black hospital patients are 31% more likely to be held under physical restraints. Why? It starts with anti-Black biases.
The language healthcare workers use to describe Black patients in their charts differs from non-Black patients. Instead of de-escalating when needed, restraints come out too often. And agitated Black patients communicating through outbursts cannot be separated from a disproportionate lack of access to treatment, including for behavioral health.
But there’s another context in which restraints are used: in policing.
From Tanisha Anderson to George Floyd, police have unnecessarily stolen lives using restraint. They’ve used language like Black victims having “superhuman strength” to justify their violence.
This comparison holds, considering that in-hospital deaths are more likely for restrained patients. For those who survive, being restrained still frequently leaves lasting physical and psychological trauma.
This isn’t to say that healthcare workers are police.
But brutalizing, criminalizing, dehumanizing, and disposing of Black patients is rooted in a logic that Black patients are fundamentally more dangerous or deserving of punishment. That is the same carceral logic the police and prison systems embedded in our culture.
We need healthcare to survive. Medicine will exist in a liberated future. But, like any institution, that liberated future is on the other side of decolonization and uprooting anti-Blackness.