Most of the Scares On CBS's Evil Are Fictional. But Medical Racism Is Very Real.

Research has shown that racism often prevents African Americans from receiving the healthcare they need.

Head, Nose, Human, Forehead, Mouth, Organism, Room, Neck, Muscle, Sleep,

In the proud tradition of shows like X-Files and Supernatural, CBS’s Evil is tells the story of a couple of investigators trying to get to the bottom of frightening and seemingly unexplainable phenomena. So that means that the show is full of not-exactly realistic stuff like ghouls, incubi, and demons. But in the midst of all that’s scary and made-up, the series has tackled an issue that’s scary and real: medical racism.

Back in October, the show, which follows skeptical psychologist Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers) and seminarian David Acosta (Mike Colter) as they explore incidents of the paranormal, focused an episode on a black girl hospital patient. In their investigation, they realized that the hospital was spending more time attempting to resuscitate white patients than it did black ones. In last night’s episode, David winds up at the exact same facility after being stabbed, only now there’s an evil nurse trying to kill black patients.

It’s pretty good fodder for a creepy TV show, but the danger black people can face in medical settings is real. “We know through data that African Americans still experience a great deal of racism, a great deal of discrimination and racial bias in the medical arena,” Medical Apartheid author Harriet Washington told me last year.

And some of that racism was vividly illustrated in a 2016 University of Virginia study that sought to understand why black patients are less likely to be treated for pain that whites. One such prior study had found that 74 percent of white people with extremity fractures received pain meds, while only 57 percent of black people with the same condition did. The UVA findings were pretty horrifying:

The UVA researchers uncovered one of the reasons black pain goes untreated: Medical professionals routinely profess racist beliefs about black patients’ bodies. Around half of medically trained respondents believed at least one false statement about biological differences—overtly racist sentiments like “Blacks' skin is thicker than whites’,” or “Blacks’ nerve endings are less sensitive than whites’.”
That finding, said Washington, “is actually a holdover from Victorian times.” Supporters of American slavery, keen to justify the institution as a scientific necessity rather than an economic convenience, insisted that black people were biologically different than whites, subhumans uniquely suited to brutal labor and neither deserving nor capable of handling freedom.

The myth that black people literally thicker skinned than whites has not only prevented black people from receiving life-saving and pain-reducing medical care, but it's enabled centuries of nightmarish malpractice.

African Americans—powerless, and supposedly indifferent to pain—were the ideal subjects for gruesome experimentation. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment is the most famous example of racist barbarism in the name of American scientific progress, but is by no means the only instance of it. “Father of gynecology” J. Marion Sims developed the first surgery repairing vaginal fistulas over four years of agonizing, purposefully un-anesthetized experimental surgeries on slave women.

So while much of what happens in Evil is spooky fiction, the medical racism plotlines reflect a grim phenomenon that’s all too real.

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