Racial Tendencies Existing in Our World and Their Impact on Minorities

Mr. Richard Delgado writes this piece ‘Words That Wound’ to highlight the racism and its effects. It’s an unarguable fact that racism is still prevalent in American society today and according to Delgado’s article, he strongly believes that racial slurs and racial stigmatization leads to minority groups who are exposed to racism to experience psychological and cultural issues as a result.

One of his first premises focuses on how he believes that racism leads to minority groups regarding themselves as being “lazy, arrogant, dirty and superstitious”. The adjectives used to describe the victims result in them in presuming that they are unworthy within society and inferior to white Americans. Delgado states that in an experiment that was conducted with black children, the results depicted that the children exhibited self-hatred tendencies because of the color of their skin. Children of color believed that their own color was undesirable and unattractive and started to question “their competence, intelligence, and worth”. Children are likely to latch on to these descriptions and hold on to these false beliefs about them throughout their life further leading them to believe that they are undeserving. As children are also unlikely to openly talk about the hardships that they face after experiencing racism and could evidently feel criticized. The suppression of these feelings inevitably leads to psychological effects in the future.

The second premise which Delgado uses to support his argument is that the psychological effects of racism leads to a higher rate of narcotics usage due to rise of mental illnesses and psychosomatic diseases. This is because having to endure racial slurs and stigmatization leads to victims believing that they have little self-worth and are not living up to societal standards. This evidently leads to self-loathing, isolation and antisocial behavior. This behavior has often been linked to victims succumbing to alcohol and drugs as a “getaway” from reality. Delgado implies that minority groups have the highest usage of narcotics as compared to all of society as a whole and this can be attributed to a higher number of minority groups enduring psychological diseases due to the prevalence of racism.

Delgado, through the premises he sets, tries to prove and conclude to the fact that racism greatly affects minorities psychologically and culturally till date and though race-induced practices like slavery are not the norm now, racism still is.

Delgado’s entire thesis and article seems to point to the conclusion that racism is still very prevalent and that it affects cultural and psychological situations even in today’s society. This is a conclusion that I believe to be valid as well as something I agree with but a good read of the thesis and Delgado’s premises causes me to classify this argument as unsound only based on the premises he uses to argue his point.

One of Delgado’s argument premise states that through racism and it’s psychological effects minorities have become the biggest abusers of narcotics and alcohol and have highest rates of addiction. Although, there is truth to this statement, I do not completely agree with it because it fails to paint the whole picture of the situation.

There are high rates of addiction of certain drugs like alcohol and tobacco when we look at all minorities in the United States as a group but what this premise and what Delgado do not highlight is the high rates of opioid addiction in white Americans. The opioid epidemic is overwhelmingly white compared to opioid’s addiction and abuse rates in American minorities. This statistic completely dismisses Delgado’s argument of minorities being more vulnerable to drug addiction and the reason or the problem behind this statistic counters Delgado’s argument that racism only affects minorities psychologically. Here’s why: the opioid epidemic exists because of the high amounts of opioid prescribed to patients at hospitals for pain causing addiction problems. Fortunately or unfortunately, opioid is prescribed to minority patients or patients of color only very rarely when compared to white patients.

A huge percentage of medical graduates and doctors in the United States are white. Studies suggest that doctors’ who have the privilege of recommending medicines have a tendency to feel more comfortable prescribing drugs such as opioid to white Americans over minority Americans because they fear addiction and abuse when it comes to minorities while treat white patients with a lot of trust.

These aspects of racism that exist in our world clearly highlight and counter Delgado’s arguments of racism affecting only minorities psychologically as well as drug addiction being a bigger problem in minorities across the board. That being said, Delgado’s argument’s conclusion that states that racism has great effects on minorities culturally, politically and psychologically is something that is very prominent and palpable in our day to day lives and the complete truth.