AIBU to think refusing treatment from non-white medical professionals should have consequences?

She was perfectly clear 🙄

The pp who used " coloured' until recently is 50. So def my generation.

I don’t know. I imagine she’ll tell me
herself what she was meaning.

Also older people are far more likely to need medical treatment.

I am 55. I remember a ward round when I was a medical student in 1994, the consultant was advised by a nurse that she should not use the word coloured. A long time ago!

As a pp said I think people in their 70s and older often do. That isn’t “your generation”. You were born in the 70s, I’m a bit younger than you but so was I. My dad would have said it, he’d be 70 this year. Other people’s second hand anecdotes don’t cancel out my experience.

!!!!

When I was at school in the 1960s and 1970s it was common usage and acceptable to say "coloured". I only learned from mumsnet several years ago that it was offensive. DH is 74 and I sometimes have to remind him that people don't say coloured any more.

I am 54. I don't know anyone from my generation who thinks " coloured' is the right term. 80 yr olds maybe.

I personally feel if someone is refusing to be treated by non-white medical staff simply because of the colour of their skin, then it should recorded as the patient refusing treatment end of, and a white practitioner should not be made available to them.

She didn’t say they were actively racist, she said they’d be deemed racist for using terms like “coloured”.

There is.

Exactly, and some people have said that this applies to cases where an alternative doctor is requested, with zero racist abuse. So the thread isn’t just about that however much people claim it is.

@DeterminedRat

There is no nuance with those awful examples. But the article doesn’t refer only to cases where racist names are used, but to a wider survey where individuals have reportedly experienced discrimination. It would be interesting to see what was reported as discrimination. For example, would refusing to be treated by someone with a heavy accent that an elderly person struggles to understand be discrimination? We can’t know the answer without reading the survey results and also identifying the full context.

If your FIL said I can't understand that monkey, or I don't understand that dirty foreigner then I'm quite sure he would be (correctly) identified as being a racist. I'm not sure how much nuance you think there is in calling people those names?

No, she's trying to justify racism by claiming people can be racist simply because they are old. Which is not true

Racism is completely unacceptable.

When my elderly FIL was in hospital he was treated by staff that he couldn’t understand due to their heavy accents and poor English. That wasn’t ok. If he had complained (which he didn’t, but we identified it when it was happening) he could have been identified as racist. I wonder if there is more nuance here which isn’t coming through in the article.

Then she isn’t talking about your grandmother, is she.

My grandmother was definitely not a racist, and she was born in the UK at the turn of the last (19th) century.

In fact @AlisonPi what you said- do correct me if I am wrong as it's a long thread- is that you prefer white doctors because non-whites don't respect you.

Can you pl point out where anybody on this thread has said that not understanding people is racist? Or do you mean in real life?

Not understanding people is a real thing. There’s huge denial about this. I actually think collective sanity is being undermined by calling reasonable responses ‘ racist’. This is why more and more people are numb to being called racist. It simply doesnt matter anymore.

Same and yes.

It is, objectively, a bad thing, if we want to live in a civilised society

You'd think so, @Vinvertebrate, but this is starting to remind me of various Trump threads, where some chortle over his imagined death - and no I'm not a fan either, but I'm also not comfortable with the concept of those whose views I happen to dislike being killed off

Worse still, and as mentioned, I've no doubt these are exactly the people who itch to get themselves on the type of "panels" tasked with addressing such issues

It is, objectively, a bad thing, if we want to live in a civilised society. Most people born before about 1960 would be deemed racist by today’s standards. I’m only 50 and I was taught this it was correct and polite to use the term “colored” rather than “black” - which could offend (I know better now ofc).

I could quite cheerfully dispatch an animal like Rudukubana myself - in my head at least. But I would not want to live in a society where that happened. And I don’t think most people would either, in a rather hackneyed “first they came for the communists” sense.