Ingrained prejudices: Am I Racist?!

A few weeks ago I went in to the hospital and I go sometimes because I get really sick and just need to be taken to the emergency room for pain relief. When I’m there I see multiple doctors and nurses as I’m usually there overnight or all day and, because it’s a public hospital, the doctors or nurses come by whenever they can and check on me, prescribe me with something new and try everything they can to make me feel better. When a doctor comes in they usually do a test which is the typical stethoscope, light in the eyes, and trying to assess bodily reactions and so forth; all pretty straight forward.

 It seemed that day that there were two doctors on call, both male, but, one was white and one wasn’t. Throughout my stay at the hospital I would drift off to sleep and different nurses would wake me up to give me medicine periodically, similarly, every so often one of these two doctors would come and have a chat with me about what the next step should be for medication and how to make me feel better so that I could go home.

Now I don’t want it to sound bad, and I picked up on it while it was happening and was really kicking myself for it, but I just knew that when the white doctor gave me different options I seemed to trust his opinion over the other doctor.  It was strange, because they would come in at different times and I would be in a half sleep state but I just felt more comfortable agreeing with everything the white doctor offered me, whereas, the other doctor I listened more intently to and thought I needed to decide for myself if what was being offered was really right for me. (Since I wasn’t in any serious condition both doctors did offer similar remedies).

Did his white skin give him better qualifications? Apparently. 

 I started to think why this was? Am I inherently racist? Is this a trait that is ingrained in me? To trust the fact of a white man rather than someone of colour? As I myself am not white, is it because of that? That I was raised to believe that white people just know better? Or was it a more structural thing? Both these men had the same qualification, they were both working in the same hospital, and they looked similar aged, so why did they colour of their skin matter to me?

This tends to happen in many situations where I think people don’t even notice, such as where you choose to sit on the bus, or who you line up behind in the cinema. Small acts that come from these ingrained prejudices that have been consistently reinforced in society and the media, it is all from we’ve been exposed to throughout our lives. The Eurocentric world in which I live in, it is on a structural level and an institutional level and an individual level. Of course that’s no excuse, but I am aware of my initial reactions and can actively work on so that I don’t think this way.