It's about time — but it's a huge task.
to use race to determine diagnosis and medical protocols when treating infants with issues that ranged from urinary tract infections and jaundice. These guidelines lead to disparities in treatments, often to the detriment of the non-white infants receiving care., the AAP says they will continue to purge outdated medical guidelines, as “race is a historically derived social construct that has no place as a biologic proxy.
For context, phenotypic traits, or observable traits in an organism, such as skin color, were often used as justification by colonizers as they enslaved Africans, their descendants, and other people of color. This fueled even more research to support the continued colonization of the Americas, creating— depicted white people as superior.
And apparently, the AAP was still using guidelines written in 1930 that said Black infants were less likely to get UTIs, simply because that is the way it had been for so long.