People Might Think ‘She's Difficult’: How Race and Emotion Shape Patient Advocacy

• In Event: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Emotions

Abstract

Shared decision-making and patient-centered care have become ‘best practices’ and key aspirations for practitioners in patient-provider interactions. At the same time, recent research considers how emotions are involved in medical decision-making with some scholars arguing that both providers and patients leverage emotions in patient-provider interactions to sway the resulting medical decisions. These conversations on emotions and shared decision-making suggest that there are power differentials at play, like race, class and gender, that may shape the patient-provider interaction and sway resulting medical decisions. Bridging the literature on medical shared decision-making and racialized emotions, I argue that what I call affective burdens or racialized rules for emotional comportment and behavior imbedded in white institutions like healthcare, constrain the advocacy of Black patients for desired healthcare. I demonstrate this phenomenon using data from 15 months of ethnographic observations on a hospital maternity ward and 47 interviews with Black women who recently gave birth. The concept of affective burdens contributes to the burgeoning conversation on emotions in medical interactions and the existing conversation on racial health disparities as it describes another type of mechanism that contributes to the perpetuation of racial health and healthcare disparities.

Author

• Patrice C. Wright, Howard University