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What does it mean to live in a well lived life? Some may define it as where one’s living necessities are met. Others may put value on relationships between other sentient beings. How does such a multitude of social injustices and poor living conditions exist within a country that claims to promote equality for all people? A common expression is that America is a melting pot. In truth, America is a melting pot of discrimination and injustice. For example, African Americans, who are 13% of the population and 14% of drug users, are not only 37% of the people arrested for drugs but 56% of the people in state prisons for drug offenses. Institutional racism is a vital factor that permeates numerous injustices throughout our society. Institutional racism refers to specific policies and/or institutions which consistently result in unequal treatment for particular groups. I argue that institutional racism constitutes an injustice and through using Rawls theory, the veil of ignorance, institutional racism can be rectified.

I argue that institutional racism constitutes an injustice. One example is, African Americans, who are 13% of the population and 14% of drug users, are not only 37% of the people arrested for drugs but 56% of the people in state prisons for drug offenses. Another example is that with the high rate of gunshot victims in the south side of Chicago, there are not enough trauma centers to treat victims and the one facility that has the capacity to do so ignores such wounds. Referring back to the first example, the rights and liberties of citizens are not distributed equally. This is not the egalitarian society that Rawls proposes in his theories. With these statistics, it is clear that different ethnicities rights are le...

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... person, the rights to vote, to hold public office, to be treated in accordance with the rule of law, and so on. The principle ascribes these rights and liberties to all citizens equally.” Consequently, this means that our institutions are not giving equal treatment to others. Teleologically, it gets away from the main purpose of medicine itself which is to help and save people. We are placing the value of money over the value of human life. This is the wrong at stake here. We are dehumanizing people. Furthermore, since”leaving one's society is not a realistic option for most people” we have created a society that habituates institutional racism. We isolate communities to create habitual social problems that consist of drugs, violence, and a plethora of other ones. This is the moral context that is at stake when we discuss the fundamentals of institutional racism.

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