People are ‘about 20%’ responsible for own health while ‘structural racism’ is biggest factor: MSNBC guest

Individuals are only “about 20%” responsible for their own relative healthiness, while “structural racism” such as the legacy of slavery make up the majority of what affects a person’s well-being, according to an MSNBC guest.

Uché Blackstock made the comment during a segment on L. Ebony Boulware’s recently-published study on the “strong link between racism and chronic poor health conditions for black and brown communities in America.”

“I think so often we think about health as individual choices that patients make,” Blackstock told Charles Coleman Jr., who was filling in for show host Ali Velshi on MSNBC on Saturday.

“And instead, we really need to understand how practices and policies, you know, the legacy of slavery, the legacy of Jim Crow, current-day systemic racism impacts the health of our communities,” she added during the interview, which was earlier reported on by Mediaite.

Blackstock — a physician who founded healthcare advocacy group Advancing Health Equity and is set to release a memoir titled “Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine” next month — was referring to Jim Crow laws, which until the 1960s had legalized racial segregation by many state and local governments.

Blackstock continued: “Individuals are only responsible for about 20% of what makes them healthy. The other 80% are these systemic factors that Dr. Boulware and her colleagues studied in this very, very important research.”

Blackstock — who previously worked as an associate professor at NYU Langone Health’s Department of Emergency Medicine according to her LinkedIn page — added that “because of discriminatory housing policies and other racist practices, we are seeing what we’re seeing now in terms of these high burdens of chronic disease in our communities.”

She added that such factors have the “highest and most significant impact” on health rather than individual choices or particular instances of medical prescription or care, pointing specifically to upticks in “diabetes, high blood pressure, chronic kidney disease, essentially it’s killing us.”

Representatives for Blackstock at Advancing Health Equity did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.

Viewers, however, didn’t appear to agree with Blackstock’s comments.

“You are responsible for your own outcomes. Never forget it,” one user commented on MSNBC’s YouTube video of the controversial segment, which has garnered over 10,000 views in the two days since it’s been posted.

Another bashed Blackstock’s comments as part of a “systematic…victimhood culture.”

“People need to do their fair share and take ‘personal responsibility ‘ for their own bad health habits and addictions, so they don’t drain resources away from those who need it, especially in today’s economy,” the same user added.

“Responsible people do not wait for someone to give or provide. Lazy people do,” yet another user chirped in the comments section.

Over on X, a viewer bashed Blackstock’s input as “lunacy.”

“This is CRT-inspired garbage,” another posted in reference to Critical Race Theory, which looks at how American racism has shaped public policy.

“Why not tell the community to stop eating fast food first, also start drinking more water,” another wrote on X.

Meanwhile, the American Medical Association, the largest council of doctors in the US, cited “racist exclusion” over the summer as to why it revised the role of body mass index (BMI) as a measure in medicine.

BMI — which physicians have used to measure body fatness and predict obesity-related health risks for 200 years — is “indirect and imperfect” due to its historically harmful use for “racist exclusion,” per a policy from the AMA’s Council on Science & Public Health issued in June.

The report found that “BMI does not appropriately represent racial and ethnic minorities” because it’s based on “the imagined ideal Caucasian” of the 19th century, without considering a person’s gender or ethnicity.