Why don't more BIPOC people sign up to be donors (bone marrow, etc)

Question

I read that if you are white you have over a 75% chance of being matched to the list. 
But that if you are black you only have a 20 something percent shot. 
And its i think lower for asains.
Why don't more BIPOC sign up to be donors? And what can be done to encourage them?

Accepted Answer

I haven’t looked at any research on this, but my guess is historic and continuing abuses by the medical community towards PoC. If doctors falsely believed I experienced less pain for racist reasons, I wouldn’t be quick to fuck with them either.
Change has to come not from within. Our doctors, nurses, and others in the medical field need to be better.

Answer

Black people historically don’t trust medical professionals. So specifically for black people not much can be done because everything will be deemed suspicious to us… I mean racism plays a huge part in all of it. Doctors being dismissive etc.

Answer

Tuskegee experiments on black men, forced hysterectomies on women of color, the dismiss of black people pain by doctors, doctors not providing the proper medicine or treatment for people of color, Henrietta Lacks, the use of black bodies as experiments and science projects for the "development of science", the foundation of certain scientific theories are founded in racist ideologies that black people are inferior and the brain size of an African american is smaller than a white american, the psychological diagnosis of drapetomania, in which it was considered a mental illness and people of color were labeled as "crazy" for trying to escape from their slave master. Im not surprised that BIPOC are donors

Answer

Many people have mentioned the history here, and there are other factors as well such the number of head of household families where the adult simply cannot take months to recover from a donation. 
But there is something else going on.  According to a report from HHS based on 2019 organ donation numbers (excluding bone marrow), "While 28.7 percent of the total candidates currently waiting for transplants are Black/African Americans, they comprised 12.5 percent of organ donors in 2019."
So, 12.5% of organ donors are black. The same report mentions that black people made up 12.7% of the population in 2018.  So that doesn't seem to be a huge disparity. Let's check the numbers for white people. According to the same HHS report, 67.8% of all organ donors were white.  And yet, 76.3% of the population is white. 
So, I'm not sure it's an issue so much of black people not willing to donate as it is that a disproportionate number of black people need organ transplants.  Perhaps we should be looking more at why that is.

Answer

Medical racism is a real thing, and BIPOC communities have been victimized by it for generations. That type of trauma doesn’t just go away. If I’d been victimized by the medical community, I’d hesitate to be a donor as well.

Answer

Because of racism

Answer

Because it wasn’t mentioned, while people are generally just white genetically. People of mixed race have very slim chances of being matched because their genetics are quite unique. Say a person is black, but their great grandmother was Haitian and white, their great grandfather was Nigerian. Both black yes but different ancestral lines. Same with Asian people. Their genetic matches will be extremely difficult to find. However most white people, their lines can be traced to a specific area like England or Germany for generations and generations. Easier to find similar people.

Answer

I have family who work at various hospital's and they told me that bone marrow donation is painful. It's not as easy as giving blood and many people don't even do that.

Answer

Besides what everyone else has said, because they don’t want to and they don’t have to. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Answer

Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington is a great start for anyone interested to dig deeply into the history of Black fear/distrust towards healthcare in the US. 
I wish I had known and read it before I ever started practicing as a white health care provider.

Why don't more BIPOC people sign up to be donors (bone marrow, etc)

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