Solidarity and hope
October 13, 2022
Did you notice it too? This week's powerful calendrical confluences?
The final week of National Hispanic Heritage Month plus Indigenous Peoples Day. Then National Coming Out Day -- and the associated Solidarity Sunday. Add the International Day of the Girl, and it was still just Tuesday.
The intersections of these and other identities were on my mind that morning at the Greater Cincinnati YMCA's annual Racial Justice Breakfast.
Keeping with the organization's mission, Dr. Dorothy Roberts of the University of Pennsylvania delivered a powerful address documenting the enduring effects of anti-Black racism on American health care and the health of African-American women. Drawing on her own extensive research, she surprised even those of us who thought we knew a bit about the topic already.
The Tuskegee study, Henrietta Lacks, racial disparities in maternal mortality and other health outcomes, and the social determinants of health: these were all familiar.
But the gasps around the room of more than 600 people on Tuesday suggest that I was not alone in my shock to learn that some health protocols still use different scales for African American patients. Treatment choices for heart and kidney failure, breast cancer and other conditions still (or until recently) assume race-based differences that lack biological evidence -- but instead reflect an unbroken tradition to 19th-century racist medical beliefs.
I have so much more to learn. But my anger and surprise on Tuesday coalesced into a few thoughts, including hopeful ones.
I was heartened, for example, to consider the Xavier students -- many of them future medical professionals -- in Dr. Kayla Wheeler's classes on Medical Racism this semester. To remember the work and values of Xavier's Center for Population Health. And the many others across campus committed to justice and to dismantling structural racism.
But I also took encouragement from the reminder that, despite all the remaining injustice, we at Xavier are hardly alone in this work -- even within our own community. A ballroom full of people on Tuesday represented not just the YWCA, but many other institutions, groups, faith communities, and individuals who share the same commitments and have their own intersectional identities.
In that room, I felt the consolation of solidarity.
Recent Xavier graduates and other young people there inspired hope (and, admittedly, even a measure of pride in them). Then Avondale's longtime community leader Ozie Davis surprised me with his heartfelt plea to "keep loving as you work to eliminate racism."
Together? They took my breath away and sustained my hope.
