Black Health Is About More Than Medicine

Black Health is a nonprofit based out of Atlanta. We focus on the impact of racism on poor health outcomes for black folks, and we use anti-racist strategies to improve health equity for black communities. Our approach is very much grounded in critical race theory, and we also try to really center black cultures and black communities in our work, co-create programs and services with our community instead of only for them.

We also really try to focus on a strength space lens for health communications, and how we talk about and engage with our communities instead of only being focused on deficits. So things around black people do not do this correctly, like black people are not eating the right foods. You know, soul food is bad for you, or black people are not working out enough.

Like really our approach is about let’s zoom out and let’s look at the structures and the systems that are driving poor health outcomes, because it’s actually not about some kind of lack or issue within black culture itself. There are actually a lot of strengths within black culture that we can capitalize on, such as our communal nature, our strong family ties and bonds.

The fact that, you know, there are a lot of healthy foods that are in our culture. We like to gather, we like to listen to music. These are things that are actually health promoting behaviors. You know, protecting our mental health the way that we use art and creativity. So we were actually a part of the group in Georgia to just pass the first arts based mental health bill in Georgia.

Myself and three of my colleagues we founded. As for of us who founded blackout, we were all at school. We were at Emory, at Rollins School of Public Health, getting our masters of Public health degrees. And so while we were in school, we were learning about and seeing, you know, charts, graphs of all these statistics of these racialized health disparities rates, excuse me, rates of HIV.

You see black folks doing a lot worse. Cancer. When cancer is caught, it’s it’s caught it later stages where it’s harder to treat for black people. And so we’re learning all these statistics. And we felt like we really weren’t learning like on the other side of like what we should do about it. And still the kind of like interventions were a lot still focused for, in our opinion, on like a race neutral lens.

And so to see how okay, like the impact of of how this is operating is not race neutral, then that means our solutions also should not be race neutral. And at the same time, this was in 2016, you know, there was a resurgence in Black Lives Matter movement. A lot was going on at the time. And I mean, we were kind of in conversation with the Black Lives Matter movement in a spiritual sense.

We created these shirts that said Black Health Matters, and we were just wearing them around campus, and we wear them around Atlanta as well. And I mean, people would just stop us, like, what is that? Where are y’all doing? Can I join? And then people would like, share. I was at the doctor. The doctor wasn’t listening to me.

This happened, you know, like, they were, like, kind of telling us a lot of things that were going on just because we had these shirts on. And like I said at the time, like black folks were really activated around the country, you know, and so people, people seem to really get it. And like I said, then they were also really asking us like, what’s what’s behind this?

And so we kind of, you know, like pointed us in the direction of like, okay, there’s definitely a big need here, specifically around health and health care that our community is kind of asking to have filled. And since we are getting these degrees, that’s something that we should respond to. So as soon as we graduated, we form this organization and have been working on it ever since.

And ten years later, we are here. We are nationally. We worked mostly in Atlanta, but we do also work nationally across the United States, and we are international. We have a site in Johannesburg, South Africa. So all of our events we use, like we have mural painting, like collaborative murals, poetry, like we just bring in the things that like make black people happy and we infuse that with our health care work and promotion.

I mean, so there are a lot of health disparities. I mean, you can pretty much look across the board at any health issue, and you will see, statistics wise, on average, black communities are faring worse, one kind of more like global type statistic to describe that. It’s just life expectancy. Life expectancy for black people is much lower than for white folks.

And so you see these disparities across race, like I said, pretty much with any health issue. And so you also see it with things that are preventable, like with maternal health outcomes, a lot of maternal deaths are preventable. So the fact that there are so many more black women dying during and shortly after childbirth is really kind of revealing that there is there’s some racism at play.

You know, a lot of black birthing people speak about this not being heard, not being listened to when they are giving birth. And I think you also see that across the board with a lot of conditions. We are part of an initiative called the Advil Pain Equity Project that also talks about that, the hashtag Believe My Pain. We talk about how doctors are often not listening when black people say that they are in pain for different reasons, and that is driving these health disparities.

And so part of that initiative that we’re working on, we’ve created a curriculum for med students and other students in clinical health fields to better communicate with their patients, do some self-reflexive practices and exercises to identify their own biases, and then, like, work better with black patients and getting them the proper care that they need and the treatment that they need.

So we think it’s really important as well to intervene with health students, because this is our future health workforce, and so they need to be part of the solution.