Discriminatory systems fuel inequity, limit opportunity
and imperil the lives, health and well-being of communities of color.
These prize-winners are working to remove barriers and create fair
and just opportunity for all.
Systemic racism in Alaska is really profound.
We still have to deal with racism today.
A lot of people, they don't think that we should have our culture,
and we should not worry about any of the things
that have happened to us and our people.
Really to know who we are today
we have to look back at our history to really assess
what our people have experienced over the last 100 years.
Chickaloon Native Village was subject to a lot of coal mining in the area,
and there is a legacy of trauma as a result of that.
The coal mining activities disrupted the salmon habitat.
So Chickaloon went in and put that back into its natural alignment,
so that the salmon could become prolific in the hopes of providing food
security for our tribe.
Sovereignty is important to us
because it's one of our basic fundamental human rights.
The things that I admire most about the Chickaloon
tribe is their tenacity and advocacy for their communities.
They make things happen.
The (Ahtna name) Life house
(Ahtna name) Community Health Center is really a place for everyone.
It's not just the Alaska Native population that they're impacting here.
They're working with all the non-Native folks that live in our communities.
I can't imagine my neighbor not having healthcare when I can go get healthcare.
It is my ultimate hope that someday our children,
my daughter, doesn't have to experience any racism
and doesn't have to take on the legacy
of this work. That it's done.
That we've achieved equity within our community. That ultimate care
and love -- a beloved community that we built for our children.
Inequities are not created by mistake,
they're created by institutions who predate on those
who are not able to/advocate for themselves.
In Rocky Mount there's been a long standing pattern
of investment where one side of town, the Nash side.
The White side of town has flourished at the expense
of the Black side of town, or the Edgecombe side of town.
You can walk and see it, it's not hard when you stand on the railroad tracks,
it is a reminder of what happened when you put one less than and one greater than.
That history is now being lifted up
so we can recover from those past traumas that we went through.
One of the examples of how the city has addressed the legacy
of structural racism is the construction of the downtown Event Center.
With that said, we were very intentional about saying we need a project
that would begin changing the course of investment,
to reroute it to downtown and to Edgecombe County.
By the time the Event Center was built,
the rate of tax revenue generated for the first time
in history in Edgecombe County was higher than in Nash County.
It's going to be intergenerational to accomplish the changes
we are talking about.
We have to continue to press through the challenges
and let our resilience the the end of our story.
Racism is a public health crisis.
We’re talking about how do we address structural and systemic racism
that perpetuates, sometimes unintentionally, inequities
for some of our residents?
During the pandemic, we found out that
early on, majority of the people
who are aware of the social distancing, testing and vaccination -
majority of those folks are in the white population.
We need everybody, people who are Latino, people
who are Black, to be sitting at the table to be able to have their voices heard
and we need others to listen to their voices being heard.
A lot of the work's been uncomfortable, it's been challenging.
It's been a space in which it's gotten heated at times,
as we talk about what those things look like.
As a refugee, I cannot see through the lens of wealthy people. And wealthy people cannot see
Through the lens of people who don't have.
Often times when talking about racial equity, immigration
has a lot of racism embedded in it.
One of the things that we're working on here at the Coalition of Healthy
Greater Worcester, is being able to train and establish
those within our coalition to be in those conversations.
When we talk about these things, there's emotion tied to it,
and it's hard to separate those, and it takes really, really skilled
facilitators and individuals,
and we have those here in the city to be able to hold those conversations.
We haven't been able to come to a perfect solution.
But the fact that we get together, we talk,
and we keep trying, it help us to move forward.