Transcriber: Sadly I'm Not Jimmy Page Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Being Black in Canada is making me sick.
Now, immediately, about 25% of you shut down and tuned out.
Either you thought this was irrelevant to you as soon as you heard the word Black
or “Not this again, she must be some type of militant.”
So let me offer you something more palatable.
Times have been tough, and together we can get through it.
Much better wasn’t that?.
This is what I as a Black woman do constantly -
sanitize the story to present the more tolerable pleasant zone.
And I’m here to tell you that this type of forced assimilation make people sick -
literally physically and mentally ill.
So allow me to reintroduce myself.
My name is Joi - Lydia-Joi Louise Marshall,
proud daughter of the African diaspora
by way of parents from Barbados and Bahamas.
My work focuses on health disparities
and people who have been marginalized by the social construct of race.
My graduate work was in human genetics,
and I continue to study what makes us unique
and how to maximize these differences.
As president of the board of directors of the Black Health Alliance,
I lobby decision makers to enact policies
that have equitable treatment for all people,
and I empower communities to advocate for their rights
within the health care system.
Now, racism is one of the social determinants that make us sick.
This manifests in some pretty significant ways
with us taking a day-to-day toll to combat it
and suppressing our experiences within the midst of it.
For example,
people of Caribbean, West African, and East African descent in Ontario
experience a 60% increased risk of psychosis.
Black people have higher rates of kidney failure,
yet are 50 to 70% less likely to receive a living organ donation.
This means we die more.
And currently, we’re seeing about a nine-fold higher rate
of COVID 19 in Black people compared to their neighbors.
Now, how are these disparities reinforced within health care?
Well, Black bodies are not routinely included in research,
which means we don’t know what differences do exist.
White bodies are often counted as the default,
which means that diagnosis cross-culturally can be difficult.
I’ve still seen dermatology textbooks that describe healthy skin as being pink,
and often healthcare presumes that Black people have higher pain tolerance.
This means that our chronic illnesses are misdiagnosed or worse;
our cries for pain relief are accused of being drug-seeking habits.
Now, if any of this information is surprising to you,
it may be because you have the privilege of never having had to experience it.
Every day in our society, one narrative is reinforced as normal,
and when that’s not you, you feel it.
Take my 18-year-old self, for example,
entering Western’s campus ready for my freshman experience.
I soon realized this did not apply to me as I walked into a poster
for an invitation to a lecture on the virtues of white women,
proudly hosted by a local white supremacist group.
Was this some type of academic irony?
Unfortunately, my undergrad was peppered with such experiences -
having racial slurs written on our Black Students Association locker,
having police accuse us of trespassing on our own campus,
or having a skinhead order me to get his groceries while shopping.
I felt nauseous.
The Pepto-Bismol for me was heading to Howard University in Washington, DC.
“HU” - the Mecca.
Now for those of you who don’t know, Howard was founded in 1867
and remains one of the most prominent historically Black colleges
in North America.
Walking the yard at Howard was like putting on a superhero cape
and having the ancestors confer their knowledge on me.
I felt the lightness of being in the majority
of having my identity and my failures be my own.
I had the privilege of studying in a place built
to be supportive of and not hostile to my experiences, my history.
The nausea subsided,
and as I proudly walked out of my graduation with my degree,
they charged us to pick up the mantle of change, and I took this to heart.
This privilege would soon end
when I was back in my first interview back in Toronto
as a white physician turned over my CV, sweetly leaned in, and said,
“I know you came in for this research position,
but I don't know what it is about you.
You just have this presence that makes me feel like you should be my assistant
or some type of patient guide.”
As I suppressed what I really wanted to say and said nothing,
the nausea returned.
My CV said superhero; had she missed that?
Years later, now much deeper in the health care system,
things would actually get much worse.
A frustrated director in a meeting said to us:
he didn’t care how we felt - he owned us.
I mean, he did apologize a few days later when he learned that this was offensive,
but this triggering experience pushed me past nausea to physically vomiting.
Every day in our society, one narrative is reinforced as normal,
and when that’s not you, you feel it.
This is why I do the work that I do with the Black Health Alliance.
Clinical negligence and diseased social interactions make people sick.
Black people are constantly having an internal dialogue to combat this.
They ask themselves questions like: “Will it make a difference if I speak up?
Am I willing to lose my job today if I do?”
And what I especially see with my work with health care is:
“If I call out my discomfort, will it impact my treatment?”
And last year, we experienced the dual pandemics of COVID-19
and the global witnessing of anti-Black racism
with a lynching of a Black man named George Floyd.
Now, as the world watched George Floyd being murdered,
I also had to have the horrible pain of having my six-year-old son ask me
why that officer’s foot was on that man’s neck.
I had no answer.
Black people’s communal trauma is put on repeat each time we are asked
to ease the public discomfort with this and countless other events.
You might think that because I work in health care
there’s a specialized solve for this.
Now, while it’s important that we routinely correct
the segregated, race-based data
and have clinically and culturally competent guides
and diverse representation at every level,
there’s no easy prescription.
Just like COVID-19, racism has infected every part of our society,
and we must have a collective solution to solve it
because just like COVID 19,
your health, my health, all our health depends on one another.
So what can you do?
Well, first of all, check yourself.
Being woke does not mean that you’re not part of the problem.
You may be still reinforcing negative stereotypes.
You may be not calling out inequitable power dynamics.
You may not normalize or even recognize experiences
that are different than your own.
For example, the Caribbean is not a vacation spot for me - that’s my family.
Normally, healthy Black skin does not look pink.
And if you overhear my playlist, especially on a rough day,
you may be surprised that this “academic articulate”
listens to music considered
even much more ratchet than the most earliest Jay-Z.
Think about the ways
in which your thoughts, your speech, your behavior, oppress other people.
Acknowledge this current reality so that it can be changed.
Times have been tough, and together we can get through it
if you recognize that being Black in Canada
is making me and many others sick and it needs to be treated today.
Esta.