Whether we are referring to maternal death, preterm birth, incarceration, education, all of our outcomes are a reality of White oppression and anti-Blackness. If you don't control any of your circumstances from the creation of the culture into the present, there can't be any other outcome.
Dante King
Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Implicit Bias Specialist
Watch the full event recording on our Facebook Page.
Title photos are from Dante King's presentation. Rooted in Enslavement is the first of a three-part Collaboratory series called Kente Collaboratories on the past, present and future of Blackness in American medicine and healthcare. Join us on March 24th for part 2, Healing, Resistance and Solidarity: The Power of Black Healthcare Practitioners, Policy Development and Health Justice Collaboration.
Speaker Dante King, an Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Implicit Bias Specialist is known for his whirlwind, interactive, multi-day racial equity workshops during which he, decade by decade, strings together the dark legacy of anti-Blackness embedded into the United States' legal system. For our February Collaboratory, in celebration of Black History Month, we were honored to have King share an abridged version of his workshop with our community, focusing on how American medicine and healthcare were built upon the torture and abuse of Black bodies.
With over 150 attendees joining either in person or remotely, the event began with Daphina Melbourne, PTBi's Community Engagement Specialist, introducing the evening's topic. She explained that "When we talk about our ancestors we do not call them slaves, we call them enslaved because we know that the breadth of who they were was so much more than being someone's property."
Afterward, Marlee-I Mystic, a wholistic spiritual practitioner blessed the space by pouring libations, a traditional ritual of pouring liquid or grains as an offering to a deity which is found in her African heritage. During the ritual, Marlee-I read off the names of women who were experimented on in the name of medicine as well as other Black community members who had been abused or murdered. She also let audience members understand that the content of the event may be triggering for some and that she was a supportive resource if anyone should need her.
To begin, King explained to the crowd that the American legal system was built on racism, noting that this institutionalized racism "incentivizes one race based on skin color over another, which has been happening for 358 years explicitly at a local, state and federal context. There can never be any such thing as Whiteness without Blackness." King also explained that, "Anti-Blackness is the root of my work and is the foundational principle of racism in the US context. All other forms of racism really extrapolate and derive from anti-Black racism."
To demonstrate this truth, King shared the historical evidence, touching on institutionalized state and federal laws that encouraged the commodification, brutalization, and dehumanization of Black bodies. For example, King educated the audience on the dramatic impact of the 1669 law, Casual Killing Act, which made killing enslaved Blacks legal, normal and moral in White minds.
King went on to examine how medical professionals capitalized on the commodification of Black bodies throughout American history to advance their own research and medical agendas. King profiled James Marion Sims, who is referenced as "the father of gynecology." Sims is documented to have bought eleven Black women to keep in his laboratory to experiment on without anesthesia.
King encouraged the audience to process the impact of such a legacy by saying, "When does this thought process ever end? It doesn't matter because the underlying principle of my work is that these laws shape the foundation for what culture would become. If I come to the US as an immigrant, I become very sensitized to the culture. It is a context where everything White becomes normal and valuable, while culturally socializing people to be anti-Black."
He also said, "Whether we are referring to maternal death, preterm birth, incarceration, education, all of our outcomes are a reality of White oppression and anti-Blackness. If you don't control any of your circumstances from the creation of the culture into the present, there can't be any other outcome."
To close the event, King played Nathan Bean's #BlackLivesMatter edition of Lauren Hill's Black Rage and encouraged audience members to take care of themselves. Daphina shared the event's last remarks stating that "If you are a Black person or person of color, yes, this is your reality and it is ok to be angry. If you are a White person and you are angry, then that is a good place to be because we cannot upend this system by ourselves because it was not created by us. We need everyone at the table."
RSVP for Part 2 of the Kente Collaboratory series!
Kente Collaboratories
The Kente Collaboratories is a 3 part series on the past, present and future of Blackness in American medicine and healthcare.
The Kente cloth has long been representative of belonging to the African Diaspora, especially in the United States, for those who have had their genealogy and familial ties broken through the process of enslavement in the Americas.
The goal in using the Kente cloth as a representation of the series is to highlight the unity between those born of African American and African parentage building a bridge between African Americans, and others from the African Diaspora who consistently work within and fight for equity and respect in healthcare.
Given that UCSF is an institution of higher learning and known for being a world-class healthcare provider, we will focus on the Medical Industrial Complex impact and influence in the following three areas, past, present, and future of healthcare at UCSF and the larger Black Community.
