Harvard University held the first-ever “Black Health Matters” conference last weekend, which consisted of panels and workshops focused on health disparities in the black community.
According to the event’s website, conference goers were to gain “an understanding of how to develop interdisciplinary approaches to addressing health issues within the Black Community.” Adding that the conference served as an opportunity for “students and speakers from across the country to explore how past and present sociopolitical climates have impacted the health of Black communities.”
Saturday’s focus was the statistical differences in health outcomes between black and white Americans, while Sunday’s workshops revolved around options for effecting change. Reportedly one of the most well-attended panels was “ZIP Code vs. Genetic Code: Social Determinants of Health” where panelists discussed the impact of racially-segregated neighborhoods on residents’ health.
“Structural racism is not an accident,” Dr. Joan Reede, the President of Harvard Medical School’s Biomedical Science Careers Program, told to an audience of close to 200 people last Saturday.
Linda Bishop Hudson, a graduate of the Harvard School of Public Health who attended the conference, showed up to learn more about the roadblocks that prevent Black people from getting into the business of healthcare research.
Conference co-director Tania Fabo explained the unorthodox conference in further detail.
“As an interdisciplinary conference, we are focusing on how health disparities can be addressed across sectors, whether that is using the legal system as a tool to fight modern mechanisms of oppression, improving health literacy and education among Black youths, or recognizing the harmful bias against Black patients that exists in the medical community,” she said.
“When we came up with the idea for the event we didn’t want people coming and learning and leaving with nothing,” Fabo told The Crimson. “You leave with these frustrations but you don’t have a mechanism to put these frustrations into action.”
The conference, with a name similar to the well-known Black Lives Matter movement, has no apparent relation to the group.
Isaiah Denby is a college freshman from Tampa Bay, Florida studying economics and political science.
