exploring structural racism and gender inequality
reflections for Black History Month
As a charity that focuses on health inequality, our projects tend to include a component of health literacy within sessions, including a space to explore and discuss the shared experiences of women’s health.
In our most recent menopause sharing circle, we encountered many stories of women whose menopause or perimenopause experience had been misdiagnosed by predominately young, male doctors, who themselves had been trained in a system that only in the 1990s started to consider the unmet needs and research gaps in women’s health.
Misogynistic and simplistic explanations of women’s lived experience of health and wellbeing are common in the narratives that we hear around The Bridge. Indeed, these are not new in the history of biomedicine. We only have to look back to the Victorian era, where male doctors believed ‘hysteria’ was caused by an “overstimulation of the mind which women could not tolerate because they did not have the capacity to”, to understand that diagnoses have long been used as a tool to control women’s behaviour and bodies.
However, the sharing circle also brought to our attention how the appeal to communicate and fight against what all women experience in common (sexism) can also erase the intersecting disadvantages that some women experience more than others.
What happens when being a woman is only one aspect of a whole range of intersecting identities?
In our health literacy discussions, we were joined by women of African, Asian and Latin-American descent. Their stories included accounts of unfair, sometimes overt, sometimes subtle, discriminatory practices and inequities in the health system, which shed light on the extra layers of disadvantage that non-white woman face. It is not just that the doctor misdiagnosing you is a young male doctor, but that he is often also white and unaware of the effects that broader historical and contemporary systems of oppression – namely racism – have on health.
Racism, rooted in Britain’s colonial history of large-scale involvement in the enslavement of African people and the transatlantic slave trade, has passed down through generations impacting the development of purportedly ‘colour-blind’ policies that do not explicitly mention race but bear racist intent or consequences, or both.
Statistics show that black people and people of colour have worse outcomes, including higher rates of preventable death than white people, across many fields of medicine and a variety of illnesses. For example, Rianna Walcott, in The Colour of Madness, has written about the barriers that Black people face when accessing mental health care, and about how they experience poorer treatment and outcomes when they interact with mental health services.
At The Bridge, when working towards our vision: a world where women are empowered to live positive healthy lives, we are now, more than ever, acknowledging the intersecting inequalities and systems of oppression that some women experience more than others. And whilst we continue to think carefully about what this entails for our charitable programmes, we have started looking to the relationships, power dynamics and underlying ways of thinking (such as racism and gender biases) that are embedded in the systems in which we work. Acknowledging structural inequalities that affect health and wellbeing, also means recognising that the same water flows within the organisation’s history and structure. To bring down structural inequalities also means critically engaging with our own internal policies, practices and resources.
books and articles by black women writers that The Bridge team recommend:
Your silence will not protect you – Audre Lorde
Girl, Women, Other – Bernardine Evaristo
The Colour of Madness – Rianna Walcott
Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche