It is our destiny to fight

Health Secretaria

Over the past 40 years Public Health has been the cornerstone in the fight for racial equity and freedom in the US. During the late 1960s the Black Panther Party was able to distinguish itself through out the black community by sponsoring research on sickle cell which effects black communities in particular. Among the strongest legacies of the Party was the fact it pushed sickle cell into Public Heath discourse where it had not been researched because it effected blacks. Early in this century Proposition 54 in California threatened to eliminate all racial data in “hopes” of making a colorblind society. One of the wedge issues with regard to this debate on the efficacy of this law was how the elimination of racial data might negatively impact the ability of medical/ Public Health research. Even whites who might otherwise supported colorblind policies voted against this law because it might negatively impact their health.
In Brazil a similar phenomenon is occurring but with deeper implications. Today we met with Joice Aragao who is a National Coordinator in the Public Health Ministry in Brazil. In our meeting she discussed how sickle cell (for falsiform disease) is only now being researched and discussed in Brazil. She discussed how the ideology of racial democracy made if difficult to do race conscious Public Health research because it was considered bad form to categorize according to race. Further she argued that her generation of race conscious black doctors helped and continues to push the dialogue on race by showing how race consciousness is helpful and in some cases vital to good Public Health research, in general, and black empowerment, specifically.
However her story means something different and profound in a country like Brazil where blacks are struggling to find a unified identity. This story shows how race is not simply something that is socially constructed and therefore not worthy of attention. This story can be a vehicle through which Afro Brazilians can find a common thread that links them to each other. Now instead of arguing that race is just a skin color Afro Brazilians can say that this disease impacts “us” and therefore “we” need to struggle together to fix it.