Doulas, doctors, nurses, and researchers recently descended on the campus of the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation to learn from each other how they can continue to identify the roots and extinguish the adverse impacts of institutional racism on Black and Brown women experiencing childbirth.
The summit, which celebrated its fifth year Sept.19-20, was hosted by the African American Babies Coalition and Projects (AABC), an initiative within the Wilder Foundation’s community impact division.
One of the highlights of this year’s summit was the participation of Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, an epidemiologist and family physician who is also a renowned leader in the theory of racism as a public health crisis. Dr. Jones held this notion long before the declaration took hold across the country following the murder of George Floyd.
“I came to this summit because this is a topic I care deeply about—I work in this space, and because Dr. Camara Jones was the keynote speaker,” said Abiola Abu-Bakr, a Nigerian-American doula and healthcare innovation consultant, on what moved her to attend the summit. “She has been a public health idol of mine and has set the foundations for the work I do today and the way I view the role of racism in health outcomes, not just how I view it but how I talk about it through the work that I do,”
Abu-Bakr also sent a message to those who couldn’t attend the summit: “Minnesota, specifically the Twin Cities, has a dynamic birth worker community. It feels so good to know that we have a dynamic conference here in the Twin Cities, and it brings together so many birth workers, people from hospital systems, and academics.
“It’s a range of people,” she added. “You just have to care about the topic to be involved. It’s not something that’s going to go over your head. If anything, you can build a community and walk away with opportunities and connections.”
The evening before the summit, Ruth Richardson, CEO of Planned Parenthood North Central States, hosted a fireside chat with Dr. Jones at the Vandalia Street location of the St. Paul Health Center.
AABC’s founder and director, Sameerah Bilal-Roby, commenced the informal and intimate gathering by posing an open-ended question about the difference between rhetoric and truth.
Healing, self-compassion, and safe spaces for Black youth and Black men were topics brought up within the overarching theme of naming what Black people need at this time. Richardson directed the group back to politics by reminding attendees to be mindful of connecting research, practice, and policy and to think about how we can collectively better measure our efforts to tackle structural racism.
On the summit’s first day, nearly every seat in the conference auditorium inside Wilder was full. The audience included attendees whose understanding of how racism functions in healthcare systems and its subsequent impact on maternal health of Black and brown people was in some form influenced by the work of Dr. Jones.
Dr. Jones’s keynote featured two of four notable allegories on race and racism. Jones’s allegories illustrate how racism operates through the story. The allegory of “The Gardner’s Tale” explains three levels of racism—institutionalized, personally mediated, and internalized. “A Restaurant Saga” encapsulates how racism is experienced by those who benefit from its structure and those who are oppressed by it—a dual reality. Dr. Jones hopes to one day publish her widely studied allegories as children’s books.
During the Community Health and Action Panel, Dr. Jaime Slaughter-Acey, epidemiologist and associate professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, discussed some of her research that uncovered threads between maternal health outcome differences as it relates to skin tone, finding that colorism factors in adverse experiences of dark-skinned birthing women.
In an afternoon session, Department of Health Commissioner Brooke Cunningham, in State of Mothers, Babies, and Families, candidly shared her fears about her birthing experience as a first-time mother years ago. As a Black woman and doctor, it was vital for her to know the call list of doctors who were scheduled to attend to her birth. In other words, she needed to identify who she knew would take good care of her. The underlying fear behind Cunningham’s story resonated with the crowd.
On Sept. 20, in Science, Health, and Community, Treatment Counselor Elder Sharyl WhiteHawk laid bare for attendees how maternal health care in hospital systems will continue to fail Black- and brown-birthing people if it continues to refuse community knowledge around quality and effective care.
Elder WhiteHawk said, “Indigenous knowledge has universal truths. Our women do better when they have their sisters, mothers, and aunties with them. We have science-based wisdom, but because it comes from the tribes, it’s not considered reliable.”
This year’s summit had 20 programs, including sessions, panels, and presentations.
To learn more about AABC, visit https://www.wilder.org/community-impact/african-american-babies-coalition-and-projects.