Discussion board

My Mother, My Story

My curiosity with my own family health issues was infused by conversations with my mother throughout my childhood, adolescent, and adult years. One of her stories that would weigh heavy on her emotionally occurred when she was five years of age. One story revealed the impact of health disparities affecting her mother’s death because of legally sanctioned segregated medical care and the inability or extreme difficulty of African American’s securing emergency medical treatment in 1932.  These Jim Crow and segregated conditions would impact generations of our family and other families who struggled with pre-existing health conditions throughout the 20th century and well into the 21st century. Historically, African American’s have had less access to healthcare because of systemic and institutional social constructs that inhibit access to affordable care and state-of-the-art hospital treatment. Even when many of the institutional barriers preventing access were removed by law, the conscious and unconscious negative racial stereotypes ascribed to African American’s would sustain a misinformed bias that continues to impact clinical decision making by many professionals in the medical community.

It is this history of systemic and institutional racism combined with generational pre-existing health challenges that would be a catalyst to my curious journey of health. The seminal event that would galvanize my academic focus occurred during my college graduation when I learned of my mother’s growing health struggle with type-2 diabetes. She suffered what she would call ‘a diabetic attack’ shortly after my graduation ceremony. To ease my growing anxiety about her status, she jokingly said, ‘son I just want you to promise that you will take care of yourself’...you don’t want this. She continued with a more exacting tone, “I want you to promise me to eat right, don’t smoke, don’t drink excessively or at all, exercise and try to avoid hanging around crazy people that stress you out. Decades after her sage advice, I now find myself incorporating into my practice and research the key perspectives, which I believe address key health and social issues and that draw on a knowledge of beneficial strategies that enhance optimal health of generations to come within my own family and the racial/ethnic community that I identify.

Lessons Learned

What I learned early in my life is that my family’s history is foundational to my own history. I believe that the same is true when it comes to understanding the history of African Americans over the past 400 years in America. Consequently, the family and personal history my mother shared with me is one that was lived by her and in some ways by me too. I witnessed the impact of her family and personal health struggles and her memories of those of her parents and siblings and those who came before. I came to recognize that the combination of shared epigenomic history, social history, environmental factors, and health equity would influence and impact my generation and generations to come.