Clinical trials done on black people, no black people on your health teams
Clinical trials done on black people, no black people on your health teams
If black people can be part of your research, we can be part of your staff
When I was offered a job to work in the Features department of my second newspaper job, I was intrigued. Food and Dining weren’t really my cup of tea, mainly because I’m not a foodie for anything but vegetarian recipes, but I immediately zoomed in on the Health section. I was moved around to other Features sections, but I was adamant about keeping the Health section even when a subsite was deleted. Ironically, I despised taking biology and chemistry classes in high school and undergrad, but I wanted everything to do with Health reporting and Health studies at my first newspaper job and this second one.
Sex education was my favorite one to cover as a speaker, reporter and volunteer (mainly due to hard-headed people who thought HIV/AIDS wasn’t real), and then came health studies for everything from Alzheimer’s to diabetes to sickle cell and psychology. I was fascinated by the industry. I created a Twitter page to keep track of any studies that were focused on African- and/or African-American participants. Too many studies that related to us kept getting buried on the page. Our readers were not predominantly black, but I wanted to bring attention to these posts for people in my own social circle.
However, there was one thing that started to rattle my patience. I was constantly getting tagged and emailed about patient trials on African- or African-American people to spread the word. But when I would go to these same research sights, I didn’t see one spot of melanin in the leadership team, in the partnership team, on the board and definitely not on the staff as a health care professional. As a health care reporter, I could easily fix that and start trying to find health care professionals in psychology, psychiatry, nursing, gynecology and general practice.
However, when just looking for general news that I didn’t write, I too often found that the same people who wanted to dissect black health had no interest in black employment. I could find Waldo before I could find a health care professional who would fall under the “people of color” umbrella. I honestly don’t recall ever having someone Puerto Rican, Mexican, Dominican, etc. ever contacting me about trial studies. And I damn sure haven’t heard from any Natives. Black health care professionals were touch-and-go and usually required some digging. Come to think of it, my memory is cloudy on Asians. But white people studying black people? I got countless requests for those.