VCU Libraries launches social justice lecture series

GABRIELA DE CAMARGO GONÇALVES Managing Editor

BHAVYA PULUGUJJU Contributing Writer

VCU Libraries launched its annual social justice lecture series last week with an inaugural speech on racial disparities in health care by journalist, author, editor and educator Linda Villarosa.

The social justice series consists of one annual lecture; there are also lecture series that have been around for decades that the library sponsors, according to Irene Herold, VCU dean of libraries, university librarian and series organizer.

“As always, I hope that they [attendees] come and listen and critically think about the content and carry away — whether it’s new knowledge or just furthering their knowledge and ability to think about these issues,” Herold said.

Health disparities is an important topic for the current climate, along with the exasperation of marginalized communities and underrepresented minorities’ treatment in healthcare, Herold said. Richmond is “the perfect spot” to raise these issues and engage in dialogue looking at the city’s history, according to Herold.

A Black woman with an advanced degree, such as a master’s degree, is more likely to die or almost die than a white woman with an eighth-grade education, according to Villarosa.

“We cannot blame our poor health outcomes, as a country, and our inequality racial inequality only on poverty. It’s not only about race. It’s not only about poverty,” Villarosa said. “It’s got to also be a question of discrimination and racism both in society and in the healthcare system itself.”

Villarosa’s lecture went along with her 2022 book “Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation.”

“Even as science races to confront COVID-19 and other diseases, racism in society and medicine is a more difficult virus to kill,” Villarosa said during the lecture.

Throughout the course of history, physicians like J. Marion Sims played a large role in uncovering the injustice faced by African Americans, according to Villarosa. Sims was a doctor, known as the father of gynecology, but better known for doing inhumane experiments on African American women.

It is a stereotype that African American people may have the greatest pain tolerance, which was used to justify inconceivable cruelty during the enslaved times, according to Villarosa.

“Difference means inferiority in this country, so when you’re using a genetic explanation, it turns it into something that is different or wrong about a black body, which is causing these health disparities,” Villarosa said.

Villarosa went on to explain how trained Black medical professionals are not taken seriously in the United States. According to her, Fatima Cody Stanford, a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital and instructor at Harvard Medical School, was on a plane from Indianapolis to Boston when she noticed a passenger in distress. In the process of assisting her, she got asked by a flight attendant if she was actually a doctor.

“The one thing that I latched onto is when the activist Audre Lorde, the writer, and brilliant person before she passed away, I asked her naively ‘Is racism going away?’ And she said ‘when it goes out, it goes out ugly,’” Villarosa said during her lecture.