So, what if you had the opportunity to pick your parents? I know it sounds insane, but just think about it. What are the characteristics? What are the determinants? What would you outline?
that would create this beautiful family for you. Things like income, ethnicity, you know, what part of the country, education, maybe they should be college educated, because those things make a big difference. You know, one of the myths of health care...
is that it is about what's happening at the hospital. But it's not about the hospital and the doctor's offices and the clinics. It is about those things that really directly affect your quality of life, like those things you just thought about in you choosing your parents.
So what would you choose? Would you say... I want to live in a certain part of the country.
Would you say I want to be white in America? Would you say I only want to be Christian? Some people would say that. Those things are called social determinants of health.
They tell us about our quality of life daily. They tell us about our life expectancy. So I wonder how many people who is hearing this would raise their hand to say, I'll be black.
So what's wrong with being black? I mean, I'm black. I grew up in... Williamsburg County in South Carolina. It's the poorest county in South Carolina, and South Carolina is already at the bottom.
My parents, I did have both of my parents in the household, which was fabulous. My dad, I guess, went to about third grade because he was a farmer, and my mother did finish high school, which was phenomenal. for kids in Williamsburg County. One of the things they taught me was that it's very, very important to focus on education.
But even beyond that, it's not just education, it's the whole support system within a community. You need a village to raise a child. You need love and support to raise a child.
And it's hard to do that when there are certain kids that are disadvantaged, that are forgotten, that are ignored, that are set aside because of one aspect. They didn't even pick it. I mean, who decides?
You just come and you're here. We're one big family. When you take away all of this, we're all connected. We're all one big community.
So how does all of this affect health? If you're living in some of these red line areas and... Redlining is something we set up.
We decided that everybody could not live together. Certain people needed to live here and other people needed to live over here. And then those people who lived over here, the schools weren't as good. Maybe there was health care.
There was chemical plants, the water systems. parks and recreation. So how do we decide to equalize all of these things?
Because these things do determine. your quality of life, and your life expectancy. 1964, civil rights.
I was born in 69, so not so far away. I'm 51 years old. We're still trying to figure out this whole thing with civil rights, and how do we know?
Look at 2020, and let's look at it from the lens of healthcare, COVID. COVID came in with a bang. I mean, I was even scared.
I'd already gone through AIDS, bird flu, swine flu. COVID was totally different. COVID was unprecedented.
It changed our whole country. And not only that, it changed the world. Here in the United States of America, we have about 400 million people and 20 to 40 million are Black, which is 12% of the population.
A third of those black Americans, black and brown folks, ended up with COVID, being hospitalized with COVID, or died. It was a disproportionate focus. The black community was hit severely by COVID.
And why? A couple of things. Number one, when you think about the in the context of social determinants of health pre-existing conditions number one if you have hypertension diabetes obesity those are things you really have to manage very very closely because they will lead to very very negative outcomes But however, if you're living in a household where there's multi-generations, there's overcrowding, you're living in what we call ghettos, you're living in these areas of town that are disfavored, the areas of town that no one wants to even be part of, you end up with a very, very specific quality of life.
So when you're not getting the health care access and preventive care that you need, it exacerbates and your quality of life decreases. Blacks in America have the lowest quality of life in any other race. Number two, just your job.
Where do you work? I mean, that determines a lot. I mean, some people have all this generational wealth.
Most black people do not. So we need a good job, but most of us are working in very low-level positions, entry-level positions in restaurants, front-facing what they call essential workers in grocery stores, maybe even doing manual labor. Some of those jobs, it's not full-time.
There are no benefits, so you don't, they're paid time off, what is that? There's no retirement plan, there's no sick time, and there may not be even any health insurance that's connected to that particular job. So what are you left with?
How are you going to be moving forward? So it's very, very important. for all of us to really think about why people are in certain jobs for their entire careers or their entire lives because that determines your health care status. You need resources to be well here in America.
It's not just going to happen and even if you have Medicaid, you still have access issues. You're in these red line areas that's probably far away from the main drag. So you need resources that's really, really close. Clinics that are right within our arm's length. Because as these diseases exacerbate, it's really hard to correct and bring things back to normalcy.
It's almost impossible. So we end up seeing These marginalized populations, they come into the ED close to death. They end up in the ICUs.
And even if they make it out of the hospital, they still have to go through rehabilitation and maybe live a life that's not very full. So what I say to all of you, is that we need to figure out how do we change the narrative? How do we make things better?
Even if it's not for me, for my children, and for your children, and for the future of our country. Because just automatically making assumptions about individuals is not right. Because at the end of the day... it affects their health care. Because those same people, they're working in the hospital.
Those same people, there are doctors and nurses and techs. And they still have that unconscious bias about who they feel black people are. So I want all of us to become activists by just getting approximate. Just really getting to know people. And it can just be one person that you see or a person at a school that you decide, I'm going to adopt.
I'm going to transform. I'm going to look at this and empower myself to look at this differently. Because you can't do it from afar.
You really do have to get close to understand the nuances of what's going on. But the problem is we all live so far away from each other. Up the track, back, you know, back the track. People live on this side. Sometimes, you know, their income issues that come up of living in certain places.
But we're gonna have to figure out how we make a difference. You know, I was one of those poor little kids, and through education, I ended up doing really, really well, and I'm always mentoring. I'm always in... schools, always teaching in colleges to make sure that they know, and they being all of us, that it takes a village.
And the reason why I am just so enamored by this, so dedicated to it. Because I'm part of the broken. I know what it feels like not to have anything.
I know what it feels like. So I don't want it for other people. So I'm going to dedicate my time, and I'm going to celebrate others. Thank you.