Board Member Message
by Sachi Kaneko
?The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.? ? Martin Luther King Jr.
This is a call to action. In an article for the Washington Post, Dr. Obasogie recently characterized the death of George Floyd as the spread of the ?police violence pandemic.?? This combined with the effects of the novel Coronavirus are two massive problems within our country that disproportionately affect Black people. ?
Black men in America are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by law enforcement than their White counterparts (Obasogie, 2020). ?Available data about the Coronavirus show that counties that are primarily Black have ?three times the rate of infections and almost six times the rate of deaths as counties where white residents are the majority? (Thebault, Tran, and Williams, 2020). ?This is the current climate of being Black in America- it is not chance or happenstance or a series of isolated incidents, it?s systemic.
Systemic racism is a pivotal piece to the founding of our country. Our economy was built on the cheap or free labor of non Whites- a system that continues to persist today. The implicit biases that were fostered by that system to enforce racial hierarchies are long standing and deep.
“The very serious function of racism? is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn?t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is?.? -Toni Morrison, Writer and Speaker