In my previous post, I shared the story of my discovery of the now-defunct National Negro Health Week (NNHW) and Booker T. Washington’s role in establishing it. I would paraphrase their major message as, “If health is the doorway to the future of the race, education is the key.”
On a related note, I am sharing another resource I discovered relative to diversity, education and Black and Hispanic health. Like my discovery of NNHW, it has reinforced for me the significance of leveraging education and educational institutions to address not only health but also broader concerns in diverse communities.
While doing research for a presentation on the state of Black health, I stumbled across the National Urban League’s Report on Black-White Equality. NUL also has a Hispanic-White Equality report. Created annually for the last 13 years and released every spring around May, the report presents a relative measure, called the “National Equality Index,” of the gap between Black and White equality. It is calculated based on five weighted sub-measures: economics (weighted 30 percent), health (25 percent), education (25 percent), social justice (10 percent), and civic engagement (10 percent).
As an engineer and researcher at heart, I was excited to see hard data and objective calculations being used to describe something as subjective as the gap between Black and White equality. And, of course, I was glad to see health represented in the set of measures included.
However, as a Black American, I was confused why I hadn’t heard of it before, whether on the news or in conversation on related topics. It is said, “You don’t know what you don’t know” and I didn’t know that I didn’t know about the report. But once I did, I wanted to know why I hadn’t known. I like to think that I roll with a pretty educated crowd, so I started to ask others in my circle if they had heard of the report. They had not.
I had to think to myself, am I hanging with the wrong people? Maybe I need to find, as one friend described it, my “tribe” – a group of friends who share not only my education level but also my passions, beliefs and values. Friends who will talk about all of the things that would interest me or know about all of the things that I want to know. But why should I need a special group of people to become aware of, in this case, possibly the only current measure of a topic we should all be interested in?
This whole matter had me internally remaking the case for public education and access to education, especially on topics related to diversity issues and solutions. And it reconfirmed my long-held belief that the educational system has its work cut out in terms of providing students, especially diverse students, the information and resources they need to truly solve the problems of the day.
