Giving Compass' Take:

• YES! Magazine reports on Ericka Hart, a sex education expert who is challenging institutionalized racism in the medical industry.

• How can philanthropy work to address medical racism? What other educators in that field are making headways?

• Here's how racial equality and healthcare are interrelated. 


Ericka Hart is changing the face of health education.

The sex education expert and professor of Human Sexuality at the Columbia School of Social Work is not one expects to see when she shows up in the classroom or at a speaking engagement. She’s “a millennial,” and she’s a Black, queer, nonbinary, femme. At 28 years old, the breast cancer awareness and representation advocate was diagnosed with breast cancer, and now in her mid- 30s, she is challenging institutionalized racism in the medical industry—known as medical racism.

How?

Hart has built her platform on speaking up about her own experiences with health care professionals and insurance companies, uplifting other marginalized people’s experiences, and ensuring that people understand how racism and other forms of oppression show up in the medical field.

Medicine has a long history of exploiting Black people’s bodies for research and gains. It’s a legacy that Hart says endures to this today. But her work intentionally makes space for Black women and nonbinary people who have traditionally been ignored or not taken seriously by their doctors, leading to delayed diagnoses of breast cancer and other illnesses. Tina Sacks, author of Invisible Visits: Black Middle-Class Women in the American Healthcare System, writes how many Black people are brushed off by their doctors.

Read the full article about medical racism by Ananya Garg at YES! Magazine.