Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American female elected to the U.S. Congress, said, “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”
In other words, find a way to be in the room. The proverbial ‘they’ is anyone who would deny blacks their rights to be a part of decisions, processes, politics, and laws created that impact the African-American community.
As citizens and major stakeholders in the American economy and culture, blacks must have a voice and be a part of the creation of American systems and enterprises. Education, employment, science, healthcare, and technology are a few areas whereby we seek to be keenly involved.
Of course, a comfortable seat at the table is better than a folding chair.
When African Americans are absent from the table, the black community is uninformed and at a disadvantage. Disadvantages have a way of leading to racial inequalities and increasing mistrust.
Today, African-American interests must be promoted and protected more than ever before. The mistrust in government systems and other institutions can’t be overstated. More transparency and African American involvement in quality-of-life processes will improve communications, race relations, and new techniques and designs.
Unfortunately, we saw the mistrust in our own medical system with the pandemic and COVID-19 vaccinations. It’s not easy to trust a system with a history of secrecy, manipulation, and marginalization.
One case in point is the infamous 1932 government initiative called the ‘Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.’ The study withheld medical treatment from black males who unknowingly were human subjects for syphilis experiments.
The National Public Health Service recruited hundreds of black males through Tuskegee Institute to participate in the study. This inhuman study left black men to suffer from the horrible disease, and some wives and children also contracted the disease.
The Tuskegee experiment left a bad taste and a reason for the black community to mistrust public medical initiatives by the government.
Understandably, the coronavirus pandemic and vaccinations stirred up old fears connected with the syphilis research.
But the COVID-19 vaccine initiatives weren’t a repeat of the Tuskegee experiment.
When blacks learned that a black female scientist was at the forefront of the development of the vaccine, more blacks received the vaccinations. Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, a viral immunologist, is the scientist, and she didn’t need a folding chair; she sat at the table.
Corbett was the scientific lead of the Viral Research Center’s (VCR’s) COVID-19 Team in the creation of a vaccine. She studied the shapes of the virus’ spikes that protrude and infect people with coronavirus. Her team’s research on Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) viruses was the building block for developing the COVID-19 vaccine.
At the National Institutes for Health, Corbett researched vaccine development for SARS and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which are two types of coronaviruses.
A member of the African American community, Corbett understood blacks’ hesitancy in being vaccinated. So, she worked to eliminate the mistrust about a medical product and procedure she could whole-heartedly vouch for. Her outreach and educational presentations about the vaccine being safe have made a difference in more blacks getting the vaccine.
Corbett’s honors include the Kaiser Permanente’s African Americans in Health Care Award (2021), the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s The Golden Goose Award (2020), the Foundation for National Institutes of Health’s Salzman Memorial Award in Virology (2020), the American Society for Microbiology’s Early Career Applied and Biotechnological Research Award (2020), and other recognitions.
Blacks being at the table make a difference.
Be safe.