We Should All Have Access
Racial inequities are tenacious. But so are these change-makers, who are pushing for greater access and care across four of the most important health issues facing Black women today.
By Katti Gray
Racial inequities are tenacious. But so are these change-makers, who are pushing for greater access and care across four of the most important health issues facing Black women today.
By Katti Gray
Racism is a public health crisis. Just reading that sentence can feel insurmountable. How does one even begin to fix such injustice? It starts with a conversation, says Paulah Wheeler, who—along with three other graduates of Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health—created BLKHLTH in 2018.
The nonprofit educates the Black community through immersive events and panels. Examining important issues—from the impact of abuse and neglect in Black families to Black reproductive health and justice—these are not panels where doctors talk at an audience from atop a podium. “We have a guided discussion,” Wheeler tells WW. “At the end, we put everyone in a circle and open the floor to whoever wants to speak. It changes the dynamic.” Ultimately, it becomes both a conversation and a brainstorm session.
The education goes both ways. While its events and panels mostly serve the public, BLKHLTH also holds workshops for physicians, nurses, and other clinicians on culturally competent care. Its flagship workshop—the Anti-Racism Workshop for Health Professionals—has been completed by clinicians at the Centers for Disease Control and the New York State Department of Health.
A push toward cancer prevention for Black women remains a key goal for BLKHLTH. “More Black people are dying of cancer because it gets caught and treated when it’s in the later stages,” says Wheeler. And in the case of colon cancer, it might strike earlier and more specifically. BLKHLTH’s colorectal cancer awareness campaign will provide at-home cancer tests (with the help of financing from a major personal-care brand) and will lobby to lower the age when people at average risk for colon cancer get screened from 45 to 35. “Black gastroenterologists are asking for that to be lower, partly because lowering it means that insurance will cover the screening,” Wheeler says. “Sometimes, it’s not the policy you have on the books, but the absence of a policy that becomes the problem for many Black people.”
Millie Peartree is a true multihyphenate: chef-caterer-author–TV host–WW Partner. But one day in March 2020—as the pandemic took hold in New York City—she was, quite simply, Good Samaritan. It was then that she saw a line of cars wrapping several blocks of her Bronx neighborhood. “I thought it was for Covid testing, but it was a food distribution program,” she recalls.
That display of her neighbors’ needs triggered a reflex, prompting Peartree to launch Full Heart Full Bellies, a nonprofit that provides nutritious meals to food-deprived children in the Bronx, the poorest of NYC’s five boroughs. In less than two years, the organization has delivered more than 100,000 meals and 250,000 pounds of food.
Food insecurity—the lack of access to affordable nutritious food—is a growing problem for low-income families throughout the U.S. But even when food isn’t scarce, there’s a long-standing fear that it soon could be. “We grew up in a culture where you clean your plate,” says Peartree. “Your parents said, ‘There are children in Africa starving.’”
There’s another reason food access is so important to Peartree. She knows firsthand how food—the kind that not only feeds your body but also binds you to your culture—can shape your life. Her own love and appreciation for cooking began at age 10, when she’d mail-order recipe cards and whip up classics like honey baked chicken. Over time, her relationship with food evolved. Today, Peartree is redefining what “healthy eating” can look like. Far too often, it’s seen through a white-normative lens of grilled poultry and salads. “Southern cuisine can be made lighter and healthier,” says Peartree, who preaches the powers of the air fryer. “My fish is air-fried. My breaded chicken is air-fried.”
This resonates with WW members. When WW asked the Black Women Connect Group (Connect is WW’s members-only social media feed) what type of recipes they were craving, healthier soul food came up again and again. Peartree brings that sensibility throughout the WW ecosystem, showing members that they can be true to their heritage and still reach their health goals.
Jasmine Marie was waiting to exhale.
After graduating from NYU’s Stern School of Business in 2015, she landed a high-stakes brand management position at a global beauty conglomerate. Two years into the job, stress and anxiety triggered a host of issues: “I had rashes, physical symptoms from my nervous system being taxed,” she explains to WW.
Marie’s doctor told her she needed to get a handle on her stress, and it was through a free session at a Harlem community center that she discovered breathwork. It not only calmed her symptoms, but Marie says, “It helped me become more in tune with my body and see how disconnected from my body I had become.”
In 2018, she launched Black Girls Breathing (BGB), a safe space for Black women to manage their mental health through breathwork and community. To make the practice accessible, BGB offers free 90-minute breathwork sessions for Black women. In three years, Marie’s online community has grown to nearly 20,000 members. But the 31-year-old has loftier ambitions, pledging to reach 1 million Black women and girls by 2025.
In some ways, the meditative act of breathwork—being still, purposefully inhaling and exhaling—can be challenging for Black women who are accustomed to shouldering so much (they’re more likely than any other race to be household breadwinners) and defending themselves against assault (they’re 2½ times as likely to experience physical or sexual violence from a partner or spouse).
But that’s precisely why meditative breathing is so critical to have in a Black woman’s wellness toolbox. Ignoring these stressors have long-term consequences, research suggests. Racial discrimination has been linked to allostatic load (cumulative biological stress). By the time Black women reach their 50s, on a biological level, they are seven years older than white women. It is thought that breathwork, an active form of meditation, triggers the body’s relaxation response (our parasympathetic nervous system) to ease that stress.
Marie says there is no one wrong or right way to start a breathwork practice, but she has a favorite for beginners: Inhale through the mouth, elongating the inhale to expand the lungs and allowing the belly to rise for as long as possible. Then exhale through the mouth, allowing your stomach to hug your rib cage. “It’s called oceanic breath,” she says, “as the breathing literally sounds like the waves of the ocean coming into shore and leaving out to sea.”
Dying while bringing life into the world—it’s an unconscionable tragedy and one that’s most likely to befall Black women. In the U.S., Black mothers are four times as likely to die from maternity-related complications than white women.
There are a litany of reasons why such disparity exists—among the most notable, inferior care at hospitals where Black women tend to give birth. The pandemic has only exacerbated the need for an alternative. And research seems to suggest that midwives could be that alternative. Per a recent review published in The Lancet, a substantial increase in midwife-delivered interventions could avert 41% of maternal deaths.
Unfortunately, there are not nearly enough midwives to support such interventions. And it’s even harder to find Black midwives. Of the 15,000 certified midwives in the U.S., only about 2% are Black.
It all seems so bleak—until you Zoom with Nicole Deggins, who beams positivity. “If you wanted a Black midwife in 2021 in New Orleans, you were out of luck,” she says. “At the end of 2022, that will no longer be the case.” By then, the first among a half-dozen Black midwives in training will take the exam required to be licensed to deliver babies.
Deggins herself stopped delivering babies to help expand the pool of certified midwives, who, as of May 2020, can get licensed in 34 states. Deggins also actively lobbies for policy changes that, for example, would require private insurers and Medicaid to reimburse midwives for delivering babies at parents’ homes. (Cost is a major barrier for low-income parents to access out-of-hospital births. Medicaid pays for home births in just a handful of states.)
“There is so much progress and so much hope in the work,” says Deggins, who still thinks about an experience that initially drew her to midwifery: She was working at a hospital that saw many high-risk patients from New Orleans’s public inner-city housing projects. “The midwife cradled this mom like a chair, to support her,” she recalls. “It was the most beautiful, peaceful birth I’d ever witnessed.”
