Last week in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, my sister and I listened as a physician at the school effectively reduced an entire continent to a monolithic entity. How he did this was with a sweeping statement: “You know, in the ’90s, everybody in Africa was dying of HIV/AIDS. It was really terrible.”
After we exchanged some mad side-eye, my sister raised her hand, requesting the professor be more specific: “So ... was everyone in Africa dying? Or could you specify a region that was most affected by HIV/AIDS?” To which the professor managed, after a long-winded and also vapid explanation, to say, “sub-Saharan Africa.”
Toward the end of the lecture, when the class was opened up for questions, another classmate asked about unsafe abortions, a topic briefly touched on in lecture. She asked the professor what exactly constitutes unsafe abortions, to which the he responded that he did not exactly know. A final classmate asked if the professor could speak to sexual and reproductive issues that face the LGBTQ community, and specifically transwomen, to which the professor responded, “I wouldn’t be able to give any answer to that question because I am not educated on the subject.”
After this painful Q&A, I approached the professor to ask him why exactly he neglected to specify a region of the continent within his lecture and to also request that, in future lectures, he is geographically specific when speaking about infections that often are racialized and are often imagined to exist within the entire African continent. The response I received was less than satisfactory; this professor effectively avoided the issue and ended his soliloquy saying that he “could talk about AIDS in Africa for days.”
As a physician who has considerable experience working internationally in the field of public health — specifically in family planning — his responses are unacceptable. This physician’s work with the World Health Organization has very real implications for the health of women worldwide, and particularly women of color living in the global south. Aside from the fact that this professor demonstrated a robust level of cultural irrelevance, as prominently exhibited on his lack of knowledge of health issues facing the LGBTQ community, he also exposed a particularly dangerous level of ignorance on issues that are key to communities both nationally and internationally.
We must ask, what does it mean for those in positions of power, for those who are responsible for advising and for implementing health interventions worldwide, to be completely and willfully blind to issues affecting members of our communities who are most marginalized? And, conversely, what would it look like if instead we had folks who were?
