The 39th annual Minority Health Conference spent an entire day tackling the relationship between false narratives of minorities and public health on Friday.
The conference, hosted by the Minority Student Caucus and UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, is the largest and longest running student-led health conference in the nation. Started in 1977 by the Minority Student Caucus, the conference has grown immensely since its conception, selling out this year with over 700 people registered for the conference and 20 group and 180 individual viewings of the webcast.
Graduate student Daijah Davis, communications co-chairperson of the conference, said one goal of the conference’s theme, “Reclaiming the Narrative,” was to help attendees recognize that perpetuated false narratives often impact the level of medical care people receive, especially minorities.
“We really wanted people to understand that there are all these narratives that we don’t even often times realize are being portrayed in the media and conversation and just realizing that they’re not always accurate,” Davis said. “We need to listen to different communities, and we need to talk to them and figure out what they need and how we can help them amplify their voices.”
Davis said childbirth mortality rates for both women and infants are the highest among African-Americans — and rising. False narratives often lead to negative stereotypes that allow people to place the responsibility of health disparities on minority individuals rather than the system creating those disparities.
Ph.D. student Shikira Thomas, conference co-chairperson, said minority health is important because of the disparity between health outcomes for minority and white populations.
“For me, the reclaiming the narrative theme was more than just, 'As a Black woman, this is what I’m experiencing,' but I began to see that, wow, a lot of minority groups, and not just racial minorities – religious minorities, sexual minorities, gender minority groups – I realized that narratives were a common thread that kind of held us together,” Thomas said. “It made me realize that although we differ so much, there’s a lot of things that make us similar.”
The keynote speakers, Monica Raye Simpson and Vann R. Newkirk II addressed the theme from the lenses of reproductive health and civil rights.
Graduate student Melissa Luong, conference co-chairperson, said having such topically different keynote lectures was a great way to approach different angles of minority health disparities. It also introduced attendees to the narratives of groups they’re not familiar with to expand their global perspective. She said reclaiming false narratives is a timely issue.
