It's Fundamental...
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New research from the U.K. points to a connection between racism-related stress and the disproportionately high maternal mortality rates among Black women.

Racism-Related Stress May Contribute To High Black Maternal Mortality Rates, Study Finds

Jeroslyn JoVonn

“Pregnancy would no longer be treated as a discrete episode, but as the beginning of prevention.”

Pregnancy Is a Turning Point. The System Just Hasn’t Treated It That Way

Black Women's Health Imperitive

Reimagining Perinatal Care to Promote Health Equity

“The Blurred Boundaries of Care: A Qualitative Analysis of Nurse–Doula Role Conflict”

Maria McClam Kelly Russin Nansi Boghossian Rachel Gulczinski Lauren Workman

The Maternal Health Equity Collaborative: An Innovative Community Model of Care in Central Texas

Kelenne Blake kelenne@blackmamasatx.com, Darline Turner, Jasmine Rousell, Cherelle VanBrakle, Raichal McDonald, Morgan Miles, Ragini Khullar, and Liana Petruzzi

Sources of Strength: Black Women Faculty Navigating Academic Medicine

Kiana Fields, Sherree Wilson, Darin Latimore, Rachelle Alexander, Diana Whitlock, and Veronnie Faye Jones

"Black motherhood is an act of resistance."

Margaret Larkins-Pettigrew, MD, MEd, MPPM, FACOG

"I'm going to use the formula God gave me": The Role of the Black Church in Breastfeeding Support for Black Mothers

Kaylee A Palomino , Shemeka Thorpe , Valerie P A Verty , Natalie Malone , Danelle Stevens-Watkins

Black Women Scholars Redefining Self-Care in Academia

Pamela Felder-Small

Abstract

Background
Despite a robust research literature on the importance of promoting health equity and stated commitments by public health authorities to this goal, progress in doing so has been disappointing in Canada. One reason is the failure to mobilize the public in support of this goal. Almost a decade ago, Sir Michael Marmot called for a “social movement” to promote health equity but there are reasons for why such a movement has not taken hold in Canada.

Purpose
We carry out a critical narrative review and case study of Canadian health equity activities that examines the intersection of these activities with definitions of what constitutes a social movement.

Analysis
Employing Harvey’s concept of critical social research as not taking for granted apparent social structure and processes, we look beneath the surface of appearances to ask why health equity activities have generally failed in Canada such that a social movement – as defined in the social movements literature – is required to move forward.

Findings
Social movements engage the public to resist problematic social conditions outside of established governance structures and processes yet for the most part, health equity advocacy in Canada has been limited to those who do so as part of their paid employment or research funding by Canadian governing authorities whose policies create these conditions. As a result of these arrangements, health equity advocacy cannot readily meet the conditions necessary for a social movement: communicating the need for such a movement; identifying those responsible for health inequities; establishing networks supporting such a goal; and cultivating a distinct health equity identity.

Conclusion
We suggest reviewing the structures, processes, and successes and failures of a variety of social movements, e.g., Social Medicine, Environmental, Labour, and Anti-Globalization, among others, to identify lessons and insights that may assist in the development of a health equity social movement in Canada.

Why Promoting Health Equity in Canada Requires a Social Movement

Dennis Raphael https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0724-3174

Toba Bryant https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0436-4528

How Race Was Constructed to Undermine Solidarity: The Political Construction of Whiteness and the Incentives of Division

Kyri Murdough

I learned to be useful long before I understood what labor was. Long before I had language for work, worth, or expectation, I understood that being helpful mattered. Being capable mattered. Being low-maintenance mattered. Those traits were praised early, offered as signs of maturity and goodness, folded into what it meant to be loved. No one explained them as lessons, but they arrived all the same, carried through repetition, reward, and the quiet understanding that ease often made you safer.

Growing up, I was often called an old soul, described as “mature,” dependable, and easy to be around. That maturity showed up in legible ways. That maturity showed up in small, observable ways. I listened more than I spoke. I noticed when adults were tired or tense, and adjusted myself accordingly. I learned how to read a room, how to anticipate emotions, and how to adjust myself so others could remain comfortable. Over time, that adjustment began to feel less like a choice and more like instinct.

Much of what I learned came through watching my mother. The attentiveness, restraint, and emotional awareness that marked me as “mature” were learned first. Watching how she navigated institutions, how she translated herself, how she carried what had been handed to her by the generations before. She taught me what she had learned, not through speeches, but through practice. She taught me that being useful meant being chosen, that being chosen meant being responsible, and that responsibility was often mistaken for love. These lessons were gendered long before I had language for them, taught as expectations placed on girls rather than traits embedded in boys.

As a child, usefulness meant anticipating needs before they were voiced. It meant helping without being asked, adjusting without complaint, and learning how to be competent without being demanding. It was taught as foresight, as doing what was necessary to keep things moving smoothly, and the care embedded in those lessons was real, even as the constraints shaping them went unnamed.

No one called this inheritance, but that is what it was. A survival strategy passed down without ceremony. A way of moving through the world that had worked before and was offered again, not as burden, but as wisdom. To be useful was to be relied upon. To be relied upon was to be expected. And to be expected was to be loved, not in the way love holds you freely, but in a specific way that depends on you.

For the women who came before me, usefulness was never abstract. It was shaped by limited options, by constant scrutiny, by systems that offered little room for error. Being useful could mean keeping a job, keeping a family afloat, and keeping yourself from becoming disposable. These lessons were not failures of imagination; they were responses to conditions that required vigilance and adjustment. Therefore, much of what we inherit arrives through watching and repetition, teaching us quietly the understanding that certain ways of being make life smoother, if not easier.

School was one of the few places where that containment loosened. I grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood, attending schools where most of my teachers were also Black. I was louder there, more expressive, more willing to take up space. School felt different, not because it was freer, but because the adults there were responsible for me, but we did not belong to each other. Their attention was divided among dozens of children, their authority was temporary, and I learned I could test boundaries there in ways I could never at home as an only child. It felt like a kind of freedom, even when I knew it would bring consequences. Outside of those walls, usefulness required restraint. It required composure. It required knowing when to perform maturity beyond my years and when to make myself small enough not to disrupt the order of things. Moving between those worlds taught me that usefulness was situational, something to be calibrated depending on who was watching.

But that calibration was never framed as an obligation. It was framed as care, as preparation for the real world I would one day have to navigate. I learned it through tone, through praise, through correction that arrived disguised as guidance. Certain behaviors were favored. Quiet compliance, emotional awareness, neatness, and knowing when to help without being asked were all rewarded. While others were quietly redirected. Things like hesitation, frustration, or visible need were met with raised eyebrows, tightened voices, reminders to “act right,” or the subtle withdrawal of warmth. Over time, those patterns settled into me as common sense.

Part of that common sense lived in my body. My hair needed to be neat at all times. My clothes ironed and specific. These lessons were reinforced through reminders, corrections, and the quiet insistence to “come back home,” an instruction to return whole and safe to my mother, as she had been taught herself. Those moments where, in her mind, I was dangerously close to not straying too far away from that expectation. So I learned how to move through space in ways that prioritized whiteness and respectability, not because anyone named it outright, but because the consequences of not doing so were always present. These were not arbitrary expectations; they were instructions shaped by experience, carefully passed down, often lovingly.

Usefulness travels this way. It settles into the body and becomes instinct. It looks like competence. It feels like responsibility; it rarely announces itself, and that is how it follows Black girls into adulthood. The same traits that once kept us close to care become markers of reliability in school, at work, in leadership, and in community spaces. We are trusted because we have proven ourselves capable. We are depended on because we have learned how to hold things together. Over time, usefulness begins to look like opportunity, like recognition, like being chosen, even as it hardens into expectation.

Inside institutions, usefulness becomes infrastructure, and there Black women are often relied upon to stabilize conflict, translate harm, absorb emotional fallout, and keep things moving forward. This labor is framed as professionalism, as leadership, as commitment, rather than as the labor it is, while the reward is often more responsibility rather than more protection. What makes this pattern difficult to interrupt is how closely usefulness becomes tied to identity. When being needed has been reinforced since childhood, stepping back can feel like failure. Rest can feel like negligence. Uncertainty can feel like risk, and it becomes easy to believe that indispensability is the same as belonging.

There is pride in usefulness, and there is also grief. Pride in being capable, in knowing how to respond, in being someone others can count on. Grief over what that capability has required, over how little room it leaves for confusion, for softness, for visible need. Usefulness narrows the range of acceptable emotions and demands steadiness even when things are unsteady.

But questioning “usefulness” does not reject the people who taught it, nor does it dishonor the conditions that made it necessary. Interruption does not have to mean abandonment; it can begin as a question about what we no longer want to carry forward, about which strategies no longer serve the lives we are trying to build.

I do not have a clean answer for how to undo what has been learned so early. I only know that usefulness should not be the only language we inherit. It should not be the sole measure of worth or the primary condition of love. If survival was once organized around usefulness, then perhaps the question now is what else might become possible when being human is allowed to come first.

And that’s a question I still hold inside.

DeLisha Tapscott, Ed.D., is a writer, researcher, and cultural worker whose work examines digital culture, kinship, and Black womanhood and girlhood through storytelling, education, organizational leadership, and analyses of race, gender, and power. She is the co-founder of Black Girl Narrative, a cultural production hub that produces storytelling, research, and archival projects centering Black women’s lived experiences across digital, visual, and narrative forms. Alongside her cultural work, she serves in executive leadership at an international feminist organization, where she focuses on strategy, systems, storytelling, and organizational care. She is also a co-editor of the forthcoming book Black Doctoral Students’ Experiences in Academia: Narratives of Collective Responsibility, Community, and Care.

We Were Taught to Be Useful Before We Were Allowed to Be Human

DeLisha Tapscott, Ed.D.

Black Feminist Frameworks Every Leader Should Know

Tracee Worley

Excited to post our latest publication entitled, "Factors That Facilitate and Hinder Historically Black Colleges and Universities Faculty Research Success" in the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.

Factors That Facilitate and Hinder Historically Black Colleges and Universities Faculty Research Success

Naomi M. Hall, Cherrie B. Boyer, Michelle Gonzales, Barbara Green-Ajufo, and Emily A. Arnold

A Conversation with Keisha Blain

Keisha N. Blain, Jamila Michener & Neil Lewis, Jr.

With collaborators at University of Chicago and University of Illinois Chicago, I am examining processes of racial socialization in Black families during early childhood. These focus group data were instrumental in helping us to adapt an observational measure of racial socialization that was used with mothers and young Black children as young as five years old.

Elucidating these processes provide key insights into better supporting families, fostering optimal developmental outcomes, and strengthening cultural assets.

Access the full article here: https://lnkd.in/eeZM9z9x

Toward Methods for Assessing Racial Socialization in Early Childhood in Black American Families

Kate KeenanORCID Icon,Leslie AndersonORCID Icon,Kimberley Mbayiwaa Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Chicago,Sarah Walton,Marquesa Moore,Cherrelle J. Gipson,Marisha Humphries,Jiayan Li,Breanna Yartey &Chinara Wyke

From Bedside to Classroom: An Autoethnography of the Mentoring Experiences of BIPOC Nurse Faculty from Transition to Tenure and Promotion

Kechi C. Iheduru-Anderson https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2353-0410 ihedu1k@cmich.edu, Karen E. Alexander https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1015-3361, Nisha Mathews https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7115-5291, Julia U. Ugorji, Valeria A. Ramdin, Christiana Akanegbu, Katryna McCoy https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8675-9891, Danielle McCamey, Florence Okoro https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8684-0363, Wilma J. Calvert, and Kashica J. Webber-Ritchey

The Burdens of Underrepresentation and Professional Identity: A Qualitative Study of Black Women in Academic Nursing

Kechi Iheduru-Anderson

Yes She Can: Examining the Career Pathways of Black Women in Higher Education Senior Leadership Position

Ransford Pinto ransford.pinto@princeton.edu, Ty-Ron M. O. Douglas, Dena Lane-Bonds, and Rhodesia McMillian

Birthing Black Mothers

Anelise Gregis Estivalet

Listen to the Whispers before They Become Screams: Addressing Black Maternal Morbidity and Mortality in the United States

Anuli Njoku * , Marian Evans , Lillian Nimo-Sefah and Jonell Bailey

Hair Bias in the Workplace: A Critical Human Resource Development Perspective

Juanita Trusty https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7184-0291 jtrusty@calstatela.edu, David Akili Ward, Mijean Good-Perry Ward, and Mengying He

Tackling the Minority Tax: A Roadmap to Redistributing Engagement in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiatives

Erynne A. Faucett, MD, Michael J. Brenner, MD mbren@med.umich.edu, Dana M. Thompson, MD, MS, MBA, and Valerie A. Flanary, MD

Can ‘Baby Bonds’ Eliminate the Racial Wealth Gap in Putative Post-Racial America?

Darrick Hamilton & William Darity Jr.

How We Care Matters: Reproductive Justice and the Black Maternal Health Crisis

Addisa Rigaud

🚨New Pub Alert🚨I’m excited to share this new publication, in collaboration with Dr. Brian TaeHyuk Keum. We designed and validated the Online Gendered Racism Scale (OGRS), a new measure designed to capture the intersectional experiences of discrimination that Women of Color face in digital spaces. We’re happy this new measure can serve as a tool to advance more research on online gendered racism. Link to article👇🏾
https://lnkd.in/eXAd5XR8

The Online Gendered Racism Scale for Women of Color: Development, validation, and links to mental health outcomes.

Keum, Brian TaeHyuk Lewis, Jioni A.

It's Fundamental...
Reading

Racism-Related Stress May Contribute To High Black Maternal Mortality Rates, Study Finds

Pregnancy Is a Turning Point. The System Just Hasn’t Treated It That Way

“The Blurred Boundaries of Care: A Qualitative Analysis of Nurse–Doula Role Conflict”

The Maternal Health Equity Collaborative: An Innovative Community Model of Care in Central Texas

Sources of Strength: Black Women Faculty Navigating Academic Medicine

"Black motherhood is an act of resistance."

"I'm going to use the formula God gave me": The Role of the Black Church in Breastfeeding Support for Black Mothers

Black Women Scholars Redefining Self-Care in Academia

Why Promoting Health Equity in Canada Requires a Social Movement

How Race Was Constructed to Undermine Solidarity: The Political Construction of Whiteness and the Incentives of Division

We Were Taught to Be Useful Before We Were Allowed to Be Human

Black Feminist Frameworks Every Leader Should Know

Factors That Facilitate and Hinder Historically Black Colleges and Universities Faculty Research Success

A Conversation with Keisha Blain

Toward Methods for Assessing Racial Socialization in Early Childhood in Black American Families

From Bedside to Classroom: An Autoethnography of the Mentoring Experiences of BIPOC Nurse Faculty from Transition to Tenure and Promotion

The Burdens of Underrepresentation and Professional Identity: A Qualitative Study of Black Women in Academic Nursing

Yes She Can: Examining the Career Pathways of Black Women in Higher Education Senior Leadership Position

Birthing Black Mothers

Listen to the Whispers before They Become Screams: Addressing Black Maternal Morbidity and Mortality in the United States

Hair Bias in the Workplace: A Critical Human Resource Development Perspective

Tackling the Minority Tax: A Roadmap to Redistributing Engagement in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiatives

Can ‘Baby Bonds’ Eliminate the Racial Wealth Gap in Putative Post-Racial America?

How We Care Matters: Reproductive Justice and the Black Maternal Health Crisis

The Online Gendered Racism Scale for Women of Color: Development, validation, and links to mental health outcomes.

About me

EVOLVE links

It's Fundamental... Reading

Racism-Related Stress May Contribute To High Black Maternal Mortality Rates, Study Finds

Pregnancy Is a Turning Point. The System Just Hasn’t Treated It That Way

“The Blurred Boundaries of Care: A Qualitative Analysis of Nurse–Doula Role Conflict”

The Maternal Health Equity Collaborative: An Innovative Community Model of Care in Central Texas

Sources of Strength: Black Women Faculty Navigating Academic Medicine

"Black motherhood is an act of resistance."

"I'm going to use the formula God gave me": The Role of the Black Church in Breastfeeding Support for Black Mothers

Black Women Scholars Redefining Self-Care in Academia

Why Promoting Health Equity in Canada Requires a Social Movement

How Race Was Constructed to Undermine Solidarity: The Political Construction of Whiteness and the Incentives of Division

We Were Taught to Be Useful Before We Were Allowed to Be Human

Black Feminist Frameworks Every Leader Should Know

Factors That Facilitate and Hinder Historically Black Colleges and Universities Faculty Research Success

A Conversation with Keisha Blain

Toward Methods for Assessing Racial Socialization in Early Childhood in Black American Families

From Bedside to Classroom: An Autoethnography of the Mentoring Experiences of BIPOC Nurse Faculty from Transition to Tenure and Promotion

The Burdens of Underrepresentation and Professional Identity: A Qualitative Study of Black Women in Academic Nursing

Yes She Can: Examining the Career Pathways of Black Women in Higher Education Senior Leadership Position

Birthing Black Mothers

Listen to the Whispers before They Become Screams: Addressing Black Maternal Morbidity and Mortality in the United States

Hair Bias in the Workplace: A Critical Human Resource Development Perspective

Tackling the Minority Tax: A Roadmap to Redistributing Engagement in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiatives

Can ‘Baby Bonds’ Eliminate the Racial Wealth Gap in Putative Post-Racial America?

How We Care Matters: Reproductive Justice and the Black Maternal Health Crisis

The Online Gendered Racism Scale for Women of Color: Development, validation, and links to mental health outcomes.

About me

EVOLVE links

It's Fundamental...
Reading