1/I lost two Family members to #COVID19 in two weeks. My Grandfather, Robert Lee Strother, will never be counted as such bc he died before other family members tested +. We postponed both funerals. #academictwitter #AcademicChatter

2/I have been studying and working for health equity and public health my whole adult life. I chose public health bc 1/2 my family was diabetic and 1/2 HTN. I witness that no amount of education or income can really buffer the cumulative cost of being Black in America

3/I am so proud of the unrelenting efforts of my friends and colleagues on the front lines right now, fighting for us and seeing us as people, not statistics or comorbities.

4/ and when this is over, There is a massive community of brilliant public health workers , researchers, social epidemiologists, health communicators, activists, advocates and policy folks who will continue the fight for health equity

5/After this pandemic ends, my sister psychologists, therapists and social workers will find ingenious ways to provide mental health supports to communities of color, navigating collective grieving

6/ Our elders told us during our training the when America gets a cold, Black America gets the flu.
We knew what was coming. We have been here already and that’s why we cry out for data bc somehow stats are more believable than our expertise

7/. we ask for data knowing it is risky bc if Covid becomes a “black problem” , the next action is it will become unimportant, stigmatized or driven by ‘problem‘ behaviors

8/ But we demand racially aggregated data anyway bc we use data to speak to power when power doesn’t listen to people. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

7/ whatever fresh hell rises tomorrow, public health folks will keep working and fighting for communities. We will keep
supporting the next gen of black, Latinx, indigenous scholars...... with less funding (NIH ) and we will do more with less.

8/ We will keep fighting for health equity, we will make the invisible visible, we will listen to our elders and our children and we will find ways to laugh and love in the midst of it all. This is what I was born to do.

RIP Pop-pop