In this month's feature Interview, we speak with Dawna Thomas, Ph.D, Professor, Chair of the Department Of Critical Race, Gender, and Cultural Studies, and the Department of Public Health. Excerpts of the interview follow.

To start, we were wondering if you might be able to talk a bit about the ways your roots as an African American of Cabo Verdean heritage has shaped your work around disparities in health that stem from ethnicity and identity?

It's a foundational piece to my work. I grew up in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, which has a large Cabo Verdean population. My mother is Cabo Verdean while my father is African American, from a very small Southern town in Georgia, who came up North. This background has shaped a lot of things for me as a person of color. Growing up, you experience different things and you begin to see how the healthcare systems work differently for many communities of color than how it works for white people. Recently, I've experienced this difference first hand in dealing with my mother, who has been a very healthy person until she got into her late eighties, and then I saw other disparities first hand, in how they treated an older black woman, seeing her in that way as a caregiver. All this has been there as a way for me to ask questions. 

I also worked at the UMass affiliated Institute for Community Inclusion here in Boston, with my focus being on disability issues. I was very struck by this exposure to the disabled community and the disability paradigm around independent living, where it’s more of an interdependent focus instead of this American perspective defined “independent living.” This is something I’ve written about; how we [as people of color] see disability differently and how the disability rights movement really changed the US and was right at the forefront of getting the Americans With Disabilities Act passed.

What might you want someone to know about the intersection of being Black and disabled if they’re just starting out in learning about these challenges and solutions?

We sometimes call it “double jeopardy”; that a black person with a disability experiences both racism and ableism. Or “triple jeopardy” if you’re a woman, as you can also experience sexism. This is a population that experiences discrimination on multiple levels instead of just one. These experiences can compound their experience with their disability and this is important to understand. A person who needs access to disability services may not be able to access those services for multiple reasons or resource limits. Structural racism plays a role in the experience. There’s some work from The National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research, from the late '90s, around African Americans and disabilities that showed how this population didn’t know where the resources could be found and that the disability providers were also not reaching out to them, either. As part of The Rehab Act, a mandate was established for providers to do more outreach to the community, in service of the community's understanding of what it is to be African American or Black and have a disability, along with another mandate to hire more diverse providers.

So the ADA was passed in 1990, and then reauthorized and amended in 2008. Here we are in early 2024; how do you tend to feel about the progress being made, policy-wise or otherwise?

For multiple and complex reasons, I think the progress is mixed. Anyone born after 1990 is accustomed to seeing sidewalk cutouts for wheelchairs and handicapped accessible parking. That’s their norm. Before 1990 that was not the norm. So that gets taken for granted. Accessibility has become a huge thing, from when you get in the elevator and it can call out the floor for the hearing impaired. We see sign language interpreters for government speeches and presentations. These are all things from the ADA. It has become second nature, along with disallowing employers from disability discrimination, but we still know that many people with disabilities live in poverty, are under-employed or [comparatively] under-educated. In the Rehab Act of the ‘90s there was some legislation passed that helped disabled students get to school. So from the ADA act we have a lot of great things, but we always need more things done, right?

Finally, we’re here in February, it’s Black History Month, which can mean different things to different people, but I was curious what a public health view on Black History Month might be, including the opportunities that may be present there?

[There is an opportunity] to really focus on health equity and to look at where we've arrived today, [but also] where we've stalled and what we need to improve next. That [involves] looking at access to patient care, looking at access for more providers to be diverse and [for them to be] like the population they're serving. Looking at unconscious bias for everyone. Some [might think] that unconscious bias is just for white providers. It's for us all. We all have unconscious bias growing up in the United States. Some think that science equalizes everything; if we focus on the body and the science, we can't discriminate or be biased. And that's not true, there's racism in medicine. So I think Black History Month is a time to step back and take account and look at what's missing and think about moving forward.

Events On Our Radar

In person and virtual events nation and worldwide, focused on health, wellness, equity and education.