Dear Friends of HOME Project,

The world made history in the time since the murder of George Floyd choking under the knee of Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, as people from all 50 states and at least 15 other countries protested in support of Black Lives Matter. There can be no justice for all as long as black lives continue to be lost at disproportionate rates to their non-Black counterparts. When the color of your skin does more to define your destiny than does the quality of your character, there cannot be equality. While the list of lost lives of black men and women grows, this civil rights movement has gained new momentum since it began decades ago. But the overt racism we see is not new. As Will Smith said recently, “Racism is not getting worse, it’s getting filmed.”

As physicians, we are uniquely in a position of power to intimately know our communities through the individual stories we learn through our patients. We know that zip codes and race are intimately tied to health outcomes and we also know it does not need to be that way. We must use our individual and collective voices to speak up and to bear witness to the injustices we see. Now, more than ever, is not the time for us to be silent. To be silent is to be complicit.

HOME Project is dedicated to improving the health of the homeless population we serve, a group of individuals from a diversity of ethnic and historical backgrounds. According to endhomelessness.org, African Americans make up 40% of the homeless population even though they are only 13% of the general population. This is not a coincidence. The systematic denial of rights throughout our country’s history from slavery to segregation, continues to create disparities in health care, poverty, housing, and criminal justice. To address the institutionalized racism that continues to exist in our current systems, is also to address health disparities. Although Hawaii has a proportionally smaller black population compared with the continent, BLM is just as important here as anywhere in the world. The liberation of Asian Americans, Pacific Islander Americans, Latinx Americans, and all Americans are intimately tied in the liberation of Black Americans.

Why now? Why during a pandemic have we chosen this moment for a civil rights movement? COVID-19 has continued to make clearer the disparities in health outcomes between groups. And while social distancing has kept people from their physical circles, communities have grown stronger and larger online where collective outrage over recent deaths such as George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, have brought millions of people together focused on a common cause for BLM, without the usual distraction of our “normal” lives.

We can no longer go on with business as usual. Let’s please stand together to demand that we treat one another with love and respect. As we take the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm” and act in the best interest of our patients, so too do we respectfully ask that we expect the same of others who serve the public.

Love and Aloha,

The HOME Project Ohana