Dr. Georges Benjamin (right), the executive director of the American Public Health Association, was keynote speaker at the Washington University School of Medicine 2017 Homer G. Phillips Lecture on October 27, 2017. He was presented with a plaque by Dr. Will Ross, associate dean for diversity at Washington University School of Medicine and professor of medicine in the Nephrology Division. Benjamin says HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is unqualified for the position and a threat to American healthcare.
Photo by Wiley Price / St. Louis American
With more than two decades leading the American Public Health Association as its executive director, Dr. Georges Benjamin knows how to keep people and communities healthy.
As the first Black doctor to serve as executive director of the APHA, Benjamin pays particular attention to the health gaps between Black and white people in the U.S.
When he recently called for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy to “resign or be fired,” in a scathing public statement, he detailed the damage Kennedy has done to the nation’s health during his brief tenure.
“Americans deserve better than someone who is trying to impose his unscientific and judgmental view of public health and science,” Benjamin said in his statement. “We deserve better than RFK, Jr. He demonstrated his incompetence in only a few weeks.”
Word In Black interviewed Benjamin and he shared his perspective on our nation’s state of healthcare and what’s on the horizon for healthcare in the Black community.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WIB: Why should Secretary resign?
Georges Benjamin: First of all, he didn’t have a health background. And even though there have been other health secretaries that haven’t had a health background, most of them were certainly grounded in health policy
Secondly, [Kennedy] had really no serious administrative experience. [HHS] is an almost $2 trillion agency with over 14 operating divisions, including several other departments. It’s a big, complicated organization with lots of overlapping parts in terms of decision-making.
WIB: Has Kennedy done specific harm to the Black community?
GB: He was just in a TV interview the other day about his department having $11 billion cut out of his budget, and he said he didn’t know anything about those cuts. Then he said those were diversity, equity, and inclusion cuts. Well, there may be some grants in there that supported DEI, but the people he fired were the very people that were out there trying to fight the measles epidemic, the tuberculosis epidemic, the obesity epidemic, and the chronic disease programs that he says he wants to support.
WIB: Those issues disproportionately affect Black communities.
GB: Racialization of services that serve people is racist in its very core, in my view. And while they articulate they want to make this non-race-based, the fact of the matter is we are still in a racialized society in this country. Structural racism is alive and well, structural inequality is alive and well.
For example, he has been advocating to get fluoride out of our drinking water. Well, fluoride can naturally be in our water. He doesn’t talk about the fact that one of the leading causes of children not being able to go to school is poor dental health.
Kids who are already living in challenged communities and have a whole bunch of other barriers that keep them from getting a good education, good dental health shouldn’t be one of those barriers. If they are from lower-income and underserved populations, and not on Medicaid, they may not have access to dental health care at all.
WIB: The APHA calls Kennedy a purveyor of misinformation.
GB: He’s actively promoted the theory that vitamin A is a preventive cure for measles, when actually, vitamin A is dangerous to give to people, particularly kids. Vitamins in general help you remain in good health, particularly when you’re not eating a really great diet. In most cases, they don’t hurt. But there are certain vitamins, like vitamin A, which get stored in the body’s fat, that when taken in anything more than extremely low doses can cause liver damage.
WIB: How can Black people protect their health?
GB: First thing is to become more health literate. This means you understand your body and how it functions. So, you can understand how to be healthy within your own community. Because 80% of what makes you healthy occurs outside the doctor’s office.
Also, it’s important to advocate for things that we know we don’t have. For example, in many of our communities, we don’t have access to grocery stores that sell affordable, healthy foods, and that we have a lot of convenience stores.
When I was a health commissioner in Washington, D.C., there were lots of grocery stores in Northeast and Northwest Washington, but no grocery stores in the overwhelmingly Black section east of the [Anacostia River] until fairly recently. Our communities need to advocate our elected leaders for them to do what is necessary to get grocery stores to come to our community now. Then we have to, as the customers, go over there and shop at those businesses.
But we also have to recognize that there are unhealthy foods for us, and we do have to improve our own individual health. So, it’s both a population approach and an individual responsibility approach that are important parts of this process.
This story originally appeared here.