This July marked my two-year work anniversary at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Looking back, I can appreciate the growth that I’ve had these two years. In light of current events, I want to focus on my journey of identifying and embracing the intersection of advocating for racial justice in my personal and professional lives.
At the age of 21, I moved back to the United States to start graduate school after living abroad for 16 years. In one class, I recall learning for the first time about institutionalized racism and the idea of being “antiracist.” Around the same time, in my personal life, I learned about social justice from an Islamic lens and why, as a practicing Muslim, it was not optional but rather imperative for me to speak out against racial injustice. Therefore, I tried to become more cognizant of my own implicit biases and did not shy away from supporting Black Lives Matter.
However, it wasn’t until after I graduated that I learned about the overlap of racial injustice in healthcare. As I settled into my job, a dear colleague of mine shared the link to a grand rounds talk at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, titled, “Achieving Health Equity” by Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones.
We must ask whether expanding our cancer genetic services, including testing and screening, will benefit everyone or just a privileged population.
In her talk, Dr. Jones did a brilliant job of linking systemic racism to racial health disparities. This inspired me to educate myself about the topic. Consequently, outside my clinical responsibilities, I found myself attending a symposium, then a lecture, and even a one-day conference related to racial health disparities.
I also started to dig deeper into the existing literature on racial health disparities specific to cancer genetic services. In addition to educating myself, I spent time brainstorming ideas with colleagues about how to increase outreach to medically underserved communities. I built a relationship with our hospital’s community benefits department, which allowed us to organize and plan outreach events to increase education and access to cancer genetic services among medically underserved communities that were predominantly communities of color.
Following current events, I recently attended a webinar featuring Dr. Ibram Kendi, author of How to Be An Antiracist, which solidified that being antiracist also means unapologetically advocating for and supporting politicians and policies that moved us in the direction of racial health equity. It means that we must ask whether expanding our cancer genetic services, including testing and screening, will benefit everyone or just a privileged population. It means that asking these questions is not “being political” but rather a practice of being antiracist.
I have learned that as I continue to navigate my professional life, I must make the choice every day to be antiracist, which also means that I must check my privilege and use it to fight for racial health equity.
Fatima Amir, MS, CGC graduated from the University of Cincinnati/Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center Genetic Counseling Program in 2018. She works as a Cancer Genetic Counselor at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA. She is chair of the Anti-Racism Working Group in the Somatic Subcommittee of the NSGC Cancer SIG.