(task) Facing my fear: when I moved back to America, I felt like a foreigner | Anthony B Iton | Opinion | The Guardian

USRS NCR RS

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social equity, health, public health, state violence, community

> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/02/facing-my-fear-moving-to-america-inequality-experience <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/02/facing-my-fear-moving-to-america-inequality-experience>
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> Facing my fear: when I moved back to America, I felt like a foreigner | Anthony B Iton
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> I was at a red light in east Baltimore <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/baltimore> when I noticed a cop in my rearview mirror. I thought nothing of it and pulled away when the light changed. Then I saw him start to follow me, flashing the lights on his patrol car.
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> What did I do, I thought? It was 1985, and I’d just moved from Montreal to start medical school at Johns Hopkins. Puzzled, I pulled my cherry-red BMW to the curb and waited.
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> I watched him approach, his hand on his holster.
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> “I got you, boy!”
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> I was stunned. “You got me? I said. “What are you talking about?”
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> “License and registration,” he chuckled.
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> I handed him my license and registration, which were from Quebec. He looked at them suspiciously. He went back to his car and got on the radio.
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> After what seemed like an eternity, he returned. He threw my license and registration back at me. “Go on your way,” he snarled.
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> This story is familiar for many African American men. But it was the exact opposite of what I’d come to expect from police growing up in Montreal where, as a seven-year-old boy, two cops came to my rescue and retrieved my stolen bicycle. That made a big impression on me as a kid.
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> But I still had an American dream. Although I lived in Canada, I actually was an American, born in East Baltimore not far from where the cop stopped me. My family moved when I was two years old.
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> So when I had the chance to attend medical school in America, I took it. I’d always had a strong affinity for the black experience in the United States, almost like a homing signal calling me back to Baltimore.
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> But as a medical student working in the ER at the height of both the crack and Aids epidemics, I discovered a very different America from the one in my dreams. And despite my efforts and my imaginings, my worst fear came true: I did not feel American.
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> These were my people, but no amount of pills or surgery could cure what plagued the community
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> I felt no connection to the city of my birth – no familiarity with its norms. I had been plunged into a harsh dystopian American reality that was deeply segregated, fractured, polarized and unwelcoming. I did not sense a role for me. I felt like a “brother from another planet”.
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> Growing up in Canada as the son of West Indian immigrants, I had a very different perspective on issues like race and class than my African American classmates at John Hopkins. I never felt like I didn’t belong where I lived.
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> But the folks in East Baltimore were struggling to overcome the extreme poverty and drugs ravaging their neighborhoods and, worst of all, they lived in an occupied police state where daily routines like walking to the corner store could involve the threat of death. The level of squalor and material deprivation took me completely by surprise.
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> I remember walking home nights after long shifts in the ER and feeling like a stalked animal, when out of nowhere a helicopter would hover overhead and shine its spotlight on me as it searched for perpetrators of a crime.
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> My feelings of being disconnected from the people in Baltimore were further magnified because I’d been trained as a doctor to save people and repair them. But I felt helpless. These were my people, but no amount of pills or surgery could cure what plagued the community: poverty, a feeling of being hunted and a deep-rooted sense of futurelessness. This feeling helped convince me to shift from practicing medicine toward public health, where I could at least try to address the way race and “place” in America is intricately connected our basic freedoms and the “social contract” we have in this country.
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> In places like East Baltimore, that contract is badly broken, and what remains of it is brutally enforced by the police. I wondered why the freedoms and health benefits of America’s social contract varied so dramatically from place to place. Why were neighborhoods in East Baltimore, Maryland so much more detrimental to people’s health than, say, neighborhoods in Westport, Connecticut? Questions like these haunted me ever since my time working at Johns Hopkins.
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> Today, my work at the California Endowment is about building healthy communities city by city. It’s largely based on my research about why a person’s zip code is more important than their genetic code in determining how long they will live <http://buildinghealthycommunities.org/2016/04/framework-for-health-equity/>. This is because deeply entrenched social inequities can still cut short a person’s lifespan <http://buildinghealthycommunities.org/> by as much as 15 years in some neighborhoods.
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> As an outsider returning to a country I loved, that status quo was terrifying. Then it became unacceptable. I’ve turned that fear into a commitment to understand and eradicate the barriers to good health based on someone’s race or neighborhood – and it’s that engagement that, finally, made me feel truly American.