BookishDragonfly's Book Journey

I don’t know that I can do this book justice in my review, but I will endeavor to explain why it has stuck with me years after reading it.

As a Black woman in America, there are some things you just know. You know them because your mother and aunties and grandmothers knew them. You know things because society reinforces the lessons taught at home as if it was giving you a test you began studying for right out of the womb. Some thing’s are not so much explained as they are felt and experienced. I knew at 8 that the pain I felt was treated differently than my white friends. I watched my mother advocate for me and even change my doctors when they refused to take serious the concerns we brought up. My father taught me about the Tuskegee Experiment while my mother taught me about the Devil of Gynecology. So I was not completely unprepared for what awaited me in Medical Apartheid.

Still, there is truly no way to be adequately prepared to read of the complete and total disregard for you and your people as human beings. The destruction of the body and mind in the name of cruelty disguised as science. And yet, I would rather know these things in intimate detail than remain ignorant to the suffering we were forced to endure. I will not turn a blind eye because it is “uncomfortable.” I will bear witness in order to honor and remember their pain. And I will use this knowledge to remain aware so when systems try to run this playbook again, I will not be fooled, placated or taken unawares.

So I said all that to say this. Read the book. It is hard and uncomfortable and enraging. But history, which is rarely easy, is always necessary to be understood if we hope for it to remain history and not become our present or future.