Black History Month

Black History Month Day 22: Medicine Has a Memory

Black History Fact:
Black Americans were subjected to medical experimentation without consent, including the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which continued until 1972.

Trust is not broken overnight.

Black history shows us that medicine has often been a site of harm rather than healing for Black communities. Bodies were used, studied, neglected—and lied to.

This history matters when we talk about health disparities, maternal mortality, pain dismissal, and distrust of healthcare systems today.

These outcomes are not about “noncompliance.”

They are about memory.

Systems that harmed must earn trust—not demand it.

Ignoring that history does not make it irrelevant. It makes it repeatable.

Black History Month Day 23: Labor Was Never Just Work

Black History Fact:
Enslaved Black labor generated enormous wealth for the United States, particularly through cotton, which by the mid-1800s accounted for more than half of U.S. export value.

Black labor built this economy—and then was written out of its rewards.

This country’s wealth did not emerge from ingenuity alone. It came from bodies. From backs. From forced labor that was never compensated, never acknowledged, and never repaired.

After slavery, Black labor was still exploited—sharecropping, domestic work, industrial labor—often excluded from labor protections, unions, and minimum wage laws. That exclusion was intentional.

Black history reminds us that “hard work” has never been the problem.

The problem has always been who gets paid for it.

Today, Black workers are still overrepresented in essential jobs and underrepresented in wealth. We praise labor while resisting fair wages. We applaud service while denying security.

The myth of merit collapses under history.

Work alone has never guaranteed dignity.

You’re weary of the history.

I understand that. Truly. It is exhausting to keep walking back through burning churches, auction blocks, segregated classrooms, redlined neighborhoods, mass incarceration statistics. It is exhausting to read names, dates, court cases, lynchings, marches, broken promises. It is exhausting to admit that the story we were handed in elementary school was incomplete at best and deliberately polished at worst.

But here is the harder truth.

For many Americans, that history is not a chapter. It is an inheritance.

It lives in the schools that are still underfunded. It lives in neighborhoods shaped by red lines drawn generations ago. It lives in medical disparities, wealth gaps, sentencing disparities, and in the quiet calculations people make every day for safety.

If hearing about it feels heavy, imagine carrying it.

The weariness some of us feel reading about racism is not the same as living inside its consequences. Fatigue is not oppression. Discomfort is not danger. Annoyance is not injustice.

Many of us have had the luxury of tuning it out. Of saying, “That was then.” Of assuming fairness because we have mostly experienced it.

But history does not evaporate just because we are tired of it.

If we are weary, perhaps that is the first honest sign that we are finally paying attention. And attention is the beginning of responsibility.

So yes. It is wearisome.

Too damn bad.

Growth is wearisome. Accountability is wearisome. Change is wearisome.

Justice has never been powered by comfort.

If the repetition grates on us, good. Let it grate. Let it interrupt. Let it disturb the smooth surface of our narratives.

The goal was never to make us comfortable.

The goal is to make us awake.

And once awake, we no longer get to pretend we did not see.

Julie Bolejack, MBA

P.S. I share these daily reflections not as history lessons alone, but as invitations — to notice, to question, and to act where conscience meets opportunity. The patterns we study are not confined to the past, and silence has never protected the vulnerable. If something here moves you, let it move your voice, your vote, your conversations, and your community.

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