(This Bridge Called Our Health is a volunteer-run platform for Black women, femmes, and girls, and non-Black women, femmes, and girls of color. We have launched a fundraiser in honor of #WorldHealthDay. Click here to support our work.)

Today is #WorldHealthDay, an annual observance hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO) to draw attention to a health issue the organization has deemed imperative to global “health.” As we mark this day, we must critically interrogate what “health” actually means for disenfranchised communities. How have capitalism, empire, structural oppression, and the systematic inaccessibility of healthcare shaped the health outcomes of trans, cis, and non-binary women, femmes, girls, and mothers of color? How do histories of structural violence continue to inform not only how health is distributed, but how it is defined, measured, and administered today? How have intergenerational trauma and chronic toxic stress constrained the health and healing possibilities of our grandmothers and granddaughters, our mothers and daughters, and ourselves?

While the World Health Organization continues to operate within a narrowly individualistic public health framework, this year choosing to focus primarily on diabetes awareness, we are critical of discourse that places responsibility for structurally produced health outcomes onto individuals. Diabetes is a serious and pressing health issue, yet it cannot be meaningfully addressed without structural analysis. According to WHO guidance, commonly proposed solutions to “beat diabetes” include improving diet, exercising more regularly, and adopting healthier lifestyles. These recommendations presume access, stability, and choice. For many of us living at the intersections of being Black, disabled, resource-poor, formerly or currently incarcerated, young or single mothers, queer and/or trans, and residing in food deserts or rural communities, such options are not readily available. We are often predisposed to these outcomes not by individual failure, but by sustained exposure to overlapping systems of violence, only to be told we are not doing enough to care for ourselves, as though we authored the oppressive conditions in which we are forced to survive.

It is critical to understand how dangerous this dominant construction of “health” truly is. Health discourse has long been shaped through fatphobia, anti-Blackness, ableism, medical racism, transmisogyny, and the authority of the Western medical-industrial complex, all while relying on the deliberate disenfranchisement of our communities. Structural factors such as income, race, class, gender, geography, and disability profoundly determine one’s proximity to an imagined and deeply contrived ideal of “health,” yet are routinely excluded from mainstream conversations.

At This Bridge Called Our Health, we recognize that conversations about community health are impossible without acknowledging the institutionalized trauma Black communities and non-Black communities of color experience globally. We cannot speak about public health reform without naming how Black women, femmes, and non-Black women and femmes of color have been systematically excluded from health provision frameworks through white supremacy and colonization. We cannot ignore the historical and ongoing reality that our bodies have been targeted, experimented upon, exploited, and discarded—often in service of advancing white women’s health—while our own needs are neglected. The lived experiences and knowledge of Black women and women of color have been erased from dominant health narratives, including those amplified on #WorldHealthDay, for far too long.

While we do not require validation from Western health institutions to affirm our experiences, the absence of structural accountability within these systems produces real harm. Those who seek care within mainstream medical spaces frequently encounter neglect, misdiagnosis, and inappropriate treatment, consequences that are often fatal. The health of Black women and non-Black women of color is urgent. Racialized and anti-Black violence both produces illness and obstructs access to healing.

#WorldHealthDay is often used as an opportunity for NGOs, public health agencies, and nonprofits—many embedded within the very political and economic systems that generate health inequities—to secure funding while perpetuating narrow, depoliticized approaches to care. We must interrogate who is funded, whose frameworks are legitimized, and which communities are excluded. Programs designed without collaboration from the communities most impacted by health inequity routinely fail those they claim to serve. This #WorldHealthDay, we challenge our communities to identify and support the true agents of change in health and healing. We honor traditional healers, community health workers, and ancestral practitioners who continue to resist the medical-industrial complex and sustain our communities despite systemic abandonment.

This Bridge Called Our Health is a platform dedicated to disrupting dominant health narratives and expanding the possibilities of healing for Black women, femmes, and girls, and non-Black women, femmes, and girls of color.

We invite our supporters to help us continue cultivating this work and challenging harmful health paradigms. Together, we can reimagine and build a world in which the lives, bodies, and well-being of women and femmes of color are treated as essential, not expendable. Please support and share our fundraising campaign to help us further elevate these voices.

Link: https://www.youcaring.com/this-bridge-called-our-health-551145