TMC scientists and health professionals hold walking vigil for black lives
Wearing white coats, scrubs and street clothes, more than 1,000 Texas Medical Center scientists, students, researchers and health care professionals gathered on a hot Tuesday afternoon for a walking vigil to support the black community and the eradication of police violence.
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As they walked a 30-minute loop around the Texas Medical Center, wearing masks and carrying signs with messages that included “Black Lives Matter,” a private funeral for George Floyd—the Houston-raised black man whose May 25 death at the knee of a white police officer ignited global outrage—was being held at The Fountain of Praise church in Houston.
The walking vigil, organized by Ayesha Khan and Malcolm Moses, began and ended by the water wall of the John P. McGovern Texas Medical Center Commons.
“The TMC is often considered a ‘bubble’ immune to activism and social advocacy,” said Khan, a postdoctoral fellow in infectious diseases at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) and president of the Association of Minority Biomedical Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. “I organized this protest because I saw black members of the TMC community fighting systemic racism that is killing their community on several fronts—police brutality, institutional racism in academia, health disparities, the school-to-prison pipeline, the prison industrial complex, and more. … Black members of our community also felt like their TMC co-workers lacked awareness, or focused more on the method of resistance rather than the racism itself that is killing black people. So we wanted to shift that narrative and normalize political actions, civil dissent, resistance, and activism at the heart of the TMC.”
Moses, a graduate student in genetics and epigenetics and president of the Graduate Student Association at MD Anderson UTHealth Graduate School, said it is important for medical professionals to address major risks to human life—including black lives in the community.
“I’m most afraid of silence and ‘normal,'” Moses said. “I’m afraid that our voices will continue to fall on deaf ears while the biomedical industry continues to fail black and brown people.”
For additional resources and more information about the demonstration, click here.