Commentary: Dr. Mark Dworkin on George Floyd and Racial Disparities in Health
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When I was 4 years old, in 1968, my parents took my brother and I to my grandparent’s home in a suburb of Detroit – about 10 minutes by car. It was April. My family is white and Jewish. I say that just to give my history some context. On this visit, of which I admit I have no memory, something changed. I say that because we visited their home several times each month so I know we visited in April. I say that also because it was from this month on, for the rest of my grandparent’s lives, that there would be three living in their home, not just two.
Enos Williams was born in the south and came to Detroit in the 1920s – most likely for the same reasons many other African Americans did – to escape racism and hostility and seek economic opportunity. I don’t know more about his early life but either his parents or his grandparents would have been slaves. I don’t know in what year but at some point, probably in the 1920s, he was employed by my great grandfather and worked and lived in a rental property as a maintenance man. When my mother recalls her childhood, she remembers Enos as a friend of her father as they were of similar age. I knew nothing of this at 4 years old. What I know is that every day I can recall visiting my grandparent’s home, there were my grandparents and there was Enos – sitting in the living room with us or having dinner served to him by my grandmother. And when I went to the basement to play and explore, there was his bed, his cigarettes, and his brand new white shirts still in their wrappers, stacked by his bedside, as he would receive them as gifts but never open them. He said they were too nice and didn’t want to get them dirty. I don’t know if Enos had ever had a family – a wife and children. But I know that he had no other family that we knew of, besides us.
The story of Martin Luther King’s assassination is known to many. But for me, I understand it in a unique way and with an important lesson of teaching by example – a unique gift given by my grandparents that I treasure to this day. When Martin Luther King was assassinated, Detroit was one of the cities that experienced riots. I am told that men came to the building that my grandfather owned with intent to set it on fire. Enos was outside and told these men in an attempt to save it that it was owned by a Black man. They disregarded his words and that night it burnt to the ground – making homeless its tenants and Enos as well. In my grandparent’s home, they feared for his safety as they watched on television the unfolding events. These were days long before cell phones and there was no way to reach him. No way to know that he was walking for miles in the night to reach the one place he could go – to their home – to what would become his home. From that time on whenever I visited, among the greetings I received was, “Howdie Mawkie!” And as I sat on the couch on Friday night sleepovers with my brother, watching The Brady Bunch and Partridge Family, there was gray-haired Enos, sitting in his chair. I was too young to understand how and why he lived there, too young and too shy to ask. It was just the way it was.
I teach public health surveillance and field epidemiology and have been involved in a number of research studies. However, on Friday mornings I leave my home and instead of parking at Taylor and Paulina, I park at Damen and Harrison. This is the address of the Ruth M. Rothstein CORE Center, one of the largest HIV clinics in the US. Many of my patients are African American and experience the disparities that we teach about in our school – disparities of health, of economics, of the environment, and of justice. I ask them about their scars. Most are from gunshots, stabbings, and the impact from a car. Sometimes my patients vanish for months or more than a year from regular care. For those that reappear, I ask them, “What happened?” and the answer is often mental health exacerbation or imprisonment.
The current news coverage of the death of George Floyd and the protests pains me and gives me hope. Sometimes progress comes from pain – I hope that this will be one of those moments. And I think of Enos Williams, the events that brought him to my grandparent’s home, and the example they set by creating a safe space. We must push our society to do more – to do enough – to create a more equal and safe space for the many who have made it very clear that this has not been a safe space for far too long.
About the author Heading link
Dr. Mark Dworkin is a professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) School of Public Health. He is a board-certified infectious diseases physician with a master’s degree in public health and tropical medicine who was trained in the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service program. Dr. Dworkin has worked at the CDC in Atlanta in the Division of HIV/AIDS where he led a multi-city HIV surveillance project and served as the Illinois Department of Public Health’s State Epidemiologist where he led, presented, and published outbreak investigations and HIV surveillance analyses. As a professor and associate director of epidemiology in the division of epidemiology and biostatistics at the UIC School of Public Health, he teaches public health surveillance and outbreak investigation at the graduate level, consults with health departments, analyzes and publishes surveillance data, and performs and publishes HIV-related research, especially on the subject of antiretroviral adherence in young African American men who have sex with men and female sex workers. Dr. Dworkin has also co-taught for the undergraduate public health concentration. He is the editor and author of the textbook, Cases in Field Epidemiology: A Global Perspective that teaches outbreak and other field investigations and demonstrates the value of surveillance through illustrative examples of important outbreaks.