Last Friday, June 5, over a hundred Cooley Dickinson Hospital staff came together (socially distanced and masked) at a kneel-in vigil, joining thousands of others across the nation who are honoring George Floyd and speaking out against racism.
Racism is insidious for so many reasons; recently, we have been reminded in the harshest way that it is also a public health crisis as COVID-19 disproportionately affects communities of color. As our community’s health care provider and major employer, we have a particular obligation to speak out.
In that spirit, I am sharing with the community the comments I made at the vigil at Cooley.
“There is so much to say and yet, what more is there to say that we haven’t heard and read many times over in the last week? If we have learned nothing else since the day that George Floyd was murdered, we’ve learned that we haven’t talked enough about the horror of institutional racism and violence against people of color. We’ve also learned that talking and taking symbolic acts are necessary but not sufficient. We must sustain our outrage well beyond the news cycle and we must translate our grief, our words, and our symbolic actions into real change.
That’s not easy. It requires us to do so much more than to not be racists. It requires each of us to look inside ourselves and challenge how we view the world and how our words and actions reflect our own conscious and unconscious racism.
When I watched the video of the horrific eight minutes, 46 seconds that George Floyd was tortured to death, I am disgusted by Derek Chauvin. I am disgusted that any human being can do that and particularly disgusted that a police officer would behave with so much disregard for human life. But I’m not naïve. I’ve always known that there are bad people in the world who commit unspeakable acts.
What upset me even more was watching the three police officers who stood there, within just a few feet of Officer Chauvin, and watched him slowly murder George Floyd. And said nothing. Not one of them tried to stop the horror.
Then I think about the dozens or likely hundreds of people in Minneapolis’ police force and local government who knew that officer and others had used their positions of power before to perpetrate acts of violence on people of color. And yet, nothing was done.
I don’t believe that I know anyone personally who would ever do what Officer Chauvin did. I’m also fairly confident that none of us at Cooley would be one of those other three officers who stood by and let it happen. But I’m not as confident about whether all of us, including myself, would do enough to stand up, speak out, and take action … well before that fateful day, to ensure that the culture of that police force was changed and to ensure that Officer Chauvin would never have been in a position to commit this atrocity.
I commit and ask all of you to commit … to go beyond not being racist to being an active ally and bystander. To not just notice but to look for acts of racism and inequality and figure out what each of us can do to eliminate them. I also commit myself and ask you to as well, to not just disrupt individual acts of racism but take the next step and identify policies, practices, protocols that need to change within our community, within Cooley, within your departments, within your teams that produce inequities in our healthcare system both in how we provide care and how we treat our workforce.
We can and must do better. I commit that I will do better, that I will do all I can to make Cooley do better in this regard. I hope you’ll join me.”
It was clear that the staff at Cooley are committed to doing more to eliminate racism in our organization and in our community. We commit to partner with the many others who are also making such commitments in these difficult days.
Joanne Marqusee is President and Chief Executive Officer of Cooley Dickinson Health Care.