Adjustment
Health Promotion Practice (2022)
“I wish you could
see our sun
the way we see it
see it dance
break
open the magic
see us glow”
Abstract
The adult spine, aka backbone, is composed of 24 segments. Separately, each segment is incapable of animating our bodies. Communities of color, low-income communities, and other marginalized groups represent the backbone of the health equity research enterprise—it literally cannot exist without our bodies and what they are subjected to in the face of structural inequality. And more often than not, researchers believe they can break our bodies into discrete segments and somehow animate a body of literature capable of healing a whole us. This poem, as counternarrative and enactment of public health critical race praxis principles of “voice” and “disciplinary self-critique”, engages the spine as metaphor to name and render visible the epistemic and symbolic violences that prop up public health’s body of evidence/knowledge. In doing so, it challenges the field’s dominant knowledge production paradigm (e.g. positivist reductionism), and draws attention to the settler-colonial, racial-capitalist, and extractivist logics of racial and health equity discourses dominated by narratives produced by mostly White scholars and “health equity tourists”, often using complex statistical techniques to complete secondary quantitative analyses about health in communities they’ve never stepped a single foot in. Under this paradigm, scores of researchers/practitioners are led to believe that they can somehow come to “know” us via variables and models alone. This poem suggests that—more than anything else—this model of practice is what’s most in need of adjustment, and warrants a greater degree of ethical scrutiny than historically/presently afforded. To view the original version of this poem, see the supplemental material section of this article online.
Excerpt
“You described how you used factor analysis to cut
our stories in to fragments
small enough to smuggle
on board a flash drive
they clapped when you finished
stood tall as if celebrating
the planting of a new flag
discovered frontiers behind
front curtains we suck
front teeth when you come
our homes turned homesteads
our bodies punctured soil
plasma, oil ritual, withdrawn
we fear we might bleed out
if we pull the poles free
our wounds will they heal?
what shape do scars take
when they’re fully adjusted?
do they rise to greet our children’s
nervous fingers reading our skin
learning their lineage embodied
embedded and threaded through
each blooming smile you buried
beneath various variants of “risk”?
can we survive unadjusted?
can you survive
adjustment?”