Abdul-Jabbar goes on to draw connections between the nation’s state of racial affairs and health outcomes in Black communities, pointing to “a wide spectrum of health threats built into the foundation of American society as solidly as steel girders holding up a bridge.”
He explains, “Most people know this is true, though some will deny it because they fear removing those rusty girders will cause the whole bridge to collapse. The truth is that those girders are already malignant with rust and will eventually collapse if we don’t address the underlying rot of systemic racism. San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge has 200 ironworkers, electricians, and painters who daily maintain the bridge’s integrity. If we want America to maintain its cultural integrity, we need to fix its structural flaws —and we need to do so on a daily basis.”
Abdul-Jabbar highlighted organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), National Urban League and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which, he says, are doing the work to address these longstanding issues — while also recognizing one of the most widely known, Black Lives Matter (BLM), a “less a traditional organization and more a movement of loosely affiliated activists across the country united by the credo that is their name,” he says.
“BLM started organizing in 2013 … But by 2020, after a series of police killings of unarmed Blacks that culminated with the suffocation of George Floyd, BLM had grown into the largest protest movement in the history of the United States. … But police brutality is merely the most dramatic and violent attack on the lives of African Americans. … The more insidious and damaging threat to the health, lives and economic well-being of Black Americans is a health care system that ignores the fact that, though they are most in need of medical services, they actually receive the lowest level,” writes Abdul-Jabbar.