An African American man struggles to raise his newborn twins and seek justice for his fiancee after she dies while giving birth due to a mistake that her doctors could have prevented.
When I was a teenager, I attended a breast cancer awareness event where I learned that women should check their breasts and armpits monthly. Since then, I have continued this ritual on the 1st of every month. One day, I noticed I had a bump on my armpit. Though it was bound to be just a razor nip, I went to urgent care to have it scanned. I waited an hour until I was put in a private room with a white female doctor.
Invested in her charts, she asked me various questions without paying much attention to me and mumbled something about taking aspirin before exiting. I continued to wait until a nurse came in and told me I was discharged. I hadn’t even taken off my shirt. In the car afterwards, I angrily called a sorority sister to complain about the neglectfulness of the appointment and was shocked when my rant was met with laughter.
“Come on, Zaire. What did you expect? You know we have to go to black, female doctors.”
Though this was my first experience being treated as lesser than in a healthcare scenario, my friend’s words showed me that I was not the first black girl to not be taken seriously while seeking care.
“What did you expect?”
Those words solidified that we know the numbers. We know the statistics. We know it’s not right. So why does it continue?
To receive a white coat, doctors have to swear upon the Hippocratic oath and pledge to do all in their power to provide treatment to those who need it, And yet, black women are three to four times more likely than white women to die while giving birth. Black maternal mortality rates are even higher in the south.
Brown Babies is a not-so-hit-on-the head, impactful film that will take the viewer through a black man’s experience of losing his educated, carefree young wife to a racist system, while continuing to pick up the pieces of his broken family.
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