Michelle and I just got back from visiting the African American museum in DC again as part of our family reunion this past weekend. That place holds so much grief, so much resilience.
What’s in those walls is still in our systems.
You’re not just seeing history—you’re seeing the roots of today’s injustice.
It hits you: this history didn’t end. It just changed forms.
On the way home, Michelle told me when she first got to Duke for her residency, she was confused by the bathrooms—two sets of them, side by side…one set for “Colored” folks. Still there after all this time, like a silent witness to the roots we haven’t yet pulled up.
Then I saw this story today:
Trump threatens to freeze federal health funding for Duke over race-based medicine research - https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/29/politics/trump-duke-freeze-funding-health-race
The breathtaking irony, right?
They’re literally threatening to defund Duke for trying to understand how race impacts health outcomes. As if that’s some fringe political agenda instead of… you know, real life.
As if we can separate medicine from the racism that shaped who got care, who didn’t, who was believed, and who was experimented on. As if Black maternal mortality rates and pain disparities don’t exist.
The bathrooms are still standing.
The legacy is still here.
But the research to address it? That’s what’s being attacked?
This isn’t just about Duke. Or funding. Or even healthcare.
It’s about what we choose to remember—and what we’re told to forget.
It’s about whose pain is seen as valid.
Whose truth is “too political.”
And what happens when we pretend racism is just a chapter in a textbook. A textbook they are trying to change or burn.
History is not past. It’s right here, in the walls, in the bodies, in the policies.
And we’ve got to keep telling the truth
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