Fighting racism and finding acceptance in the health industry with Rev. Donna Owusu-Ansah

As I shared in last week's episode on resetting, I am personally on a journey of listening and learning to the Black community to understand their challenges and become an ally in racial reconciliation. I welcome hard discussions here on the Graced Health podcast as they relate to the health and wellness industry.

I invited Reverend Donna Owusu-Ansah, a hospice chaplain and associate pastor in New Jersey, to the show in March 2020 (Season 3) to talk about her health and wellbeing as it relates to being a pastor, mother, wife, and woman. If you haven’t listened to that conversation, I recommend you go back and do so. She brought so much wisdom and grace to that topic. 

However, in that episode I felt like I missed an opportunity to dig into something she said, which was “I had postpartum depression and I was also living in a community that was not welcoming of my presence, so I didn’t have friends.” After we saw Breonna Taylor tragically shot to death in March, learned in May of Ahmaud Arberry’s killing while running, and George Floyd breathlessly die under the knee of a police officer in late May, I knew I needed to open that door. 

Reverend Donna graciously accepted my invitation to come back and talk about her experiences of not feeling welcomed, and we expanded on that by talking about implicit bias, what we can do about biases in the wellness industry, and how to check ourselves. 

Find full show notes at https://www.gracedhealth.com/fighting-racism-rev-donna-owusu-ansah


We discuss:

• The broad scope of the challenges of living healthy for Black community, especially Black women
• Her experiences of feeling unwelcome in the fitness community
• How whites can partner together to become allies with the Black community
• Implicit bias and how we may be unconsciously exhibiting bias
• The implicit bias that can exhibited in the medical community
• What we can do about biases we recognize in ourselves
• Why am I doing, thinking and feeling what I’m doing, thinking and feeling?
• The whiteness of the wellness industry and why more representation is important
• The importance of Black Girls Run and other organizations that promote wellness within communities of color
• How to make fitness opportunities more available beyond the “ingroup”
• Loves...Regardless: A love and spirit offering to Black women

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