A Disparity

As a living being that was passed down the role of storytelling, I describe the conditions under which individuals find themselves. Science, and specifically public health research, affords me the opportunity to deploy my storytelling skills toward advocacy and intervention for communities that disproportionately bear the burden of poor health. Although neither role makes space for the emotional toll of this work. Neither allows me to rest long enough to move through the emotional mist of what it means to be perceived as a queer, Black, cisgender woman, and storytelling scientist in a stratified and hateful world where I am so much more. This poem pools from various worlds within me for each stanza. The poem seeks to reconcile for my whole self, and others who experience marginality, why our colleagues, countrypersons, and community members see it fit to perpetuate notions of human difference along racialized, socioeconomic, sexualized, gendered, able-bodied, and other stratified lines—to the detriment of our lives. How can my colleagues, countrypersons, and community members be willing to receive the privileges of a democratic society but discard the lives from which that society was built? How can my colleagues, countrypersons, and community members be willing to receive our science but discard our health? This poem brings together multidisciplinary discourse from the humanities and the social and biological sciences to state plainly what many others have academically. May this poem be paired with existing literature on the falsity of biologized race, reparations, and methodologies of reflexivity in science. To view the original version of this poem, see the Supplemental Material section of this article online.