Health disparities across the country have historically deprived the Black community of viable aid and trust in the medical field and increased the risk of diseases, among other underlying issues. The founding of Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science (CDU) was a major step toward health equality. On Thursday, Feb. 27, CDU hosted its 10th annual President’s Breakfast at the Colburn School of Performing Arts in downtown Los Angeles. The event brought together key voices in healthcare and policy to discuss this year’s theme: “Health Disparities: Are We Better Now?”
“For the last nine years, the Breakfast’s speakers and panelists have engaged in thought-provoking, controversial, and inspiring dialogue that reflects on the topic’s history, takes inventory of the challenges faced and progress made, and outlines the work ahead,” said CDU President and CEO Dr. David M. Carlisle in his opening remarks. “For the first time in ten years, the CDU President’s Breakfast will also address the real possibility and consequences of losing ground and regressing on a critical societal issue and human right.
The Honorable Xavier Becerra, former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, delivered a keynote address that underscored the persistent challenges facing underserved communities while offering a message of resilience and action.
“We need to move from a system that treats an illness to one that promotes wellness,” he stressed, calling for a more preventative approach to healthcare that prioritizes long-term community well-being over-reactive treatment.
“We’re repairing a bunch of broken men and women, and we’re spending big money to do that,” said Becerra. “If we had spent the money to build strong children from the very beginning, can you imagine the might of this country…”
The health disparities many Black communities face were key to the rapid development of several health issues such as obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and cancer, among other issues.
According to Department of Health & Human Services (HHS):
• Non-Hispanic Black or African American students in grades 9–12 were 50 percent more
likely to be obese than non-Hispanic White students in 2023.
• Non-Hispanic Black or African American female students were almost 2 times more likely to be obese than non-Hispanic White female students.
• Non-Hispanic Black or African American male students were 30 percent more likely to
be obese than non-Hispanic White male students. In 2023, non-Hispanic Black or African
American adults were 30 percent more likely to be obese than non-Hispanic White adults.
• African Americans have a higher cancer burden and face greater obstacles to cancer pre-
vention, detection, treatment, and survival.
Research has shown that:
• African Americans experience more illness, worse outcomes, and premature death compared to White people.
• African Americans have the highest death rate and shortest survival of any racial/ethnic
group for most cancers. African American men also have the highest cancer incidence.
• Cancer death rates in Black men are twice as high as in Asians and Pacific Islanders, who
have the lowest rates.
• Prostate cancer death rates in Black men are more than double those of every other
racial/ethnic group.
• Black women are 40 percent more likely to die of breast cancer than White women and are twice as likely to die if they are younger than 50.
• About a third of African American women reported experiencing racial discrimination at
a health provider visit.
• Living in segregated communities and areas highly populated with African Americans has been associated with increased chances of getting diagnosed with cancer after it has spread, along with having higher death rates and lower rates of survival from breast and lung cancers.
Dr. Paula Braveman, Professor Emeritus of Family and Community Medicine and the Founding Director of the Center for Health Equity at the University of California, San Francisco, highlighted the pervasive influence of structural racism on health disparities, particularly in maternal and infant care. “What people don’t think about so much is that racism acts more indirectly and is mostly structural,” she explained. She pointed to racial residential segregation and disparities in bank lending as key contributors to underfunded schools, reduced economic opportunity, and increased stress—factors that ultimately impact health outcomes. “At this point in our history, structural racism is probably more deadly in terms of what its effects are.”
• Black Californians have the shortest life expectancy at 74.6 years. One in four Black
respondents in the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) felt they could have received
better care if they were of a different race/ethnicity. In 2020, Black Californians had a higher percentage of preventable hospitalizations, and Black adults had higher unplanned hospital readmission rates than those of other races/ethnicities.
• In 2021, the percentage of Black infants who were born preterm, 12.7 percent, or who had
low birthweight, 12.4 percent, was higher than those of other races/ethnicities.
• Black mothers experienced the highes maternal mortality rate among all races/ethnicities between 2018 and 2020.
Dr. David Hayes-Bautista, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at the School of Medicine at UCLA, addressed how traditional racial and ethnic categories in health research can help and hinder efforts to address disparities. “We need to create a new way of defining human alikeness and human differences, a more fluid, more dynamic,” he stated. He emphasized the need for a framework that better captures the complexity of health disparities while maintaining predictive power. Hayes-Bautista also noted CDU’s unique positioning as both a Historically Black Graduate Institution and a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI), calling it “ground zero for this new way of thinking about a multiracial and multicultural society.”