‘I feel that it’s imperative to share my experience as a Black man because of the stigma surrounding vaccines in our community.’
Many Black people experience vaccine hesitancy because of the long history of racism in health care in the United States, which in many ways is still present today. This racism is important to acknowledge, and so is the fact that vaccination is critical to ending the Covid-19 pandemic and protecting your loved ones. It can be difficult to reconcile these thoughts. Writer Tony Jones, M.A. wrote in LEVEL about his own experience making the decision to get vaccinated as a Black man.
“Honestly, doubts immediately popped into my mind when presented with this opportunity, but those thoughts quickly subsided,” he writes. “I thought about how things have changed since the Tuskegee experiment. Yes, there is still racism. And racist people would love nothing more than to see the demise of any other race in America that isn’t their own. But I don’t believe scientists created this vaccine to inject harm into people as a sick experiment to tear down another race.”
Read more from Jones on LEVEL:
