Would there ever be a Trayvon’s Law?
Back when I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, I remember picking up a women’s magazine and reading one of the token “substance stories”— about health care horror stories—included amongst the articles and ads about fashion and cosmetics. In one of the stories, a Black woman described an outrageous experience of going to the hospital with a serious medical problem, yet being left to wait, unexamined and untreated, for hours. Later, when asked to explain why that happened, a hospital employee involved in the receiving process said something along the lines of, “Well, I just assumed that she was some welfare person who didn’t have insurance,” and so he just left her.
By then, I had some understanding that things had historically been unfair to people who looked like me. But until that moment, I hadn’t really understood what my parents meant when they said that, even in the present day, the world was different for me because I was Black. Until then, it hadn’t fully occurred to