Schisms and Isms: Todays' ism is racism mixed with pure sexism

UPDATE:

I’ve previously written about the Ugly Underbelly of the Global Health Industry, the following email trail and correspondence are a visceral demonstration of what that piece described, and speaks for itself.

This substack is one of the hardest to publish, but possibly one of the most necessary. Just the other day I spoke about the three ‘isms’ and mere hours later, I was confronted in my own life with the brutal, painful evidence of systemic racism, misogyny and sexism.

Ironically these individuals – one of whom recently sat on the Mpox IHR Emergency Committee 2024 – will use and abuse the platforms of global institutions – their access to power, their access to academic institutions and to donors to slander, malign, denigrate, and abuse. Comfortable to do so on official platforms because of what can only be described as white privilege. The type of privilege that says there are no consequences for people like us. Expressing their outrage that the people from the Global South should have any type of leadership position in a space that they consider solely their own.

It begs the question, are those who consider us of the Global South so unworthy indeed worthy themselves to sit at tables where lives are being decided?

Sadly, these vile messages are just the tip of the iceberg. There are messages that reflect collusion with a former board member and Professor to systematically undermine and collapse the organisation. Emails have been sent to the Director of the London School of Tropical Medicine with the offer of a drink to truly dissect and slander a black woman. And they have also been sent to a Special Advisor on Global Health to the President of the European Commission. These are the power circles that control our so-called world of Global Health.

Read their words for yourself below and reflect – as I now have to – that if this is what they’re comfortable putting on official email, what do they say in private within their own circles of power?…

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Here I organised a birthday surprise for one of the authors pictured above, and received a thank you - mere months before he refers to me in the most vile and degrading of terms.