white4Black: a Black-centered approach for white people to dismantle white supremacy

The guiding principles of the white4Black movement

Welcome to white4Black. I’m Erin McHugh (she/her pronouns), a white middle-aged cisgender queer woman in the Twin Cities area in Minnesota. My grandfather was physician and medical civil rights advocate Dr. John P. McHugh of Brooklyn, NY and Rockford, IL. He was involved in medical civil rights advocacy his entire career and up until his death in 2017, tackling a variety of medical civil rights causes.

My grandfather’s first and foremost concern was for the Black community, especially with issues related to Black health and access to medical care, maternal and infant care, and access to abortion. He started working with the Crusader Clinic system in Rockford, IL in the 1950s and ran a fully-integrated medical practice. He recognized that there were serious inequities within the medical system and he vehemently argued that there is no place for segregation when it comes to healthcare. He had special concern for access to prenatal care, early childhood medical care, and access to abortion—he held fast that abortion is non-negotiable basic medical care and must be accessible to all.

I wanted to introduce my grandfather here and will be talking extensively about his teachings, such as how he raised me to have a Black-centered approach to politics and medical and educational inequities. His philosophy was that if a policy does not serve the needs of Black people, the most subjugated population in the country, then the policy is a failure and must be thrown out. From the time I was a young child, he taught me how to listen to the needs of Black people as spoken by Black people and that anti racism work is never finished, and that white people have a duty to do the work.

We have been failing Black people for hundreds of years. It is our duty as white people to act and organize, and to do so in a way that centers the needs of Black people. Join me and stick around as I share resources and facilitate discussions about anti-racism and dismantling white supremacy.