When envisioning a better health care system, Ndifreke Ikpe said the solution resembles much of what she saw during last week’s March On! Festival: a collaborative union of activism and storytelling challenging historic roots of inequity.
Guided under a 2025 theme of: “The Right to Be Well,” March On! Festival – the nation’s longest-running civil rights film festival – deemed Washington as the place to champion health equity and wellness Sept. 15-21. Instead of simply filmmakers, the festival united creatives, lawmakers, health and wellness leaders and advocates from around the globe with the tools to drive equitable public health.
“Health equity begins when America recognizes all of the inequities that have been built into the very foundation of our health care system,” Ikpe, a health equity trainee, told The Informer. “Racism’s been used in medicine for centuries, and we’ve been building on it and [not addressing] the harmful legacies that have contributed to people in marginalized communities having poor health outcomes.”
As the city played host to a hybrid series of panels, workshops and celebratory soirees, Ikpe counted among many demanding accountability for the stark odds in Black health and wellness.
Health experts and students alike addressed disparities across various topics, from the nationwide impacts of COVID-19 among African Americans, to the disproportionate rates of issues like maternal mortality, breast and urine cancers in Black women and prostate cancer in men, compared to their white counterparts.
Meanwhile, artivism thrived through documentaries like “Critical Condition: Health in Black America,” which hosted a Sept. 18 panel at Howard University Hospital inviting attendees – including Ikpe – to journey through systemic trends that leave Black Americans nearly twice as likely to suffer from high blood pressure, diabetes or heart disease.
At the Sept. 15 opening webinar, doctors and health advocates Aletha Maybank of Truthlight Studio, “Instagram’s Medical Mythbuster” Joel Bervell, and Uché Blackstock, founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, joined forces to unpack generational medical myths and misguided narrative. In a three-part discussion, the experts touted the power of storytelling in connecting lived experiences to the truths of modern health care.
“We rarely hear about how Black communities were systemically excluded from life saving trials, how Indigenous health sovereignty was ended, or how medical myths that were rooted in slavery still echo in today’s health care system,” Bervell said, “and they aren’t just history lessons – they’re urgent warnings, especially today.”
The March On! Fest comes at a time of discouragement for equity standards and health protections nationwide. On the list of major recent setbacks: threats to Medicare and Medicaid; the purge on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI); rollbacks on policies with the Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration; cuts to public health funding; and attempts to erase African American progress and history, to name a few.
For Bervell, this marks an even more crucial moment to celebrate initiatives that embody the walk of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, including March On!, which once bore the name March on Washington Film Festival.
Lauding the opportunity to build on ancestral resistance, the Peabody Award-winning physician reminded folks that the mission for collective justice then – just like now – “wasn’t just fought in the courtrooms and on the streets.”
“Art and activism together make inequality impossible to ignore, and it invites people to imagine an alternative of what it is right now,” Burvell said. “We have to pair data with lived experiences, making sure that we’re building coalitions that unite patients, unite providers, unite policymakers, and refuse to let equity be treated as just a temporary trend.”
‘March On!’ Addresses Why Health Equity Exists, What It Looks Like Today
Throughout the weeklong festival, the diverse array of speakers made it clear – when it comes to health outcomes, biology plays less of a role than people think.
Alongside socioeconomic factors – living wages, educational status, access to quality care and resources – Dr. Sharon Malone, a nationally renowned women’s health expert, told March On! attendees that she attributes 80% of health disparities to environmental placement, which evidently traces back to residential segregation that began in the 1930s.
“You can’t underplay the role of racism in this system,” Malone said on Sept. 19, while speaking at the “Grown Folk Talk: Grand Rounds on Women’s and Men’s Health” panel. “But you cannot ignore the fact that, even as a Black physician in this country, we have been raised and educated in a system that is inherently racist in its views.”
As panelists and film sources for Thursday’s “Critical Condition: Health in Black America,” Dr. Vanessa Northington Gamble, a professor at George Washington University, and American Academy of Pediatrics Senior Vice President Dr. Joseph Wright chronicled the intersections of systemic racism and medical health on and off the screen.
With note to historic themes of oppression, the health care duo candidly mapped a framework that can be traced to pseudoscientific origins to enforce labor on enslaved peoples in the mid-1800s.
Now, Wright, also chief health equity officer, said it exists in modern practices based in inaccurate “race-normed” science, such as use of the spirometer, a tool used to measure airflow and test pulmonary function; the pulse oximeter; and how the process to diagnose urinary tract infections in children is based in “a dichotomizing variable around race.”
Emphasizing the flaws behind the thinking, Northington Gamble explained the core of scientific racism.
“It’s not that Black bodies are different,” she said, “it’s that Black bodies, and Black people, are inferior.”
Malone said that today’s health professionals also play a role in tipping the scales on equity, notably pointing to the alarming racial disparities in maternal health.
The D.C.-based OB/GBYN charged physicians, regardless of race or background, to approach health care from the lens of improving “a population of a people,” while highlighting the need to work on “the before, the during, and the after.”
“What you are when you’re 16, 17, 20 is gonna be determinative of how you do in a pregnancy. [Similarly], there are conditions in pregnancy that put you at higher risk of other chronic diseases as you age,” she explained. “Nobody educates you on the front end of the kind of things we should be doing to make sure you don’t end up there, and that’s where, I think, that our profession has failed.”
Turning Cause to Action
In the aftermath of the weeklong festival, Wright told The Informer he hopes attendees leave with the fuel to confront public health concerns in their own lives and communities, “and make sure that we don’t repeat them.”
While he focuses on tackling racial bias in medical algorithms, other festival leaders made a case for prioritizing structural investments, such as clean air, stable housing, quality food, and investing in community-based organizations that approach health holistically.
On the topic of urgent reform, Bervell called for systemic disruptors that start with accountability, representation, and access, and challenged the public health sector to embed equity metrics “into how we measure health care success.”
“That means designing systems that are representative…not just treatments, but devices, drugs, clinical trials that reflect the diversity of the patients that they’re meant to serve,” he continued.
To build standard care from the inside-out, he suggested aligning physicians incentives, dismantling models “that often reward volume over equity,” and ensuring that culturally competent care isn’t optional, but a standard woven into daily practice.
Inspired by the festival, Ikpe told The Informer immersing in community and storytelling is one of the “the biggest and easiest” ways to raise awareness and fight the road ahead.
While she plans to continue working toward medical equity and appreciates organizations such as March On! fighting for civil rights through film, Northington Gamble also emphasized the role of the Black Press in moving justice forward.
“Historically, it was Black journalists and Black newspapers who were the trusted messengers, but also they were the ones who revealed the inequities and kept telling the story,” Northington Gamble said during a Q&A on Sept. 18. “It’s more important these days that we have folks [such as The Washington Informer] telling these stories.”