Black people are not a monolith and experience anti-Black racism in a wide variety of ways.
That includes Black seniors, who are made invisible by the system but are hyper-visible at the same time, said Elvenia Gray-Sandiford, a community development practitioner, educator and social justice advocate with more than 40 years of experience.
That’s true in accessing health care, she said.
Many Black seniors are hesitant to “rock the boat” because they are afraid they’ll be punished, like their doctor refusing to see them, she said.
But their experiences aren’t talked about or measured, and without data things won’t change, Gray-Sandiford said. She’s got a plan to tackle that.
Gray-Sandiford moved to Canada in 1987 under the Domestic Workers Program. Participants could apply for landed immigrant status once they’d “made something of ourselves,” like going to school — which is hard to do when caring for someone else’s family round-the-clock for five days a week, she said. Immigrants also had to pay a $950 processing fee per household member, even if a child had been born in Canada or they were married, she said.
She started the Young Vibration Dance and Cultural Workshop in 1988 to teach and celebrate Black history and volunteered with the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter for 20 years while working as a community and family development practitioner for a number of community organizations.
Gray-Sandiford’s latest project is the Harambee Alliance for Health, Wellness and Aging Society, which she helped co-found and register in 2025. She is the director.
This Saturday the society is hosting its first symposium and expo called “Disrupting Ageism, Centring Black Lives.”
Speakers will include experts on sickle cell disease, dementia in the Black community, Black joy and purposeful aging and a possible appearance by Jean Augustine, who championed Black History Month in Canada. There will also be food, music and dance.
The Tyee spoke with Gray-Sandiford ahead of the symposium to talk about how anti-Black racism shows up in health care and what we can do about it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Tyee: What kind of health care inequalities have you seen here in B.C.?
Elvenia Gray-Sandiford: I’d always be advocating for people in crisis with sickle cell disease. People here don’t know about sickle cell so we’d go to the hospital and explain this person is not drug seeking, they are having a sickle cell flare up. Sometimes they’d even call the police, so I’d have to go to the police station to advocate for them.
There’s uterine fibroids. As early as 18, Black girls can be diagnosed with fibroids. There hasn’t been any research done in B.C. Toronto is just starting. Research from the U.S. says three out of every 10 Black girls will have fibroids.
It takes a while to get diagnosed here because white women don’t usually get fibroids, but for us it’s a regular thing. It can bloat your belly, it can stop women from getting pregnant, it can cause heavy bleeding during a period. In Canada doctors recommend removing the whole uterus. In the Caribbean there’s a less invasive surgery.
Diabetes effects Black people differently. This comes from the slavery days when slaves were given scraps of meat that they cured with salt brines. Even then they were eating a lot of salt, and these are the meals we grew up eating today.
The pulse oximeter, which clips to the end of your finger [and reads blood oxygen levels and heart rate], reads Black skin different than white skin. The U.S. Food and Drug [Administration] put out a call in 2022 to change it, but the ones that people have in their homes are probably still the same.
Black people have to be sicker in order to qualify for a kidney transplant.
Skin cancer or anything else that is on the skin looks different on Black skin too. You go to a doctor and they pull out a reference book, but all they’re seeing in the book is white skin. When people aren’t able to offer culturally sensitive care, I don’t think it’s because they’re racist. It’s because the system was not set up for us to be a part of it.
I went back to school during COVID and the George Floyd uprising. I didn’t hear anybody teaching about how to work with Black families. But when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock we spent 25 minutes in class talking about it. When I asked why, my professor had me stay back to tell me how much I’m angry. And then I got angry.
I have a lot of professors telling me it’s not their job to teach people how not be racist. That’s not a fair statement because it’s your job to teach them what they’re going to find in the workplace.
You can’t learn from a book when the book wasn’t written with nobody else in mind but one set of people. That’s another way curriculums need to change — the books need to change.
That’s one of the reasons I went back to school, because my intention was to start to rewrite some psychology book and get our narratives in the book as well.
When did you help create the Harambee Alliance for Health, Wellness and Aging Society?
I was hearing all of these stories in school.
A teacher who had uterine fibroids and lived in the Interior. Doctors were sending her from one place to the next, which is a long way to travel for medical care in the Interior. Two summers ago she flew to Jamaica to have the surgery.
There was another woman who was in pain and I kept telling her to get tested for sickle cell. But the only sickle cell clinic in B.C. for adults at St. Paul’s [Hospital] is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. When you have a job, that’s really hard.
An African man had a child with a white woman and this little baby kept crying and crying and crying. Doctors said they can’t find what’s wrong with her. They were going to the Ivory Coast on a holiday and I told them to take their baby to a doctor there. They came back from their holiday and said the doctor found sickle cell.
But the doctor here couldn’t find it because they’re not looking for it in a mixed-race baby.
So I’m like, okay things really need to start changing. This is how [Harambee Alliance for Health, Wellness and Aging Society] was born. Let’s talk to people, ask “how are you doing?”
We’ve been doing stuff for the past two years but registered as a society in 2025.
We heard about the Black Health Alliance in Ontario and Taibu Community Health Centre. They’re trying to create a framework on Black health inequity. I said, “Oh, that’s impressive. Would you help us do that?”
So the Black Health Alliance is mentoring us to do that. We’re co-ordinating people to come together.
We have a symposium this Saturday bringing experts and community members together. We start with education, with gathering, mobilizing and organizing so we can put together a Black health advisory committee.
This will be a framework, a pathway. And we want to write it, because you all are not doing a good job. You can’t fix something that was not made for you. We can’t go in and try to adjust it because the health system was designed around white people. We were never part of the original assumption, the data or the planning.
When I first moved to Canada I would spend weekends at my sister’s house. We would meet and invite women to that house on the weekend, where we’d put our money together and cook, play our music and make ourselves happy.
Now I’m finding the majority of these women have breast cancer.
We used to sleep across the bed so everybody had a place to sleep, and how I hear they’re suffering in silence. That’s not right. That’s not normal.
Once we have the stats and we have the data we can write plans for how we want to deal with this.
Once we have the framework on Black health inequity, we can hold people accountable and say, “How are we going to get this done?” But right now we don’t have anything like that.
What kind of Black community engagement has Harambee Alliance for Health, Wellness and Aging Society been able to do?
We were going anywhere people were gathering, about eight different places. It’s not about us, the seven people who came together to say let’s start this. It’s about everybody, as long as you have melanin in your skin.
Things like sickle cell runs through people with melanin. It runs through the Black community, through the South Asian community, the Caribbean and Middle Eastern communities.
Some people are told its fibromyalgia because that’s the closest thing doctors can see when a body is aching. But the two are treated differently.
So we’re hoping to have people doing the research, writing and we can come together as an advisory committee and create the pathway for change.
I’ve suggested putting a Black community health clinic in when they rebuild Hogan’s Alley. We need to be integrated into the regular health-care system, but we need to start from somewhere. Black bodies bear a lot of pain and people have assumptions about our bodies. That needs to change. We have to start somewhere, so I’m hoping that this is the start.
It’s been 30 years since B.C. started recognizing Black History Month. In what ways have you seen inequality reduced, or perhaps not changed or gotten worse?
With what’s going on across the border, it’s almost a go pass to be racist. I keep hearing, “You’re so lucky you’re not living across the border.” Well, no, because you’re still racist here. Right here beside me.
I first went to university in 1992 and I went back during COVID. I was asking people, what has changed? Because I am feeling the same way.
In school I did a research project on the Maroons from Jamaica who went to and built Nova Scotia. A teacher that I had wanted to get the research published — and then come and teach it in her class.
I’m in my mid-60s going to university and you’re asking me to come to your class but you’re not saying you’ll pay me or compensate me in any way? How far have we come in 30 years again?
Why am I still feeling the pain of being dismissed when I go to the doctor? Why am I leaving the doctor’s office and crying in 2025 like I was doing in 1987?
Our children are able to go to university, they’re being educated. But are we being invited to the table?
We’re always compared to something else. But every disenfranchisement is their own. We’re not just talking about racism, we’re talking about anti-Black racism. But people don’t want to use that word because anti-Black racism is the aggressive kind of racism.
We don’t tolerate pain any more than anybody else. Our skin is not thicker. But those are assumptions that make our treatment in health care unequal. For someone to go through a lifetime facing the racism, the microaggressions that we have, especially for those of us who have been here a long time? It affects our nervous system. It sits in our body for years and years. And when we get to 55 plus it’s compounded with ageism.
The Black and Aging Symposium & Expo — “Disrupting Ageism, Centring Black Lives” will take place Saturday at Langara College in the main floor of the T building, which is closest to the Canada Line station. The event is hosted by the Harambee Alliance for Health, Wellness and Aging Society. The symposium is 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and the Black Health Expo is 3 to 7 p.m. ![[Tyee]](https://thetyee.ca/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}
