Wellbeing is our birthright. The meaning of empowerment for women of color.

Abstract

The Brooklyn-based New York Black Women's Health Project is a chapter of the National Black Women's Health Project (NBWHP), which was founded in 1980 by Byllye Avery of Atlanta, Georgia, as a way of filling the void in both the mainstream health care system and the feminist health movement regarding the specific needs of African-American women. According to Avery, health education is "not just about giving information; people need something else ... We are dying inside ... Unless we are able to go inside ourselves and touch and breathe fire, breathe life into ourselves, [of] course, we couldn't be healthy. [We] started working on a workshop that we named 'Black and Female: What is the Reality?' This is a workshop that terrifies us all. And we are also terrified not to have it, because the conspiracy of silence is killing us." The NBWHP attempts to break this conspiracy of silence by giving African-American women an environment of supportive self-help groups in which women are able to express the whole of the condition of their lives and share their feeling with others who understand what it is like to be Black and female in this society. A basic philosophy of the organization is that health behavior is not simply a matter of knowing what to do or not to do and then making "rational choices;" rather, individual health reflects personal and social circumstances. Poor women often know the "facts" but feel powerless to make changes because their lives are conditioned by many levels of oppression and despair.