Black Women Told To Fight On, Even When Battle Unbearable Dr. Elders Says Changing Lot Of Poor Will Take Stamina

Fighting for change is like dancing with a bear. When you get tired you can’t just sit down - you have to keep dancing until the bear gets tired, Dr. Joycelyn Elders told the National Political Congress of Black Women on Sunday.

Black women need to dance long and hard to change their lot in this country, the former U.S. surgeon general said.

The first step is to make people aware of a problem, to make them care, Elders said.

“Parents are seeing their children die, their children are getting AIDS, getting into drugs,” she said. “And parents are mad about that, they are going to do what they have to, to save their children.”

She spoke to about 200 women on the last day of the five-day biennial convention, which brought black women leaders from Congress, government, academia and business together to develop solutions for problems facing black communities.

Elders wondered if black women are healthy enough to elicit change.

Health is more than the absence of disease, she said. Health is about strong families, jobs, education, the environment.

“If we’re not healthy enough to make a difference, we better make sure we’re sick enough to die,” Elders said.

Black women need to fight for power, Elders said. They have to find leaders within their communities and prepare them to enter the political process.

“Power is never given, it has to be taken away,” said Elders, who was forced to resign the surgeon general’s post last year by a Clinton administration unhappy with her outspoken approach to public health.

“You have to have gumption, you have to ask for what you want - you might not get it but sometimes you do.

“We have got to go out and be the headlights - we’ve been the taillights for too long.”

There’s a lot of talk of “family values” in Washington, D.C., but those families are part of a small, exclusive group, Elders said. The policies conservative members of Congress seek threaten most other American families, she said.

“They want to destroy affirmative action,” Elders said. “We knew these same people when they wore white sheets over their heads, and rode around calling themselves the Ku Klux Klan.”

Elders, who was fired in December after critics said she advocated teaching masturbation in schools, decried the lack of health education in schools.

“They say I want to teach people how to have sex,” said Elders, now a pediatrician at the University of Arkansas Hospital.

“I don’t know anybody who had to teach someone how to have sex - except the fathers out there molesting their daughters.”

She said more young black men are in prison than are in college and warned that Americans are losing the war on drugs. She insisted on every American’s right to health care.