President Obama announces this morning the nomination of Dr. Regina Benjamin as Surgeon General. Describing her qualifications and background, the president alludes to a little known town in Alabama where the doctor left her mark. “None has been more pertinent to today's challenges or closer to Regina's heart than the rural health clinic that she has built and rebuilt in Bayou La Batre.”
The president expounds, “Bayou La Batre is a rural town of about 2,500 people. It's a shrimping town, where a lot of folks work for themselves, scrape by, and can't usually afford health insurance.” He added how interesting the town’s demography is “because you've got whites, blacks and Asians in this community. There are a lot of Laotians and Cambodians who have moved there and are a part of this shrimping town.”
Apart from the devastating damage Hurricane Katrina has brought to this area and how inspiring leaders like Dr. Regina Benjamin continues to contribute to its recovery, Bayou La Batre is also significant landmark for early Asian Americans. In her book, “Survivors”, Sucheng Chan shares how Asian workers were brought in to this town to supplant the prevailing core of workers then, African Americans. Divide and conquer! “Owners and managers like employees from Indochina because they are concerned about the relative ease of controlling various groups of workers.”
Likewise, Miss Chen describes the move as part of a campaign to bolster the industry’s suffering image in the wake of increased health consciousness in the late 70’s. Perhaps, lack of compliance to FDA regulations was more prevalent then than they are now. The plant owners have capitalized on this new awareness by conveying the message that “their plants were utterly clean even if they employed Indochinese workers.”
Dr. Regina Benjamin’s hope to be “America's family physician” will hopefully be realized if confirmed as Surgeon General. We all will need to follow through her assurance that “no one, [she repeats] no one falls through the cracks” in this administration’s goal of providing health care to all. We owe such supportive vigilance to the people of Bayou La Batre, given their history as a racial cauldron once subjected to such unapologetically unjust agitation.
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