(Snippets from the frontline)
COVID-19/BLM: Reggie Brass saved my life
In life, most of us have a brush with death. Not surviving, I would not have provided medical care to thousands of patients, nor been a father to my daughter.
Reggie Brass saved my life. He ran a support group for African-American men in south Los Angeles called “My Child Says Daddy” providing tools to remain in the life of their child.
Going through a divorce in the early 1990s, I attended weekly meetings a mile from where I grew up. There I learned how African-American fathers were stigmatized by the courts as “deadbeat dads.”
As part of the solution, Reggie brought judges, attorneys, social workers, psychologists, and county agencies to educate us about the judicial system, while sustaining the emotional struggle to remain in our child’s life. He understood up to 90% of those incarcerated came from fatherless homes.
We learned to focus on our child, be involved at school and extracurricular events, and teach them to be moral and ethical human beings. “My Child Says Daddy” now has evolved into a parenting organization of multi-races and genders.
Reggie Brass saved my life.
Then and now: Black Lives Matter.
Gene Uzawa Dorio, M.D.
Leave a Comment