‘Strong Black Woman’ is not always a compliment. Student researchers tell Durham why
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- Students urge Durham to translate CEDAW pledge into concrete local policies.
- Researchers link maternal inequity to dental access, Medicaid rules, patient navigation.
- Advocates call for multilingual IPV services, stable funding, and bias training.
Nearly a decade after Durham County commissioners pledged to uphold women’s human rights, three student researchers returned this week with a challenge: Make the promise real in local policy.
Representing the nonprofit WomenNC, the students from Duke, N.C. Central, and N.C. State presented commissioners on Monday with the “less-visible” burdens facing Black and Latina women. Their findings moved beyond broad statistics to highlight the lived realities of maternal health disparities, the “strong Black woman” archetype, and the specific dental and language barriers facing survivors of domestic violence.
The presentation serves as a stress test for the county’s 2017 endorsement of CEDAW, the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. While the 1979 international treaty provides a roadmap for pay equity and public safety, WomenNC leaders argued that for the 53% of Durham County residents who are female, that map has yet to lead to tangible policy shifts.
‘Just because you carry it well’
Noelle Smith, a senior psychology major at NCCU, told commissioners her research examines the “strong Black woman” archetype and how it shapes health, coping and wellness.
“As a Black woman navigating the world, there are moments when it feels like I’m carrying an invisible weight while still being expected to show up, perform and lead without hesitation,” Smith said.
She described the archetype as a “culturally embedded expectation that Black women must always be strong, self-reliant and resilient, even in the face of chronic stress and structural adversity.” Over time, she said, “strength stops becoming a choice and becomes an obligation.”
“This project is grounded in one powerful truth,” Smith said. “Just because you carry it well does not mean it isn’t heavy.”
Smith pointed to persistent racial disparities in health outcomes and urged bias-aware maternity care along with more community-based screenings and support. Black Maternal Health Week begins April 11, when organizations nationwide highlight inequities in prenatal and postnatal care.
Black women have the highest rates of maternal and pregnancy-related mortality in the country, Smith said. She urged commissioners to consider more local programs, including mandatory bias-awareness training for health care professionals to reduce “medical mistrust” and expanding health screenings across the county.
The ‘smile gap’ and Medicaid’s ghost network
Duke University senior Caroline Joo, a WomenNC scholar studying sociology and chemistry on a pre-dental track, urged commissioners to consider oral health as part of maternal health equity.
“I want to talk about why maternal health equity is being compromised through a lens that we almost always overlook in public policy, which is the mouth,” Joo said. “I call this crisis the smile gap.”
Joo argued that dental care is both a health issue and an economic one, saying visible dental disease can limit job prospects for women who are overrepresented in customer-facing, low-wage work. Pregnancy can increase the risk of gum disease and systemic inflammation, she said, yet access to care is limited even for those who qualify.
“One hundred percent of pregnant women in North Carolina are eligible for dental care, yet only 8.5% receive it,” Joo told commissioners. She attributed the gap to how some Medicaid benefits are structured and to what she described as a “ghost network” of providers that appear available but are difficult to access in practice.
To close the “smile gap,” Joo recommended raising Medicaid reimbursement rates, creating “warm handoffs” where prenatal clinics schedule dental appointments directly, and funding patient navigators to help with logistics like child care and scheduling.
Intimate partner violence, language access
Chalina Morgan Lopez, a senior political science student at N.C. State, closed by highlighting barriers facing Latino survivors of intimate partner violence, or IPV.
Her research found survivors are often “re-traumatized by the help-seeking process” due to a lack of bilingual providers and a pervasive fear of law enforcement. Durham’s Latino population is about 17%.
“People are scared of ICE and are not leaving their homes to seek IPV services,” Lopez said. “Many survivors are also mothers and are in situations where their partner is the breadwinner.”
She said local organizations intended to help often lack a Spanish hotline or translation features online. Commissioner Nida Allam said neither the Durham Crisis Response Center nor the county’s Family Justice Center websites have helpful information in Spanish and said she would follow up with the directors.
Lopez also urged the county to stabilize funding for legal and mental health services, “especially considering organizations have been hit hard by federal funding cuts.”
Commissioners: bring the work back to policy
Commissioner Wendy Jacobs called the presentations “outstanding,” and asked WomenNC how it is working with the Durham County Women’s Commission, an advisory body that submits annual reports to the commissioners.
Commissioner Michelle Burton connected Smith’s research to her own experience and asked, “How can we give people, women, Black women, women of color, support?”
Before moving on, commissioners didn’t decide on specific next steps but encouraged the students to keep pushing their work into the policy arena.
Beth Dehghan, founder of WomenNC, reminded the board that while Durham is recognized by the United Nations as a “women’s human rights county,” the next step is implementation: “to see how we can collaborate for implementation of these policies.”