Anti-Colonial Science: A Course Journal. Vol. 3, 2025. https://ojs.library.dal.ca/acs/

The Anticolonial Actions of the Black Pharmacy Students’ Association

How the Education of Racialized Medical Conditions Will Change the Field of Pharmacy

Jennifer McDonnell

The discipline I have chosen to write about for my scientific reflection is pharmacy, as I am a second-year science student in hopes of becoming a pharmacist with the PharmD program here at Dalhousie University. Because I have no personal experience working in pharmacy yet, I have decided to use this reflection as a chance to highlight how some racialized groups are affected by and affect pharmacy. Since I am from Alberta, my focus will be about a popup that the Black Pharmacy Students’ Association from the University of Alberta held in 2023.

Having a student led event meant to inform marginalized groups is decolonial. Because Universities are colonial institutions, and student are often the first to act when the institution does not. The Black Pharmacy Students’ Association at the University of Alberta is an example of a student group that acted to educate students of colour about skin conditions on dark skin, using their education as an anticolonial method.1 Aisha Ibrahim, one of the presidents of the Association, highlights the lack of Black Health and content about dark skin curriculum.2 This disappointing truth about the lack of diversity in programs offered at a university level, is an example of why students have to react in anticolonial ways to further their education and advocacy. The realization that in the 2020s, health care is not equal, and academic institutions are still not providing the knowledge for how to treat conditions specifically on racialized people, is discouraging for a student who wants to go into healthcare. The colonial idea that white skin is the standard and should be the main focus of medicine goes against the idea of equality and reinforces the marginalization of people of colour — which is an idea that goes against Martin Delaney’s life work.

Martin Robertson Delany was a nineteenth century advocate for the African American community in the United States. During the twentieth anniversary of the Emancipation proclamation, Delany, and other Black leaders gathered on this important day, and Delaney gave a speech — titled “ The Republic of Liberia.” 3 Throughout his speech, Delany shames the US for keeping Black people marginalized and argues for their rights via a study on ethnology.4 With the understanding of modern science and the understanding that skin colour comes from melanin in melanocytes, it is important to note that Delany did not have the scientific understanding that we do today.5 While Delany’s study stating that dark skin colour simply contains “identically the same” pigment that white people have, is not fully correct, his argument that skin colour should not be a factor of discrimination is correct, and arguing about an “equal vitality” in people of different skin colours is anticolonial, because it identifies that Black people are deserving of the same and/or more equitable standards of healthcare.6

The next voice aiding me with this reflection is Franz Fanon. Coming into Algeria as an outsider and someone who has benefitted from colonialism as a racialized man, he offers an interesting perspective on the relationship between skin colour and medicine. Even with the understanding that treating people with dark skin colours differently is a social consequence of colonialism, it is not translated into medicine.7 Fanon’s time in Algeria looks at the reactions of Algerians, and how the colonial method of medicine is seen as killing culture and traditional medicine and exhibits a relationship of distrust between the colonizer and the colonized. 8 In relation to Canada, the colonial structure in which Canada is built upon has dichotomized society and has become standard to prioritize healthcare for white skinned people, which has in turn created a lack of confidence in racialized people to receive the same standard of care. The lack of equitable standards of health care is a direct result of the lack of academic knowledge, and we need to stop the mistreatment of racialized patients in medicine.9 This is why the Black Pharmacy Students’ Association at University of Alberta is so important — their actions are decolonial because with their sharing of information about dermatological conditions through reachable media, they are not only making healthcare more accessible for people of colour, but they are also proving that healthcare can change.10

The association’s collaboration with pharmacy professor Ravina Sanghera not only on the event, but with the curriculum, proves that pharmacy training and healthcare can be adapted to be more inclusive.11 This encouragement and representation is what will lead to the improvement of the objectivity of doctors, and patients of colour would not be mislead “by the lie of the colonial situation.” 12 Fanon’s ideas about building ambivalence, with both sides and understandings of the patient and healthcare professional considered would be a helpful practice in Canada’s medical professions.

With the Black Pharmacy Students’ Association’s initiative, these students are decolonizing the healthcare system, which will further alleviate patient doubt.13 The decolonizing of health care will cause medical professionals to stop giving up on “the colonized patient, ” and furthermore ceasing the lack of clinical examination and analysis on people of colour.14 The anti-colonial actions of the Black Pharmacy Students Association have impacted me as an aspiring pharmacy student and student of HSTC 3403, as part of my goal in taking this class was to learn methods of Anti-Colonial science that I could take with me to pharmacy school, in order to further decolonize this field of medicine. This goal no longer seems so implausible as an individual, as I know that I can work with likeminded pharmacy students and in my future of practicing healthcare with anticolonial methods.

Bibliography

Coulter, Brendan. “Black Pharmacy Students at U of a Dispelling Myths about Darker Skin through Pop-up Clinic | CBC News.” CBCnews, March 25, 2023. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/black-pharmacy-students-at-u-of-a-dispelling-myths-about-darker-skin-through-pop-up-clinic-1.6790975.

Delany, Martin Robison. “Principia of Ethnology (selections),” in Martin Delany: A Documentary Reader, ed. Robert S. Levine (1879; Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 468–483.

Fanon, Franz. “Medicine and Colonialism,” in A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (1959; New York: Grove Press, 1994), 121–145

Levine, Robert S. “The Republic of Liberia,” in Martin Delany: A Documentary Reader, ed. Robert S. Levine (1879; Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 459–462.

“Skin Layers and Melanin.” Mayo Clinic. Accessed March 25, 2025. https://www.mayoclinic.org/skin-layers-and-melanin/img-20007151#:~:text=Melanin-is-a-natural-pigment,produced-in-cells-called-melanocytes.

  1. Coulter, Brendan. “Black Pharmacy Students at U of a Dispelling Myths about Darker Skin through Pop-up Clinic | CBC News.” CBCnews, March 25, 2023. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/black-pharmacy-students-at-u-of-a-dispelling-myths-about-darker-skin-through-pop-up-clinic-1.6790975.

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  2. Brendan, “Black Pharmacy Students”

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  3. Robert S. Levine, “The Republic of Liberia” in Martin Delany: A Documentary Reader, ed. Robert S. Levine (1879; Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 459-462.↩︎

  4. Levine, “The Republic of Liberia,” 460

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  5. “Skin Layers and Melanin.” Mayo Clinic. Accessed March 25, 2025.

    https://www.mayoclinic.org/skin-layers-and-melanin/img-20007151#:~:text=Melanin-is-a-natural-pigment,produced-in-cells-called-melanocytes.

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  6. Martin Robinson Delany, “Principia of Ethnology (selections),” in Martin Delany: A Documentary Reader, ed. Robert S. Levine (1879; Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 468–483.↩︎

  7. Frantz Fanon, “Medicine and Colonialism,” in A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (1959; New York: Grove Press, 1994), 121–145↩︎

  8. Fanon, “Medicine and Colonialism,” 125.

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  9. Fanon, “Medicine and Colonialism,” 121.

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  10. Brendan, “Black Pharmacy Students”

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  11. Brendan, “Black Pharmacy Students”

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  12. Fanon, “Medicine and Colonialism,” 128.

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  13. Fanon, “Medicine and Colonialism,” 123

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  14. Fanon, “Medicine and Colonialism,” 126

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Copyright (c) 2025 Jennifer McDonnell

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