No Time to Heal

October 21, 2025

By CEO & President, Tito Izard, MD

(In Memoriam of Milwaukee’s Best)

In the span of just six months, our community has been shaken by the violent loss of two of its most dedicated healers. Dr. Akintunde Bowden, a dentist who gave a decade of service, was killed in his apartment after a dispute with a neighbor. Kamonti McFarlane, a dental hygienist who served 19 years, was killed in a domestic dispute.

Both worked at Milwaukee Health Services, Inc., where they tended to our smiles, our health, and our humanity. Both lost their lives not on the battlefield of war but within their own homes.

A Deeper Disease

The media is missing the point if we think this is simply about guns. Gun violence is a symptom of a much deeper disease: health disparities.

African Americans continue to have the poorest health outcomes of any racial or ethnic group. We still live in what Dr. King called “two Americas”- where one America thrives while the other is locked in cycles of crisis.

We trade housing for handcuffs, health for heart attacks, graduations for guns, and love for loneliness.

The tragic deaths of these two health professionals may seem like isolated coincidences, but they reflect the broader, predictable reality of inequity. Statistically, losing two oral health providers in such a short time is rare, but losing Black lives too soon is not.

Disrupted Ecosystems

Health disparities and the social determinants that drive them are the direct consequences of multigenerational economic abandonment.

The Black community exists within the confines of a disrupted ecosystem, shaped by decades of divestment and wealth extraction. Trapped within an elusive capitalist system, disadvantage accumulates like interest, producing the illusion that failure is personal when, in fact, it is structural.

Too often, Black Americans internalize this narrative, believing their broken dreams are their fault alone — rather than the imposed failures deeply rooted within one’s ethnocultural lineage.

Ethnocultural lineage can be defined as a group’s shared common lived experience. It is often expressed as the beliefs, behaviors, norms, and characteristics received from ancestors and passed down through generations. It is your family’s resiliency story.

But broken dreams leave scars and fractured trust. Gun violence is one type of disparity, but the same inequities show up in higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, strokes, respiratory illness, and toxic exposure. The result is the same: premature loss of life.

Why Hurt the Ones We Love?

If health is the stability of mind, body, and spirit, then Black Americans live within a persistent, multigenerational health crisis.

Human resiliency is sustained by the interconnection of five domains. Each reflecting a vital aspect of our being: physical health, psychological well-being, social belonging, financial security, and spiritual connectivity.

When these domains are exhausted, instability emerges. Broken dreams both reflect and deepen that instability, weakening our foundations. In turn, instability gives rise to dissociative behaviors, those decisions or actions that may conflict with our own faith, upbringing, cultural beliefs, values, or character.

Therefore, violence, despair, and hopelessness are not random. They manifest as disparities along a continuum, from gun violence to chronic disease.

When Healers Are Lost

Now, what happens when healers themselves are lost? What happens to the community when two providers, who dedicated their lives to mending others, are suddenly gone?

Urban, under-resourced healthcare agencies already are constrained by workforce shortages. Every time a healer is lost, the community bears the weight.

A patient waits longer in pain. A child misses preventive care. A family goes without the support that could keep them whole.

For those of us who remain, compassion is not simply an act, it is our calling. It requires sacrifice, even when our own hearts are breaking.

But how long can healers continue to sacrifice without relief? How long can agencies run on the resilience of their staff without resources to heal the healers?

A Moment of Reckoning

We are in a moment of reckoning. If we do not collectively address the rising crises of health inequities, violence, and abandonment, we will see more unrest, more instability, and more broken dreams.

Economic bondage produces social revolutionaries. But revolution born of despair is not the future our community deserves.

As we mourn Dr. Bowden and Ms. McFarlane, we must demand more than condolences. We must demand investment in the communities, the institutions, and the people who give so much of themselves to keep us alive.

Otherwise, we risk leaving our healers not only to serve but to suffer as martyrs for a cause that should belong to us all.

Because for organizations serving communities like ours, there is no time to heal.