NILES, Ohio - "Unmute the uncomfortable" is the message behind a powerful event to engage in racial justice and mental health awareness.

Attorney Pierce Reed with the Ohio Innocence project said we need to do better and take responsibility for the implicit and explicit bias within us.

Reed discussed some examples of how systemic racism can affect health and the justice system. 

"It's one thing to recognize that you're not objectively a racist, that you don't intend to be, but the more that we're separated against each other and this is true for white people who have the ability really in this society to avoid interacting with all kinds of people with whom they're not comfortable, but people of color don't enjoy that same privilege," Reed said, "They ultimately may find themselves in a medical, legal or another kind of system that is dominated by white people but white people tend to have the ability to isolate themselves from communities of color."

Reed said for that reason, segregation is not solved and it's systems like the medical field and the justice system, that he said are intertwined and can directly impact many lives.

"Particularly in the medical community, is that we're trained to think of medicine as a science...that it's subjective...that things like DNA or blood tests or toxicology tests are able to be defined in a very objective way but ultimately, it's humans that are running those tests and interpreting the results," he said.