interviews
Call It What It Is
by LaShyra Nolen
July 1, 2020
This interview with LaShyra Nolen, Harvard medical student, and the first Black woman to become class president, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | You've written and spoken about your experience within a dual reality – of being both a medical student at Harvard, and a person committed to your own identity and equity.
LN | The dual reality is you're training at the best medical school in the world, but there is so much suffering going on in your community. And whatever knowledge you gain still isn't going to necessarily translate to the improvement of the condition of Black people. For example, I could go on to become the best surgeon in the world. I could save the life of a Black patient. But they can go outside, drive home, get stopped by a police officer, move too fast, and get killed.
That is the dual reality. You're learning, but you're not necessarily getting to the root cause of the suffering of your people.
You always have to think about it from both of those perspectives, that of a student and that of a Black person in America.
In addition, you go into class and you are expected to maintain professionalism. You are expected to just talk about the science and to talk about the assignment at hand – when that same morning you watched yet another police lynching of a Black man. You're trying to deal with those emotions, and you have no idea how it's going to be taken if you say, "Hey guys, I'm really not doing that well. Another Black man was killed. Racism is pervasive in our country and we're all complicit in it." It is a challenge that all Black professionals have. You have to walk in and put on this face, even though internally you are dealing with the turmoil and hurt of your community.
What does this moment feel like at Harvard, as a student?
As a medical student, I feel like I can speak out more than my mentors or faculty members who are more ingrained into the system of medicine. Academic medicine is very hierarchical. The higher up you go, the more you have your hands tied, and you can't speak as much truth because you're trying to move up to an associate professor position so that you can finally start to use your voice. I know that there's a risk that comes with speaking up, but I, personally, can no longer just pretend like everything's okay, and allow people to continue to suffer in silence. Even the most brilliant people have been complicit in racism, and some of them genuinely have never even thought about it.
They've grown up in a bubble, their entire lives, and all this is happening and they're just like,
"Oh my gosh, I'm a good person. I'm not racist." And you kind of have to be like, "No, but you really are though."
These brilliant people who are excellent in their field, are just now realizing they're complicit in this system.
Again, I am happy that's occurring, but I'm always just like, look how much it took for us to get here. NASCAR is just now removing the Confederate flag. Suddenly now I have Juneteenth popping up on my Google calendar. I'm like, what?
My classmates and professors have really been amazing actually. We are all from different backgrounds. Some are fourth-generation physicians, and some grew up on reservations and are bringing medicine to indigenous folks. All of them realize that the system needs to change, and they have been so supportive. Beyond just talking the talk and posting the black box on Instagram, they've been reaching out to me saying, “Here are the notes from class today. I got this recording for you because I know you've been putting in work on the advocacy front.” That's true allyship to me. I've really been pleasantly surprised and happy to see the support that I've gotten from my classmates.
There has been a widespread acknowledgment that COVID is affecting communities and people of color at much higher rates. I am curious if you think there has been an appropriate conversation around why that’s the case?
I think that in order to understand that we have to look at our history, and at policy. The original ill was, of course, chattel slavery. This country has not valued Black lives. The policy reflects that, and policy ties into our healthcare. That history of systemic discrimination is important to look at to examine the current landscape of COVID-19.
Redlining decided where people live in this country, and which communities our government and our local city councils were going to invest in. Black communities were not invested in. As a result, Black communities have not had access to the basic resources that they need to survive and thrive. They don't have access to healthy food. They don't have access to safe places to exercise. They are exposed to environmental pollution. They have less access to education. I mean, then you look at who is more likely to be an essential worker - Black people are overrepresented.
It doesn't end there. Once people get into the clinic, they have to deal with the biases and systemic racism in the hospital system. There are studies that have shown there are medical students and residents who still think that Black people have a higher pain tolerance.
We can take maternal mortality as an example of treatment differences. Black women, at all income levels, are dying disproportionately compared to white women. When they get to the hospital, doctors don’t believe their pain. I mean, it happened to Serena Williams. It is safer for Black women to not engage with the healthcare system because of the violence and harm it causes.
How do you think mistrust of the medical system compounded the COVID crisis?
I think it all comes back to this conversation of access, right? When COVID-19 first hit, the testing centers were predominantly located in affluent communities, and a lot of Black communities were left without access to testing. The lack of Black physicians and Black health care professionals means that when Black patients come in and say they have COVID-19 symptoms, they are less likely to get treatment compared to white people.
If you know there are no testing centers in your neighborhood, you know there is no representation in the hospital, and you know that you are going to be discriminated against once you walk in that door, you know your life is being devalued. That knowledge prevents Black people from seeking care from our healthcare system. With anecdotes of horror coming from your community, of course you are going to be nervous to trust the healthcare system.
What does a better understanding of investment into public health look like to you?
I think we need to turn all of the conversations that we've been having into public health initiatives. Racism was declared a public health emergency in Boston. That is the direction I think we should be moving in.
We need to move beyond equality to think about equity. We need to recognize that not everyone is on the same playing field. We need to truly make sure everyone's specific situation is taken into consideration. We do that by investing in those communities, and by looking at how we make sure they have access to good education, access to health care, access to housing, access to good food. Improving the conditions where people live, work, pray, play will improve their healthcare outcomes and our healthcare system.
Of course, we need things like the physical exam, but often patients go into that physical exam with preexisting chronic diseases caused by disparate suffering. Going as upstream as possible will lead to better healthcare outcomes and in the long run, improve healthcare costs. Even if investing in public health didn't improve healthcare costs, I still think that it's the moral thing to do. I think we're too driven by what's going to save money in our country. We need to do what's right.
Everyone deserves to have the basic resources they need to live out a viable, joyous life. Right now we are doing nothing to guarantee that.
Someone said to me once, we’re too focused on raising the ceiling and not at all focused on raising the floor in the American healthcare system. Do you feel like this starts as a medical student?
I can definitely speak to that culture. As a medical student, I'm really passionate about community activism. I am passionate about making sure that everyone has access to healthcare, and ensuring that we're teaching medical students anti-racism so that they don't go out and further harm communities. I can spend two years doing that – serving on committees, writing up reports, and changing curriculum at my institution. But my peers who are spending the same time publishing papers on very specific proteins and disease processes might have a better chance at residency.
In medicine, you're not incentivized to do work that you don't get credit for. You always want to be able to publish, and activism isn't always publishable.
It has been the responsibility of Black students, students of color, and indigenous folks to improve their institution. They do the work so that they can thrive and survive, and so the next generation can do the same. But at the same time, they still have to do everything they have to do as a medical student to get to the next level. I'm literally trying to improve the very environment that I'm suffocating in, while also trying to handle everything else that medical students are expected to.
There was a letter early on from public health officials advocating for protest as it’s needed to fight racism within the healthcare system. Does that feel new or was it already a part of the conversation?
I think it's always been a part of the conversation for those who have been oppressed.
But that is what is special about this moment. We literally had a global pandemic that exposed the disparate suffering of Black people across the country, across the globe. And then on top of that, you have back to back to back killings of Black people. It's heartbreaking that it took this much for us to start having these conversations, but we are having them, and people can’t run away from them.
There are no distractions. We're not going to get anywhere if people don't name systemic racism for what it is.
We need to say Ahmaud Arbery. We need to say Breonna Taylor. We need to say their names, and we need to name the issue at large.
Big-name organizations are just finally starting to realize that this is something that they need to get on board with. It’s hard to know if it's really genuine or not. I think that people don't want to be on the wrong side of history. Regardless, learning is still happening. I'm very happy that anti-racism is becoming the status quo and that we are having these conversations. We need to continue to push the envelope to get people things they need to live a good life.
interviews
Reshaping The Immigration Narrative
by Lizania Cruz
October 15, 2019
Albert Saint Jean, the chief organizer for BAJI and Lizania Cruz, a designer and the founder of We The News, sat down with frank to discuss representation in the immigration narrative.
The partnership between BAJI and We The News exemplifies the ways that issues of race, immigration, and class can and should be written in conversation with one another.
This interview was conducted and condensed by frank news and was originally published on July 15, 2019.
Albert: My name is Albert Saint Jean. I am the New York City organizer for the Black Alliance for Just Immigration [BAJI].
When I heard about BAJI, this was before Trump, I had gotten interested in volunteering, in organizing with BAJI, because a lot of the stuff they were focused on were things I’d seen throughout my life. I was born here, but I was the first of my grandmother's children born here. Everyone older than me had migrated over and I saw what they had to go through with their status, their relationship with law enforcement, their relationship with the criminal justice system, their fear of deportation. I felt like BAJI was at the nexus of a lot of those things when I found out about it three years ago – and long before Trump, because they were things affecting black people. Basically I got into it because it spoke to the things that I saw in my own personal experiences.
Lizania: I'm Lizania Cruz. I'm an artist and a designer originally from the Dominican Republic. I moved here in 2004 when I was 21 to finish college. I started We The News – doing work around shifting the current narrative on migration and trying to figure out how we [people] change.
I was frustrated with the way the current immigration narrative was – only talking about the majority within the minority group, and how the media was taking over the narrative. I didn't feel represented. I didn't feel like our stories were pluralistic in any way. So I started wondering what if we told our own news and our own stories – what would that look like? That's how We The News as a project started. I was talking to different organizations and someone recommended BAJI. I thought it was super interesting how they were talking about migration, blackness, and at the same time talking about the correlation of that and the criminal justice system, which for me, no other organization was doing. Getting involved with BAJI has made the project what it is today. It has also politicized me in ways I wasn't thinking about.
What are those ways?
Lizania: Looking more at the similarities between disenfranchised communities already in the US and the immigrant movement. Again, I don't think we do that as often, and now I'm constantly thinking of ways that story could be told, and what are the lengths, and how do we organize collectively rather than organize in silos. We're organizing for LatinX folks and maybe labor workers, and we're organizing for people that have been affected by mass incarceration, why are those two things not organized in tandem while looking at the policies in the same way?
You mentioned you feel like the narrative is not pluralistic.
Lizania: Yeah.
And very mono.
Lizania: Exactly.
Does the division of groups fighting for their specific causes as separate give their stories more autonomy? If all these issues are nuanced, where do they blend and how do you deliver a message that covers, or even touches on, all of the personal?
Albert: Particularly with BAJI, they look at the nexus between the similarities between African Americans and black immigrants.
When we talk about the immigration issue, we shy away from the racial aspect of it. This is a racial issue. The diversity of immigrants we have now is only possible because of the rights that African Americans fought for in the early 60s. The 1965 Immigration Act was a part of that, the whole civil rights act. That allowed for the diversity of other immigrants to come here. When we shy away from that, we miss a large swath of what's going on in the immigrant community. We miss talking about what are the drivers that send people here in the first place?
US policy is responsible for a large bulk of us being here. My family wouldn't have come here if it wasn't for the United States supporting a dictator for so long. Her [Lizania’s] country wouldn't be the way it is if it wasn't for US agribusinesses and foreign policy.
Where did your family come from?
Albert: Haiti.
Another place that they [US] supported dictatorships. It's kind of like the stories we're able to show the common thread is US policy, and a lot of it is the racialized aspect of immigration in the United States.
Lizania: I'll add to that. I see specifically in the work that we've been doing with We the News, a creation of a platform where all these stories could live together. There's not as many platforms like that. Finding a place and a platform where people could come together and share their stories and have a voice. None of us are the same and we all have different experiences, but how the commonality becomes the difference, is always what I'm interested in questioning.
Even when we facilitate the story circles, we open with a prompt that is the same for everyone. But nobody responds the same way. How do these stories sit together and how do we make a space for that to happen?
The personal narrative is a driver for policy in this case. Are you guys interested in changing policy?
Albert: Exposing policy, changing policy. Those are important. But I think with my work, what's even more important is changing structural issues.
Is policy complicit in structural issues?
Albert: Well, there's policies that are a symptom of structural racism. Most people look at the Trump era as, for what it is, a terrible era, especially for immigration. But these problems have been going on long before that. The 1996 laws were implemented after Timothy McVeigh bombed Oklahoma City. A provision they made was that anybody that commits a crime that's a foreign national would be deported. Whether it’s retroactive or not, you don't even have to be convicted. A lot of people I come across aren't convicted. Yes, it's policy driven, but a lot of it is also sustainable. I'd say a majority of this is systemic. So yeah, there's policies that are pushing against it – but also these narratives show the systemic issues I see as well.
Lizania: It's a way of popular education. I think policy is important, but I think you have to start from the bottom up and create the popular education. People vaguely understand where all these issues are coming from. And you could potentially organize to create policy – but even at BAJI, those who are organizing and those who are going to Congress to affect policy, are different.
Albert: Yeah, that's true. Sometimes I'll go to DC and help lobby for certain things or meet with city officials along local issues. But the bulk of that work is in the hands of people who specialize in policy. Not that these folks have any faith in this system, it's just that they know that this is another strategy.
They feel as though we still have to use policy as a tool. So my job is to create the pressure that Lizania is talking about. Creating a space for people in the community to not only learn about themselves and their rights, but also learn to advocate for themselves. The more they start to realize that their experience is not an anecdotal experience, that this is more of a trend than a norm, they're able to do all the things she just mentioned. That's an organizer's job. To make sure that education is there. When we look at past movements, it wasn't Malcolm X or Martin Luther King who started those movements. They came out of those respective movements, to articulate the needs of the people. We have to start somewhere. I think the more we share this with people, the more likely people are going to be able to fight for liberation so to speak.
What's your dream in this?
Albert: In an ideal world?
Yeah. What do you want immigration in America to look like? To feel like?
Albert: I would say the way it was when my grandmother came in, in the 70s. You just come here – I honestly don't believe in borders, to tell you the truth. But, in my lifetime, I would like for people that are undocumented to obtain amnesty, I would like for there not to be any caps or quotas, regardless of where people come from.
Lizania: I ask this question to myself all the time. We're doing this work but what does it look like when the work is done? I think that if this system runs how it's supposed to, there wouldn’t be quotas for the people that could come here.
Albert: Diversity visas.
Lizania: There won't be diversity visas. I was just having a meeting with my lawyer, and the type of visa I’m applying for has a two year backlog, and he's like, "that's actually nothing." Plus the amount of money that goes into the process. It's just not realistic.
It’s interesting to look at the immigration argument coming from the GOP in the 80s, Bush H.W. and Reagan in 1980 are wildly different than Ted Cruz today.
Albert: What a lot of people don't realize, and this is where I hate the two party system, for the reason you pointed out, is at one point in time the Republican party was way further to the left than Democrats now, than Obama. What Reagan did, the amnesty – and don't get me wrong, all the fuckery that's happened started with Reagan in this country, it started before, but Reagan really took it off – but he gave general amnesty in the 80s. This is someone who right wing people worship, you know what I mean? When I look at Democrats and I look at how they're like, "Oh no, be realistic. This is what we can fight for."
When people claim to be moderate now and think, "Oh, I'm moderate, I'm in between. I understand both sides." No, you're a conservative. When you look at the historical analysis of it and how far right this country has gotten, how this country doesn't recognize that is even scarier. The fact that it is normalized, even on the democratic side, is scary. The fact that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren can be considered extreme, it's very scary because these were all basic ideas people had.
It's interesting you brought up this thing with Reagan and Bush. I mean, Republican, Democrat, they were always messed up. But Republicans were more strategic. Coming out of the New Deal Era, they knew they had to make concessions in certain places. Especially since they had a labor shortage for certain sectors of the economy. They needed the Bracero Program and domestic workers to come over. They were like, yeah, why would I be against this? They were very practical.
Wet foot dry foot for Cubans. If they made it to the mainland of the U.S., they automatically got a green card because they were fleeing communism. The Haitians, however, were fleeing a dictator who's indiscriminately massacring whole families, women, and children on the streets. 60,000 people were massacred underneath this dictatorship, and people were fleeing. I had family members who were fleeing, but they didn't have the same privileges Cubans had. Once their foot hit land they could be apprehended and found out. I just thought that aspect of it was very interesting to me. The US link. People magically forgot that the US created the situation in El Salvador and Honduras and all these places as late as the 80s, and no one's talking about that. Why are all these people showing up here?
Do you think there’s a lack of education in America about U.S. presence in Central and South America?
Albert: I think that's true globally. Even when we talk about the Middle East we're not really clear about the roots of all those problems.
Lizania: I did a poster that was also part of We the News looking at all of the different interventions in Latin America specifically by the US.
While you're critical of American actions abroad, are you also hopeful for the "promise" of America?
Albert: No, well, I'll say this. I'm hopeful if we can tear down the structures that we have now.
The majority of Americans want the same things. Majority of Americans do not care about if Lizania has access to citizenship or not. But politics makes us pit each other against each other. Politics is what uplifts white privilege and makes white folks say, "hey look, you know what? These immigrants and these black folks and these other folks are threatening my security." Politics does that. In reality, most Americans want the same thing and I think that the system we have now does not allow the will of the people to really be represented.
Lizania: If we aren't hopeful, why would we do it? With my work, I'm just trying to find ways that our reality could actually be a more inclusive, a better reality for all of us. I think the reason I do the work I do is because I believe that there could be a better way and that we have to construct that way for ourselves. Hopeful is not the right word. Let’s see how America could work for our communities in a better way. Or maybe it's not only America – how can we as people of the world, live better?