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
Righteous, Eloquent Rage
by Reverend Dr. Cassandra Gould
June 10, 2020
This interview with Reverend Dr. Cassandra Gould, the Executive Director of Missouri Faith Voices, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Reverend Gould | We are an unapologetically black woman led organization. We're a statewide, nonpartisan, multifaith, multi-racial grassroots organization. We engage in the intersection of faith and justice, faith and politics. Our main objective is to help build up ordinary people's power to make change in their communities. In partnership with other grassroots organizations, we have been able to get an increase in minimum wage, get fair legislative maps, and put Medicaid expansion on the ballot in Missouri.
I'm from Alabama. I am the daughter of a civil rights worker. My mother was there on the bridge on Bloody Sunday. My hometown is 47 miles west of Selma. I have spent 35 years of my life in St. Louis. I raised my children here. When Ferguson happened, I could not, not show up. Ferguson was just several miles from my home in St. Louis. My children's grandmother, who's now deceased, lived in that very same apartment complex, my children played there. They were much older than Mike Brown, but I was really drawn to this space in understanding that it easily could have been one of my children, had it been a different time or different space.
I was not the Executive Director of Missouri Faith Voices at the time– I was just a clergy whose mantle was always to speak truth to power, and to always be in proximity to wherever the pain of the people was.
frank | How did you get involved with Missouri Faith Voices?
I called them the day after Mike Brown was murdered because I knew we needed organizing help and I knew we needed people who could help us imagine a different day. We needed people who could actually be thought partners in helping us get past the pain in the streets and figure out how to amplify that pain in a way that could lead to strategic change.
I was deeply impacted by the hopelessness articulated by the young people who shared their experiences with being over-policed. Young people who lived in a community where most of the people looked like them, but had no sense of governance than the community. I felt it myself. I remember on the night of the non-indictment, standing in the street in tears and saying to a colleague that as long as I had breath left in my body, I was going to be fighting towards having a different prosecutor in office and seeing a change of leadership in Ferguson.
Which culminates today, with your work and the election of Ella Jones, Ferguson’s first black female mayor. What’s changed since the first nights of protest in Ferguson?
Our understanding of what our stake is and what the communities stake is where we are different in this moment. When I came on board in 2015, we didn't have a chapter in St. Louis. I thought, we can't consider ourselves to be statewide and not be in what was then in the largest city in the state. Every hegemonic narrative around blackness plays out in St. Louis. It's the place of Dred Scott, the place of Mike Brown's murder.
So we brought clergy out to start listening to people. Not just to hear their pain, but to begin to ask how we actually change lives.
One of the best ways to become involved in democracy is to become politically educated. Ferguson impacted the urgency of political education, and advanced the understanding as to why the average person needs to understand some basic tenants of government functions.
I think the pain point for our organization now is the question of how to make the information that we have more accessible to people. For young people, like those who are in the streets of Ferguson. How do we actually bring people what they need? We really look at what it looks like to include the people who have been excluded. What is it like to talk to African-Americans, other people of color, and immigrants who historically are not being contacted by campaigns. No one is knocking on their door with literature, but they have perhaps the biggest stake in the game, as bad policies are going to affect them first. The organizing model of our organization has changed because we focus on and invest in the leadership of ordinary citizens who are trying to figure out what to do in this moment.
And so here we are now in a pandemic, that has disproportionately impacted people who look like me, and we have another Ferguson on our hands. I've heard people saying, "Oh my God, I’ve never seen this before I've never seen multiple cities protest." The history books show that it was really Ferguson that re-sparked an era of protest. We were in those streets for more than a year. The consistent, organized protesting was highly effective. We were making demands, and we became a public witness to organizations who had been fighting for things like community police models for 45 years.
My mother was at Bloody Sunday in 1965. When I stood in the streets of Ferguson less than a foot away from those tanks, I felt as if everything had changed and nothing had changed since my mother was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
How do you think faith leaders fill a space non-faith based organizers can’t?
To me, Jesus was a revolutionary. Jesus goes into the church and kicks the tables over. Jesus is crucified. That was state sanctioned murder. We live under those same optics, right? Jesus is hanging on that cross, not able to breathe either. Depending on where you are in society, we all have a lane and all of the lanes look different, but for me, people of faith don't get to sit it out. They don't get to be silent. There has to be the space that we're showing up to make a difference.
Faith and organizing really go together. In the sixties, many of those meetings were held in church basements. Oftentimes the critique is, where is the church? Sometimes the church is in the background actually getting the work done. Not always, but sometimes. I think that the results of these elections show just that.
Certainly we cannot take credit for the election. Mayor-elect Jones has not stopped campaigning since the day she lost the last election. But I do think being intentional about organizing, making sure that there was additional voter registration, making sure that there were phone calls made a difference. Reminding people, especially in a pandemic, to go out and vote. We are encouraging everybody that puts their feet in the street to also put your feet in the street and go to the polls for fall primaries as well as the general election.
People will feel the way they feel about faith. Some people have no faith. Church attendance, Christian church attendance, was already down prior to COVID-19. But churches, mosques, synagogues are still the place where, no matter what, someone will show up. There's always an audience. That is the way in which faith leaders, good and bad, have the opportunity to shape narratives, to create narratives and to influence how people think and certainly how they vote.
The conservative components of faith based organizations have been extremely loud.
Conservative evangelicals tend to get more air time. Sometimes it's because they own our waves. Or it's picked up by Fox news, and then it is picked up by the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania. Reverend Al Sharpton said yesterday, Trump was using the Bible and the church as a prop and as propaganda. It was a political message more than it was a faith message.
I do believe that those of us who understand our faith, who understand that it's synonymous with justice for all, need to do a better job of amplifying that. We need to not just talk to the people in our pulpits, but we need to also make sure that those messages are in the public square. Or else people are going to be left with those who spew political propaganda in the name of God. They might call themselves Christian, but we are not praying to the same God, and we're not preaching about the same God. If you can actually still support the kind of reckless, racist rhetoric, then you are bowing at the altar of white supremacy. And that's not the God that I believe in.
The manipulation of Christianity in politics is so completely interesting and bizarre, but also so effective.
It is also the reason so many people turn away from the church.
I've had the opportunity to be in Ghana, and I had the poignant experience of being in the castles that enslaved my ancestors. Above those dungeons of inhumanity were churches. The church, specifically in the United States and Britain, has turned to the anti-blackness that has been a key tenant of some religious practitioners. I think that's something that the church needs to grapple with.
Hopefully we'll keep this conversation about anti-blackness in the public square, and in the minds and miles of those who get to have microphones and platforms and interviews, so that we can deal with this. We've not dealt with it for 401 years, not adequately, which is why it just keeps returning. It never really goes anywhere. It's Mike Brown. It's Breonna Taylor, whose birthday is today. A close sibling of racism and white supremacy, is genderism. It comes out of the same patriarchal systems. And when black women are killed, there is not that much focus on them.
I was speaking to someone this morning about the lingering effects that police violence has on women. The way in which they are physically and emotionally harmed by the trauma of police brutality, and how that trauma is often left out of the conversation.
In many of our households, black men are extracted, whether that is through the pipeline to prison or though state sanctioned violence. We live in a carceral state and that model extracts resources from us.
If my black son or husband or significant other is incarcerated and there's a bail or a bond, I am left to make that happen. So even if black men are incarcerated at a higher level than black women, and if they are killed at a level that's higher than black women, black women are still left with the burden of either bailing or burying them, and then trying to go on and continue to create life. It is a necessary conversation. In 1962, during a speech, Malcolm X said that the most neglected person in America was a black woman.
While I'm so excited about the election of Ella Jones to the mayorship, I also worry about the attacks that she will be subjected to from white people in society. There was a pet shop owner in Ferguson that immediately after the election said that he would be closing the store and moving on due to the election. It is that kind of racist, reckless rhetoric that fuels fires of people who would actually seek to do harm to black women in leadership harm. Sometimes that harm is done by tears. It is the white fragility. It is the white women who undermine your leadership, your authority, or your intellect. I have certainly lived through that. And sometimes the harm is actually directed at your humanity, at your very being. As a faith leader, I'm certainly also covering her in prayer because there will be people in Ferguson who will not be happy that there is a black female mayor.
How can we better include women in the conversation about police brutality?
Women are raped, harassed, physically threatened by law enforcement officers. Especially black trans women. This goes back to my conversation around how we haven't grappled with the guilt and the sin of the church and faith communities.
The constitution was written to say that a black man is three fifths of a human, a black woman is less than that. We actually have to deal with the historical ideology and the psychological impact of that, which has made women invisible. I love the Bible, but the Bible is a document that was also written by patriarchal misogynistic men.
As a grassroots leader, I know that even as we critique outside systems, no system can actually escape the same critique. What is the rubric that we use to ensure that whether it is in the church or in a protest space, that there is equity. Having racial and gender equity conversations in training and understanding around that is really going to be key. You know, if you can't protest all of the dead black bodies, then don't don't protest any of them.
We have a tendency to make ourselves feel better, by saying, oh thats not us. It's easy to say that the issues are stemming from law enforcement. We shift the blame away from ourselves. But every system, every institution in America needs to actually examine themselves.
People are still doing diversity training, I'm not really sure why. I guess it makes them feel better, and they check off a box to say that they did something. There needs to be a system of accountability after you sit on that Zoom training for two hours. How are we actually assessing its impact? What is the assessment of the black people who work with you and their interactions with you? The law enforcement officer who was responsible for George Floyd's murder had 18 instances of misconduct. How do you have that many instances and still have a job, any job?