“Black people feel less pain” and other lies
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No images? Click here  June 15, 2022 Dear Meteor readers, I hope you are well. I am trying to keep calm while we wait for the SCOTUS to make decisions. I am distracting myself with the things that are good: my cats, the sunshine, and all of you loyal and committed readers. Today, my dear friend, writer, and professor Syreeta McFadden talks to award-winning journalist Linda Villarosa about her new book, Under the Skin, and what she’s learned in her years as a health reporter. It’s a really freakin’ good conversation. But first, the news. It’s dark and hell is hot, Samhita Mukhopadhyay  WHAT’S GOING ONLabor woes: Employees at various Starbucks locations are working to unionize and the company’s overlords are pushing back by threatening to limit access to healthcare for trans employees. According to Them, workers have filed a charge against Starbucks with the National Labor Relations Board for creating a “coercive and hostile environment” including threatening the loss of gender-affirming health benefits if they vote for union representation. (Starbucks did not respond to the charge but their stance on the matter is made clear on their union-busting website.) You know what we’re not going to do in the month that we celebrate our Lord and savior Marsha P. Johnson? Remain idle while workers, trans or otherwise, are stripped of their rights. So until Starbucks comes around, consider putting your money into that local coffee shop instead of paying a small fortune for your non-dairy venti secret menu unicorn frappuccino with extra whip. #BringBGHome: WNBA star Brittney Griner’s wrongful detention in Russia has been extended once again to July 2. The Russian court system has moved Griner’s hearing, on the alleged charge of possessing cannabis paraphernalia, which means she will remain in the custody of Russian authorities where she has been held without due process for over 100 days. As a professor of military and strategic studies told ESPN, “Dragging out her detention, missing court deadlines–these are key indicators that we should question the legitimacy of her arrest, precisely why the U.S. classified it as a wrongful detention.” So why is President Biden—a man who claims to love women’s sports so much he practically adopted the USWNT—dragging his feet on this issue? Party crashers: The Proud Boys and other far-right groups have been interrupting family-friendly drag events across the country during Pride month (which is painfully ironic considering their name is Proud Boys). One such event was a drag queen story time where Bay Area drag queen, Panda Dulce was reading story books to children. Imagine getting so enraged about story time that you pull up to a children’s event to yell? Get a life. Despite these ongoing expressions of hateration, Pride events are going forward thanks to the fearless queens who have been attending and the businesses that have been supporting them (like Rabble Rise Doughnuts in New Jersey who put on a WONDERFUL Drag Queens and Doughnuts event for families.)  AND:
  HEALTH REPORT“Something* About Being Black Is Creating a Health Crisis”*It’s racism! BY SYREETA MCFADDEN  YOU SEE THAT GLOW? IT’S THE SHINE OF INCREDIBLE KNOWLEDGE. (IMAGE VIA LINDA VILLAROSA.COM) Linda Villarosa has been raising the alarm about African American health for nearly forty years. First, as a health reporter and editor for Essence Magazine in the late 1980s and ‘90s, and later in her book, Body & Soul: The Black Woman’s Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well-Being. Her prolific reporting for The New York Times has examined the infant and maternal mortality in Black mothers and babies, racial disparities in both the HIV and COVID pandemics, and life expectancy in Black communities, namely her hometown of Chicago. Just this past weekend, she wrote the cover story for The New York Times Magazine about the grotesque, continuing practice of legalized forced sterilizations of poor Black and brown women. Villarosa’s new book, Under The Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation, is out this week and is a culmination of decades of extensive reporting and research exploring racism in healthcare. Through profiles of Black women and men from different backgrounds, supplemented with extensive studies, Villarosa lays bare the forces that account for Black people living sicker and dying quicker than their white counterparts. Her findings are profound. For example, regardless of education and income, Black Americans still live in more polluted areas, suffer more from chronic illnesses, and have higher death rates from conditions like diabetes, stroke, and heart disease than white people. College-educated Black mothers have higher infant mortality rates than white mothers who haven’t graduated from high school. “Yes, something about being Black is a creating a health crisis,” Villarosa writes, “and that something is racism.” As I read Under The Skin, I had frequent flashbacks to my own experiences navigating health care and reading Villarosa’s articles in Essence when I was younger. (Her articles were so popular, she tells me, that people would Xerox and share them.) So I was thrilled to have the opportunity to talk to her.  ROUND OF APPLAUSE TO SEAN GERARD CLARK WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS GRIPPING COVER ART. (SCREENSHOT VIA INSTAGRAM) Syreeta McFadden: In this book, you challenge dominant—as well as your own—assumptions about the root causes of racial health disparities. Why was it important for you to flip the gaze on yourself? And what did you discover that you had to unlearn? Linda Villarosa: It’s been a real challenge because I’m an American, born and raised in a culture that teaches you that personal responsibility is everything. And that you, as an individual, are in charge of your own destiny, your own health, and your own wealth, without looking at the structural, institutional, and historical discrimination and racism that we as African Americans have faced. My family was a bootstrapping kind of family. My grandparents came up from Mississippi [to Chicago], and my parents finally managed to dig their way out of [there]. I ended up at Essence magazine, where the thinking was if you empower each individual Black woman, who is usually in charge of a family, you can change the health of Black people. So it was if you know better, you do better kind of thinking. And I worked really hard to get as much information as I could to Essence readers. At the time, Essence had a huge reach among Black women. [In 1991], I went to public health school, and I started learning that not everything is individual, there are health policies, and there’s the history of [racism in] America. And later, my own pregnancy, showed me I was doing everything right, [but it still] wasn’t that easy. It was much more fraught than I would have expected, given my insurance status, my health status, my income, and my education. I still believe that taking the best care of yourself is smart. But now I see that to achieve optimal health, we have to explore what has happened to us in America and the effect of living in a discriminatory or racist society. In the book, you share a much more complete history of the origins of Dr. Arline Geronimus’s “weathering hypothesis.” Arline is probably 70ish [and has] been thinking about this theory of “weathering” since she was in college. The idea is that the discrimination we as Black people especially as Black women face has a weathering effect: which means it’s prematurely aging our bodies. And it’s the culmination of at minimum micro at worse macro aggressions. And she spelled it out for me and I really liked the poetry of the word weathering. Weathering is at once the effect of discrimination and everyday insults, as well as big picture insults on our bodies, like the way a storm weathers a house, it knocks the paint off the outside, it messes up the roof, it pulls the shutters off the hinges. But then we also as people weather the storm, and we have kinship and we have community and we have friends and we have spirituality. So I really liked that dual meaning of weathering. There’s a chapter where you write about the medical community’s understanding and recognition of pain in Black bodies. Could you talk a little bit about that? I really dug deep into that when I was working on my 1619 Project essay [which explored the dangerous fallacy of pain tolerance in Black people]. During the years of slavery, there were doctors and scientists who were also enslavers; they owned human beings and they had a vested interest in keeping slavery in place. And one of the ways they did it was to use science and “data”—to push the false idea that Black people have super high pain tolerance. So that allowed people to not feel bad when they worked us from sunup to sundown, beat us, whipped us, castrated us, took our children away, killed us—all the things that happened. And it desensitized people to our pain. If we have a superhuman tolerance to pain, then it was okay to treat us badly, and it was okay to also perform medical experiments on our bodies. Slavery is over, but that idea is stuck in the American consciousness. Even as recently as 2016, there was a study of [about] 220 white medical students and interns, and they found that 40% had believed at least one false idea about Black people. And the most common one was that we had a higher tolerance for pain. In another [study], the question they asked was, if two people, one Black, and one white, got their hand slammed in a car door—what would the pain feeling be? And even these, you know, educated people who are the doctors of tomorrow said, oh, a Black person would feel that less. That was 2016. In the book, and in The New York Times Magazine cover story, you write so movingly about the Relfs, two sisters in their teens who were forcibly sterilized in Montgomery, Alabama in 1973. Their case revealed that over 100,000 Black and brown women were sterilized by US government programs for decades, harm that has continued. The article grapples with how to deal with reparations for Black people—and it’s not just Black people, it’s Latinx people, it’s sometimes poor white people—who were sterilized against their will or without informed consent. There were eugenics laws on the books in 32 states [but] they went away in the 70s and the United States still kept sterilizing people in prisons, and immigrants. So if we’re looking for a concrete way to [repay] people who were sterilized, reparations is a way to do it. Three states have done it: Virginia and North Carolina had programs to give reparations to people who were sterilized, and California is in the midst of it right now. People like the Relf sisters, who are alive [but] never got a dime for their sacrifice, deserve an apology. And they deserve some kind of financial payment for the sacrifice they made. How do you hope this book will transform the conversation around racism and health? I hope this book is a data-driven, research-based, evidence-based tool to help people understand, people who really have been trying to talk about it and don’t have the tools. I don’t want people in the healthcare system to feel defensive—that I’m saying, you’re racist—because I think we all have blind spots. Health care providers are heroes, but we still all have blind spots. And if we understand them and confront them as a country and in the healthcare system, that’s how we can make things different. I also don’t want our folks to be afraid of the health care system. But I want us to go in with our eyes open—to go in with support, to go in with questions, to go in with, you know, knowing, and to gently push back. And if you can’t do it for yourself, bring someone with you. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  Syreeta McFadden is a freelance writer and professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, BuzzFeed News, and elsewhere.  Did you find this newsletter enlightening? Spread the love and the info by forwarding this email to a friend. FOLLOW THE METEOR    Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? Sign up for your own copy, sent Wednesdays and Saturdays. |
