UNDISTRACTED: December 17, 2020

Flattening the Curve of Inequality

Please note: This transcript has been automatically generated.

Brittany Hey, y’all…It’s Brittany. So this past week, a lot of us saw images of FedEx trucks delivering vials of vaccine across the country and our hardworking healthcare workers once again rolling up their sleeves, but this time for the first COVID-19 vaccination shots, I’m breathing a sigh of relief. It’s a glimmer of hope, but at the same time, our death toll has now officially topped 300,000.

So there is absolutely light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re still in the tunnel—and it’s pretty dark. Our daily death toll tops 2,500—COVID is a public health crisis, and it’s also an economic crisis and a social one. And its devastating effects have only been made worse by our country’s preexisting conditions: racism, sexism, poverty, inhumanity, and y’all, there is NO vaccine for that. Complex problems require complex solutions. So what does an intersectional feminist response to the pandemic even look like? That’s what we wanted to explore on this week’s show and I mean, look, women—especially Black women and women of color—we are bearing the brunt of this and a better world for us is actually a better world for everyone.

This emergency has exposed and exacerbated so many of the inequalities in our society, but we cannot wait until this is all over to expand justice. We have to get to work on the healing right now. We are undistracted.

[2:56]

Brittany On the show today…Dr. Esther Choo, Fatima Goss Graves and Imani Barbarin. 

I’ll be talking to them about what an intersectional feminist response to the pandemic looks like from a medical, economic, and disability justice perspective. 

Imani Barbarin It’s a terrifying time to be disabled. It’s also terrifying time to be a disabled person of color because the existing medical structure is already built for us to not survive it. 

Brittany That’s coming up. But first it’s your “UNtrending News.”

Brittany A new song blasting violence against women is really striking a chord in China. Popular Chinese singer Tan Weiwei has a new album called “3811.” It’s going completely viral with a lot of buzz focused on a track called “Little Wan,” which is the anonymous name Chinese authorities gave to female victims of violent crimes. So just a trigger warning, but in her song, tan sings about little Wan being beaten, burned alive, shaved bald, confined and murdered.

Tan’s references to domestic violence, including two recent brutal killings in China, have earned her props from her female fans. We’ve been talking on untrending news about the many movements that are being led by women around the globe, and that are focused on the issue of femicide on violence against women, women lead our most successful movements.

So we should be protected by them too. 2020 has been a year of reckoning and this reckoning is long past due. 

[5:00]

Brittany Remember Trump’s Muslim ban from 2017. Yes, it was real. He banned travel from seven Muslim-majority countries. Turns out that this policy was so stressful for immigrant women from those countries who were already living in the U.S. that it actually increased their odds of having a premature baby. Yeah. You heard that right. It’s from a new study from Columbia University and it found that in the eight months after the ban women from the impact of countries who were pregnant and living here in the States saw a 7% increase in their chance of delivering early; meanwhile white women born in the U.S. saw no change in their odds of having a preterm birth during that same period.

Preterm births occur when babies are born before 37 weeks of pregnancy, and they’re associated with honestly, a variety of health complications for the infants themselves. This is another in a long list of examples of how racist and xenophobic policies have real material effects on people’s health. And we’ll be talking about that more on this episode. And although president-elect Joe Biden has promised to eliminate the ban on his first day in office, it’s going to take a whole lot longer to actually undo its effects on this community. 

[6:22]

Indya Moore Hi everyone. My name is Indya Moore and [SINGING] TranSanta is coming to town. Yeah!!!

“Pose” star and powerful activist, Indya Moore is using their celebrity to make sure that trans youth get what’s on their Christmas lists.

They started a new social media initiative called TranSanta where any one of us can anonymously send trans kids holiday gifts. I did it. It’s awesome. 

Indya Moore My friends and I want to make sure that trans kids feel like they are a gift to this world because they are. 

Brittany Listen to how efficient this is. So you just go to the TranSanta Instagram page, and it’s full of letters from kids and young adults talking about their life stories, or frankly how challenging COVID has been.

And we get to just click the link in the accounts, bio and access each person’s Christmas gift registry. This is a beautiful way to give and trans young people need our love and support. Trans youth specifically report, increased rates of depression, suicidality, and victimization compared to their cisgender peers. So if you want to get involved, which I highly suggest you do, go check out their Instagram @transanta 

Indya Moore Trans kids, trans youth, I see you—I am you. Acceptance and love are gifts. We all deserve. All year. 

Brittany Coming up…I’ll be talking to Dr. Esther Choo, Fatima Goss Graves and Imani Barbarin about how to treat this pandemic.

[10:53]

Brittany And we are back! So thankfully the vaccine is here. But nearly every state is still experiencing skyrocketing rates of COVID-19 and hospitals across the country are just being slammed—they are completely overwhelmed, but like I said before, this crisis is so much more than just a medical one: it’s an economic crisis, a childcare, a housing, a food crisis. And women, specifically Black women, Indigenous women, or women of color, are being hit the hardest. It is clear that we have to treat this emergency—and it’s still an emergency—from every single angle. So what does an intersectional feminist response to this pandemic look like today? I’m talking with three women who, thankfully, have some amazing answers for us.

First up Dr. Esther Choo. She is a professor of emergency medicine at Oregon Health and Science University and she was one of the very first to sound the alarm about COVID-19 infections among healthcare workers. 

Brittany Dr. Esther Choo. Thank you so, so much. 

Dr. Esther Choo Thanks so much for having me on. 

Brittany So set the scene for us: from a medical perspective, how is COVID-19 affecting American women?

Dr. Esther Choo Well, this is the thing that is so profound. It was pretty obvious from the beginning that women were going to be disproportionally affected. I mean, first of all, if you look at the essential workers across America, the people who are consistently exposed to disease were women, and in particular women of color. And then when you go into the hospitals, it’s the same thing. And the roles that are occupied by women of color are those where they have high surface area contact; they’re in and out of rooms with COVID patients all the time. I mean, in every hospital in America, there’s this kind of upstairs downstairs phenomenon where, you know, the kind of fancy people making decisions are so distinct from the ones who are, have to roll their sleeves up and get in there.

Brittany You’ve also talked about how struck you are, about how much later Black and Brown people seem to be being diagnosed with COVID. 

Dr. Esther Choo It really is one of these things that if you had to design a system that was fundamentally unfair, you would design the system that we have. I was trying to imagine a way in which it could be more unfair and more inequitable and lead more to profound health inequities and I couldn’t come up with a way. Even just seeing the tip of the iceberg, it’s clear that we are testing Black Americans later and less often than we are other people. And because of that, it drives so much of healthcare. If you’re not getting tested early, you’re not identified early enough to initiate some of the treatments and you’re not put on a path where you can prevent spread to other members of your community and your family members.

Brittany As somebody who’s not a medical professional myself, that’s something I wouldn’t even think of as part of the problem. I’m just observing the disproportional effect on communities of color on the other end. So then what is the fix? Like I said, we are really talking about an intersectional feminist lens here. So what does that kind of medical response look like to you?

Dr. Esther Choo I mean, I think we have a huge push ahead to make people aware of their biases and the structural forces that are built in that make women and women of color disadvantaged in this time. And I think that temptation is always to say, well, let’s get through this crisis and then we’ll deal with that, but we don’t have that luxury here.

And so I think first of all, we need to really think about our practices and policies in this moment and how we can pivot now. One thing that our public health department did here in the state of Oregon is they said, look, we are encountering huge disparities in who gets diseased and also who gets tested. And we don’t have a super sophisticated way of addressing this, but when it comes to people of color, throw out all your testing criteria, just test them if they come to be tested, you know, so if you are Black or Hispanic or Indigenous in you’re in the state of Oregon and you show up at a health center and you are receptive to testing—you get tested.

So for everybody else, we hold up the CDC criteria. Do you have a fever? Do you have a cough? Do you have this exposure? And we, you know, we kind of use these restrictive criteria so that we can be mindful of the resources, but we can’t be mindful of resources when we’re talking about the communities that are hardest hit. So I think there are times where we just have to look at what are the structural factors we can use to try to overcome some of these inequities, but we need to do that at every step in the pandemic. When we think about how we’re distributing say medication supply. How we’re making decisions about all scarce resources, including hospital beds and ICU and ventilators.

And then as we look at our vaccine distribution policies, we have to be very, very mindful of the inequities that we have built into all of society, but also into our acute pandemic response. 

Brittany I mean, you’ve made this so plane, you said: “The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that addressing our racist societies and structure is a matter of life and death.”

Dr. Esther Choo Yeah. 

Brittany It’s that simple? 

Dr. Esther Choo It seems simple, but I think it is amazing how much easier it is to build in inequity and so much harder to remove it. You know, somehow when we talk about removing these things, it’s like all of a sudden we need 20 panels to talk about how we’re going to do this; and we need a bazillion people from the communities involved to help us figure out how to dismantle it.

And it’s somehow the fixes to structural racism and gendered racism are so much harder. Whereas putting these practices into place took nothing. And so I’m just always struck by how we find ourselves in this pickle of not being able to undo what we did thoughtlessly. 

Brittany So let’s talk about right now and what we should be thinking about as we move ahead.

Vaccines are obviously at the top of the list, you know, we’ve had these major medical trials, but I will say, especially as a 36-year-old woman who, with my partner, we are talking about. whether or not, we want to have a baby soon. A lot of these trials have left out pregnant and breastfeeding subjects. So what do the vaccines mean for pregnant and breastfeeding people? Will the vaccines be safe for them? 

Dr. Esther Choo Yeah. And these are areas that you point out so smartly we just have big gaps in information. You know, we don’t know what these vaccines look like for children under the age of 16 or for pregnant women. Those are two big groups. And I think we will get more information from trials moving forward, but we also will have to balance our pulled knowledge from other vaccines. And also our understanding that pregnant women are more likely to get severe disease and end up in the ICU and on ventilators. So there’s a, you know, there’s kind of weighing the risks of not vaccinating against the benefits. From what we know historically about vaccines and women, they tend to be safe. We haven’t seen any side effects affecting women of childbearing age. There’s no reason, you know, mechanistically to think that they would be harmful and we just make that call because we also don’t want to put pregnant women at more risk by not vaccinating. 

Brittany And I appreciate you being straightforward, right, and providing the information that says, “we don’t know everything, but we’ve got good information that we can make some judgment calls on.” So as the holiday celebrations begin and winter sets in and it keeps getting dark at 5:30, what do we need to keep top of mind? 

Dr. Esther Choo So, if we are complacent, we will double-down on all the inequities. And just to give one example, if we accept the idea that states will get a certain batch of vaccine and they will only get more once they’ve spent down all their vaccine, you can see how that incentive makes us just want to give it to people who are very ready to receive it. And we know because of the terrible lack of trust that the medical institution has. And we have no earned trust among communities of color that the people first in line are going to be people who are doing pretty well in the pandemic to begin with, you know, it’s going to be wealthier people, it’s going to be people in communities that are very well-resourced. It’s not going to be people of color. So I would just say people everywhere need to be really mindful of this and need to be pushing for all of our leaders to go the extra mile and make sure that we are evening out inequities as we go. And I’m actually terrified night and day that we are going to do this in a way that that will only increase the inequities and the outcomes in this. On an individual level, we have to understand how long it’s going to take in the best of circumstances. And when I do the math, it really gets us to almost this time next year, before we are achieving anything, close to herd immunity. And so when people are like, wow, I can’t wait to take this mask off. And I’m like, please don’t talk in those terms at all. You know, I really want people to understand that there are a lot of things that we’ve pushed for—that we’re still pushing for—that has to become our new normal for a LONG time—further ahead than we are willing to think. So we have this euphoria right now about vaccine, but I need people to still think in terms of “I can still spread it.” So face masks need to stay around, contained social groups need to stay around, social distancing as just a matter of fact and as habit need to stay around. So I feel really bad and evil because I’m keeping people, you know, in their little pods, but I can’t figure out another way, even being a relatively optimistic person. So unfortunately, we still need to hammer home all of these behavioral changes and make them really habitual. 

Brittany Good habits to keep us hopefully…alive. Esther, thank you so, so much for your wisdom and for your relentless work on all of this. 

Dr. Esther Choo Thanks so much for having me on.

Brittany Dr. Esther Choo professor of emergency medicine at Oregon Health and Science University. 

Next up, let’s get a better understanding on how the pandemic is affecting women from an economic point of view. Fatima Goss Graves is the president and CEO of The National Women’s Law Center. She has said that, “the economic devastation of 2020 is an ongoing disaster in the lives of women. And will leave scars that will likely last a generation.” 

[21:50]

Brittany So I’d love to get your take from really an economic perspective. How has the pandemic specifically affected American women? 

Fatima Goss Graves Yeah, the, you know, what we’re dealing with is a health crisis and economic crisis, a care crisis, you know—all of that is happening at the same time. And I just want to paint a bit of a picture so that we’re on the same page about what’s happening right now for Black women in particular.  One in three Black women who are working right now are working as essential workers. They’re disproportionately working as home healthcare workers or working in nursing homes and other health settings. But they’re also, you know, the frontline workers working at, in grocery stores, the frontline workers who are continuing to do things like drive buses. The other thing to know is that Black women are disproportionately in the spaces where people lost their jobs. They’re overrepresented in a lot of hospitality and retail.

They’re overrepresented in many of the places that shut down quickly and haven’t come back and where we don’t expect for people to come back and the upcoming stories that they’re really overrepresented as public sector workers in state and local governments. So there’s an economic crisis, which for Black people generally ends up being a family crisis, because Black women’s wages are so important, not just for sustaining themselves, but really for sustaining their families. And as we race towards a bit of a cliff of sorts, when a lot of the supports that we had injected and the economy wrap up, Black folks are looking at this in a particular way in Black women in particular. So I’m just going to add one more thing, and that is the care crisis.

You know, but care crisis in this country actually did not begin with this pandemic. Right? 

Brittany You can say that again. Yes. 

Fatima Goss Graves It was a system that was basically built on the idea that it was okay to pay Black and Brown women less. And so in September, many of us were sort of startled but actually upon reflection, it makes a lot of sense.

When the numbers came back, that over a million people left the workforce in September, and we’re no longer trying to look for jobs. And over 800,000 of them were women, mostly Black and Latino women. And that is because you saw both the care crisis of people not being able to continue to sustain the idea of working and caregiving and homeschooling at the same time.

And because for many Black women, the situation is that they’re not just working only remotely from home. So who was watching our kids? And so we are in a situation where our terrible care infrastructure has crumbled. And if we do not figure it out, there is a real worry that even if the economy comes back in the most brilliant of ways, we will not be able to have the care infrastructure to support it.

Brittany I mean, the numbers that you are talking about are staggering, right? Like you said it’s actually about 865,000 women who dropped out of the workforce to be clear, that’s compared to 216,000 men. And another thing that has become really challenging is food insecurity, right? It’s risen significantly this year, according to some of the stats from The National Women’s Law Center, it’s one in six Black and Latino women who are currently food insecure.

Fatima Goss Graves Right. And if they don’t have enough to eat, that means their families don’t have enough to eat. And when I think about part of what is happening and why these stories don’t get told is that there’s often this sort of invisibility around how Black women in this country are doing, right. So if everyone is experiencing high rates of unemployment, people are ready to have an unemployment conversation. If it’s Black women, it gets brushed by too quickly. 

Brittany Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you’ve said before that unless the government takes precisely the kind of decisive clear actions that you’re talking about, that the advances that women and women workers have made over the last 50 years are actually in jeopardy. So can you remind us what some of those advances have been, and what’s really at risk here. 

Fatima Goss Graves Yeah. I mean, when we think about what it has looked like for women to both be working in a range of different spaces to have attained and broken various types of glass ceilings, but also have been able to earn and save and move, frankly, to being the co- or sole breadwinners of their families—that’s even more true for Black women. So over the last 50 years, that is part of what a range of changes have meant. And I’m not suggesting that there was sort of utopia before the pandemic. 

Brittany Sure. 

Fatima Goss Graves But it is the case that we’re in a very different situation now. We’re talking about women leaving the workforce at rates that we really haven’t seen and putting us back decades. The story here is really about what’s happening with care. It is not possible to continue to be in this situation where people are working and caregiving and homeschooling without support. It does not work. And it is taking a toll not only on the economic security of Black and Brown women, it’s also taking a toll on their health and their mental health either.

You are, Brittany, well familiar with all of the tropes of Black women as some sort of superheroes that are apparently invincible to all things, including pain. We are struggling right now. And I have to remind people that Black women aren’t actual superheroes. Like they’re kind of magical, but we aren’t actually super heroes.

Brittany Yeah. Tracee Ellis Ross was on the podcast a couple of weeks ago and she said: “We’re not magic. We’re real,” and that means all of the human conditions that one has to deal with at any given time. This is exactly right. Let’s continue to talk about the actions that need to be taken. I mean, on this episode, we are really exploring this very specific question of what an intersectional feminist response to this pandemic looks like. So what is your vision of that response? What action needs to be taken? 

Fatima Goss Graves Well, the first thing that we have to do is actually take the sorts of steps that stabilize the situation. So that means the sorts of protections that were in place that allowed people to do things like have paid leave or have a boost in unemployment insurance that match the time. There’s no reason to let those things expire—we need to address them, but we also have to take care of the disproportionately Black and Brown women who are working as essential workers without support. The idea that they’ve been doing this without premium pay, the idea that they have been doing this without the appropriate safety equipment—it’s outrageous. It’s a shame. And so we need to invest in a way that matches this language that we have of essential, but around the care crisis in particular, the thing that has stunned people is that the real answer to the care crisis costs money. Right? And we can’t be afraid to say that we can’t be afraid to say we need to stabilize the childcare and long-term care sector. That will require as investing because families right now, it turns out, they can’t afford to pay more and they are barely getting by…if that, and I haven’t even gotten to the disproportionate way in which COVID has hit the Black community, in which COVID has hit Indigenous folks in this country. You know, right now, if you talk to Black people—and there’s been some research on this—you know, people know people who have had COVID, they’ve lost loved ones to COVID. It’s not something that’s happening over there that you’re not sure why it’s happening. They’ve been dealing with it. My family lives in Detroit right now. And the number of people who my parents have lost in such a short period of time—that trauma is in our bones right now, right. My friend Ai-Jen Poo always says, you know: “Care is the work that makes all other work possible.” The answer is to build in and invest as if we actually value the lives and the work of Black and Brown women in this country.

Brittany I love that, Fatima, thank you so so much.

Fatima Goss Graves Well, I was so glad to be with you and thank you. Thank you, Brittany. We will see each other in real life. At some point—I’m confident.

Brittany Fatima Goss Graves is the president and CEO of The National Women’s Law Center.

Finally, I want to bring in one more incredibly important voice on this subject. Imani Barbarin is a disability activists with cerebral palsy who writes @crutchesandspice.com. It’s been fascinating to say the very least for her to watch disability and accessibility awareness suddenly take off during the past many months.

[32:43]

Brittany Imani, thank you so much for joining us. 

Imani Barbarin Of course. I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for having me. 

Brittany One of the really interesting things that has been happening is how so many more people are actually beginning to experience what disability is like. You wrote: “Non-disabled people are now experiencing a taste of disability themselves.” What did you mean by that? 

Imani Barbarin So there’s so many different things I meant by that: one is the fact that about 30% to 40% of households in the United States has a preexisting condition within their walls, and for the very first time, so many people have had to identify as having a disability in order for the checks and balances in the Americans with Disabilities Act to protect them in terms of like job accommodations and work from home accommodations, things like that; another part is that people are becoming extremely ill from this virus—they’re becoming disabled; they’re having amputations because of blood clots; they’re having kidney failure; heart failure—a whole host of viral effects on their bodies. And these are long-term effects. So now people are becoming disabled from COVID and there’s likely to be hundreds of thousands of people who will have long-term disabilities because of COVID-19.

And I fear that even there’s some people that are leaving the hospital today, tomorrow, yesterday, that will not be able to return home because their homes are not even accessible to them. 

Brittany So let’s talk a little bit about this accessibility. So I don’t think we’ve ever talked about this before, but my dad was in a wheelchair for about the last two years of his life. I was 11, 12 and living life with him, right, not even experiencing what he was experiencing, but watching him have to suddenly think about all of these things that myself I took for granted all the time, right. You have talked so much about the fact that these questions of accessibility are becoming so relevant and recognized by people when they should have been always, right. I mean, there are, for example, a lot of employers who are making work from home a priority. So it’s now normal, right, for some of these things to happen, it’s normal for doctors appointments and therapy appointments to be done over Zoom. It’s gotta be frustrating to suddenly see people observe and take seriously all these issues of accessibility.

Imani Barbarin Yeah, it really is. It’s kind of like that meme of the cat sitting on the stool with its hands up, like what the hell is happening. I’ve been talking about this for years and nobody’s taking any heed to it. And disabled people in general have been talking about this for years and people have been like, Oh, well that’s special treatment, that’s a special need. And to have people flip literally on a dime to be like, “oh, we’re going to work from home accommodations. We’re going to have remote schooling accommodations,” I think the most devastating comment I got was from a disabled high school student who dropped out a month before the pandemic started because the school refused to give her homeschooling accommodations…a month.

That’s her entire high school career that is just gone, and less than a month later everybody is using these accommodations so that they can function in school and keep their learning up to date. 

Brittany That is infuriating. I mean, you’ve also noted, well, you call it “a strange paradox” that has emerged. So you said: “white collar job and educational accessibility is everywhere, disability rights and the activists who helped make them possible are under enormous threat.”

Can you talk a little bit about that paradox? 

Imani Barbarin Yeah. So the fact is that while all of this accessibility is happening, everyday life has become way more dangerous for disabled people. We can’t leave our homes out of fear of catching COVID-19 even small things like if we’re going to be able to get prescription medication mailed to us, cause a lot of insurers that are covered under Medicaid did not allow that. There are some states where, you know, in New York’s earliest versions of its crisis standards of care, it wrote in its crisis standards of care that they could take a ventilator from a person with a disability who use it on a daily basis to give it to somebody with “a better chance of living or a better quality of life.”

Brittany Oh my God!

Imani Barbarin Yeah. This is quite literally the stress that we’re constantly under. And then when hydroxychloroquine was a thing, people who needed it for lupus couldn’t get it because you know, the manufacturer was hoarding it essentially hoping to sell it off as a cure for COVID. I mean, quite literally every single aspect of our lives is affected by COVID-19.

It’s a terrifying time to be disabled. It’s also a terrifying time to be a disabled person of color, you know, because the existing medical structure is already built for us to not survive it. And now that we’re at the mercy of the medical system by the thousands, it’s a terrifying daily experience.

Brittany You have painfully and painstakingly laid out what’s at risk here, what the issues are. What are the solutions? 

Imani Barbarin So the very first and most dire thing we need to do is divest for congregate care settings and invest in community-based care. Not only is it…it’s safer. The next thing we need to start doing is getting funding to disabled people themselves. There are some dire consequences. People haven’t been able to work. People have been also been cutting off a lot of their extra spending in anticipation of an economic crash in early 2021. The next thing you need to do is STAY  THE F HOME. Like it’s such a simple thing. Just stay home. It is infuriating to watch as people disregard not only their lives, but mine. This is an airborne virus. This virus is like ableism itself. You’re not just affecting yourself. It’s everybody around you that will have to live with the consequences of what you’re doing. The fact that you’re losing 3000 people a day and people aren’t even blinking. They’re not even blinking…Stay home! 

Brittany That’s it? That should be a really simple request. And I’m really hopeful that as people hear from you, it really gets through. It shouldn’t take all that. 

Imani Barbarin It shouldn’t. I just hope that as many of us disabled people make it out of this as possible. We have so many hopes and dreams other than to just survive. And they’ve been put on hold. I mean, a lot of people’s dreams have, but for disabled people it’s been terrifying. 

Brittany And everybody deserves to thrive. 

Imani Barbarin Exactly. 

Brittany Imani, thank you. Not just for this conversation but for every single thing you do every day. 

Imani Barbarin Thank you so much, Brittany. Thanks for having me.

Brittany Imani Barbarin is a disability activist who writes @crutchesandspice.com.

[39:35]

Brittany I’ve been thinking so much about Sandra Lindsay—she’s the nurse in Queens who was the very first person in the entire country to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. When officials at the hospital asked for staff volunteers, she—a Black woman—raised her hand. I am also thinking about what Fatima said, how she has to constantly remind people that Black women are not actually superheroes. We for damn sure save the day time and again. But we aren’t magic. We are mere mortals just trying to do our best to help our families and EVERYONE survive. It’s true care is the work that makes all other work possible. But while Black women, and Indigenous women, and women of color, and working class women are out there rescuing everyone else. Who’s protecting them? It is far easier to say “let’s just flatten the curve and we’ll worry about the intersectional stuff later,” but guess what—the crisis will not end. And the curve of inequality will not flatten. If we don’t iron out the intersectional stuff right now too, we have to make justice contagious.

So share this episode, advocate in the ways for Tema requested, take the vaccine and the precautions as Esther recommended and to the very best of your ability. Listen to me and STAY  THE F HOME! We’re not done with this until everyone gets to the other side together.

That’s it for today, but never for tomorrow. 

 

UNDISTRACTED is a production of The Meteor and Pineapple Street Studios. 

Our Lead Producer is Rachel Matlow.

Our Associate Producer is Taylor Hosking. 

Thanks also to Treasure Brooks, Grace Chen, and Hannis Brown. 

Our Executive Producers at The Meteor are Cindi Leive and myself. 

And our Executive Producers at Pineapple are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Max Linsky. 

You can follow me @MsPackyetti on all social media, and our team @TheMeteor.

Subscribed to undistracted and rate and review us. Y’all, we so appreciate it. You can do that on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts or wherever you check out your favorite podcasts. So as always, thanks for listening. Thanks for being, thanks for doing. I’m Brittany Packnett Cunningham.

Let’s go get free.