This week we’re recharging and planning ahead. So we’ve curated some of the most interesting conversations Farai Chideya has had with our guests in the last few months. Senator Tammy Duckworth talks about how her service in the military inspires her political leadership, including her advocacy for veterans and people with disabilities. Investor Nathalie Molina Niño explains why it makes business sense to see entrepreneurship by women of color as an investment opportunity. Professor Steven Thrasher explains the ableism that seeps into talk of Covid-19’s disproportionate impact on communities of color, and the creation of what he calls a “viral underclass.” Journalist Leezel Tanglao talks about the platform Tayo Help which disseminates useful information to Filipinos, a population heavily impacted by Covid-19 due to the large number of Filpino healthcare workers on the front lines of the pandemic. MacArthur Fellow Tressie McMillan Cottom shares her personal story of pregnancy and loss to “reanimate” the worrisome statistics about Black maternal mortality. And futurists Sharon Chang and Kamal Sinclair discuss better ways our country could plan for retirement and work-life balance.
EPISODE RUNDOWN
3:40 Senator Tammy Duckworth says even though she was injured in combat, serving in the military was the “greatest privilege” of her life.
5:37 Senator Duckworth explains why it’s important to tailor policy so veterans can transfer their skills to the civilian workforce.
10:02 Senator Duckworth says she would like to see more people with disabilities in government positions in order to inform policy.
15:06 Nathalie Molina Niño describes the moment she realized that access to money was the root issue getting in the way of success for women and people of color entrepreneurs.
23:02 Dr. Steven Thrasher explains why he says ableism is a “plague” during the Covid-19 pandemic.
28:16 Leezel Tanglao talks about her online platform Tayo Help and how it works to stop the spread of misinformation about Covid-19 within the Filipino community.
37:44 Tressie McMillan Cottom talks about her hesitancy to write about the death of her newborn daughter, but says she did so to illuminate how a statistic could be someone’s lived experience.
44:20 Sharon Chang and Kamal Sinclair of the Guild of Future Architects discuss what a true work-life balance could look like if society redefined the value of work.
Farai Chideya:
Thanks for listening and sharing Our Body Politic. As you know, we're only a few months into this show. We are still evolving, still shaping it, and we need lots of input from listeners like you. So I want to ask a small favor. After you listen today, please head over to Apple podcasts on your phone, tablet, laptop, or anywhere you listen, and leave us a review. We read those because your ideas matter to us. And thank you.
This is Our Body Politic. I'm the creator and host, Farai Chideya. Each week we bring you conversations with leaders and thinkers, mostly women of color, about how they're experiencing the politics and culture of the moment, plus how they're influencing it. This week, we're taking a short break from production to take stock of all the great interviews we've brought you, and plan ahead. We've got some cool things cooking in the test kitchen.
Farai Chideya:
Now, these are some of our favorite conversations from the last few months. Let's start with Senator Tammy Duckworth. She's a combat veteran, a disabled American, and a leader. Born in Thailand, Senator Duckworth is the daughter of a Thai mother and an American father. Her family's military heritage goes back to the revolutionary war. Now, that came up in a 2016 debate with her opponent, Republican Senator Mark Kirk. Here he is on NBC News.
Mark Kirk:
I've forgotten that your parents came all the way from Thailand to serve George Washington.
Farai Chideya:
Senator Kirk was essentially implying that Duckworth was lying about her family history or saying that he didn't understand or didn't want to understand her multiethnic heritage and history. Duckworth defeated Kirk to become a US Senator from Illinois. And before that though, she spent years continuing her family's history of military service. She served as a helicopter pilot for the Illinois National Guard in Iraq. It was there that a rocket attack cost her both her legs and partial use of her right arm, something she spoke about at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.
Senator Tammy Duckworth:
A rocket propelled grenade hit our helicopter, exploding in my lap, ripping off one leg, crushing the other and tearing my right arm apart. But I kept trying to fly until I passed out.
Farai Chideya:
Later, she served in positions including assistant secretary of the US Department of Veterans Affairs, was elected to the US House of Representatives, and then in 2016, to the Senate. In 2018, Duckworth became the first Senator to ever give birth while in office. After she fought to change Senate rules to allow children in the chamber, she was also the first to ever cast a vote while holding a baby.
Senator Duckworth, I am so thrilled to have you on Our Body Politic.
Tammy Duckworth:
It's so good to be on. Thanks for having me.
Farai Chideya:
I just wanted to tell you a little bit about my family to start out with. We have people who have been veterans and specifically fought in wars back to the Civil War, which was my grandmother's grandfather, and up to my cousin who served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even though I've heard years of stories from my family, I don't know what it's like to be a veteran. I want you to tell me what it's like to be a veteran and how it informs your mission today as a public servant.
Tammy Duckworth:
Well, serving in the military was the greatest privilege of my life. It truly was. If you came up to me today and said, "Tammy, we're going to give you a magical snap of the finger. We'll take you back to being a second Lieutenant and you get to do your military service all over again. The caveat is you know that you're going to get blown up and you're going to lose your legs and go through all that," I would take that deal in a minute. I would take it in a quick second, because it was truly the greatest privilege of my life because I got to do two things.
One, I got to serve next to the most amazing men and women I have ever had the privilege of knowing. People of honor, people of discipline, people of good intentions, folks who come from all different life stories and backgrounds, and that's what's so great about our military is that you could be serving next to someone who has a completely different life story than yours, but you're still sharing the same mission and you've got each other's backs. That was just the most incredibly personally rewarding thing I've ever been able to do in my life.
And then the second thing was this idea of serving something greater than yourself, that you are serving the American people. You're serving this Republic and this democracy trying to make for a more perfect union. And so I'm so proud to be a veteran because I get to stand on the shoulders of those who came before me, many of whom I'm sure, I'm assuming that someone in your family served even before they had rights as citizens, before they were citizens. So I get to stand on some amazing shoulders of our forebearers who served in uniform.
Farai Chideya:
I think about all of the veterans who I've interviewed in my journalism career who frankly have felt lost if they become civilians again about how they're supposed to function in a chaotic job market and what healthcare benefits they're getting. As a Senator, or possibly in the future in other roles, what do you want to see America do for veterans?
Tammy Duckworth:
Well, there are a number of things that I would like to do, and it starts with their time in the military. I wrote a piece of legislation called the Troop Talent Act that would require the DOD to provide our military men and women with the civilian certification for their military jobs on the day that they get that qualification in the military. I'll give you an example. You could have somebody who is an army medic and served four years or 15 years or 20 years as an army medic, but they never get their EMT license. So then when they come out after four years of serving honorably, oftentimes in battlefield conditions where they're basically doing battlefield surgery, they come home, they can't get a job as an EMT unless they go back to school, spend money, spend time, and they're shown as having zero years of experiences in EMT.
We need to make sure that our military men and women get the civilian certifications on day one. And then we have to make sure that we provide the wraparound services for them in terms of their healthcare. Well, first and foremost, jobs in terms of their healthcare, and make sure that we follow up with them throughout the rest of their time as veterans. The Marine Corps does this very well with their Marine For Life program. The army has started that, a version called Soldier For Life, but it's not consistent across the military, and I think we need to do a much better job of that.
And then there are special communities of veterans that would need extra attention just because of who they are and the challenges they face. Female veterans, for example, will need extra attention because they're oftentimes overlooked in the veteran community as being veterans. Also women, when they leave the military, experience on average a 30% drop in pay because in the military, you get equal pay for equal work, but when you leave and you go to civilian job market, women in the civilian job market, depending on whether you are white, black, or Latinx, make anywhere from 80 cents on the dollar down to as low as 70 cents on the dollar. And so female veterans immediately see a drop in their earning ability in going into the civilian workforce.
And then on native American, a First Nation veterans have an especially hard time because they're so isolated if they go back to native American lands where they don't have as much access. So those are some of the things I would certainly want to work on.
Farai Chideya:
You are the first US Senator to give birth while in office and in an interview with CNN, you talked about your gynecologist saying so many of us professional women give up our fertility. Why did you decide to proceed with fertility, and what did you feel like when your second daughter was born, who was born when you were 50, I believe.
Tammy Duckworth:
Yes. Relief. Well, as a young professional woman, I wasn't ready to have a child. And as a helicopter pilot, you get grounded and you lose your flight status if you are pregnant. And so I was on the fast track to compete with my male counterparts to be a battalion commander one day. And so we, my husband and I just decided we weren't ready and we didn't know if we wanted to have children. And by the time we decided to have children, I was wounded in combat and recovering from that. I started with IVF treatments and it was 10 years of struggle before we got to the point where we had our first daughter, Abigail. From the time I was about 36, 37, I had her at 46. And yes, I had Maile Pearl two weeks after I turned 50.
Farai Chideya:
Best birthday present ever.
Tammy Duckworth:
Best birthday present ever. I'm glad I did it. I tell people I'm a new mom, not a young mom. I'm so grateful that we have the capacity for me to do that. And by the way, the men in the Senate have been doing it for years. The men in the Senate have been having babies for 200 years and nobody bats an eye when a 65 year old male Senator has a baby, and they make it a big deal because I was 50. Let's get rid of the double standard here.
Farai Chideya:
Oh, absolutely. What does America need to do in the coming years to really make sure that people with disabilities have pathways to employment, are allowed to be married regardless of economic status? There are couples that can't marry each other because of the way benefits are structured. What sorts of things do you want to see change and what changes are you making in your role as a Senator?
Tammy Duckworth:
Well, first and foremost, stop attacking the ADA. It's been 30 years since the ADA passed and people are still attacking it. When we have corporations that have had 30 years to make their businesses wheelchair accessible, including brand new buildings who continue to flout the ADA and try to attack it, shame on them. We need to make all of our public transportation ADA compliant so that people can actually get to work. And then we need to go after a lot of the healthcare regulations and rules to make sure that people... As you said, you shouldn't have your benefits affect whether or not you can be married. Those are all things that we need to be working on.
Tammy Duckworth:
And we need to elevate persons with disabilities to the very highest levels of government because they will help us to chart those waters. And that's why when at the time vice president Biden asked me to look at his plan for our disability awareness and disability support, I asked him to please include a position in the White House for disability advisor, special advisor to the president for disability issues, that that person will answer directly to the president.
Farai Chideya:
Senator, thank you so much.
Tammy Duckworth:
Thank you for having me on.
Farai Chideya:
That was Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois. Each week, we invite you to tell us what's on your mind through our platform, Speak. This week we're asking you more about your community. We want to know if you had one hour to talk about one topic affecting your local community with a US Senator for your state, what would you talk about and why? I'd be talking to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand or Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and I'd ask what their concrete action plan is for ensuring fair financial services that would preserve black home ownership during and after the pandemic in neighborhoods like the one I live in in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. To leave us your message, you can call (929) 353-7006. That's (929) 353-7006, or go to ourbodypolitic.show and scroll down to find a Google form to respond in writing.
Farai Chideya:
This week, we're bringing you some of the interviews we enjoyed the most in the last few months. Nathalie Molina Niño is a one woman force for business innovation and justice. She's the daughter of South American immigrants and she rose in the tech industry, then took on behind the scenes roles in politics. She's a technology expert and coder by training and has worked on everything from socially responsible investing to higher education. And now she's got a big idea for making finance more inclusive. Nathalie, it's great to have you on.
Nathalie Molina Niño:
It's amazing to be here.
Farai Chideya:
Why don't you just set the stage for us? I want to know a little bit more about how you got into both business and politics. What was it that attracted you, maybe even as a child, to understanding these systems?
Nathalie Molina Niño:
Well, the political awakening is definitely most recent. I come from a family of immigrants. My parents moved here from Columbia and Ecuador respectively, worked in the sweatshops of Los Angeles. And then my father ended up starting his own factory. My mom, in order to make sure that my dad's entrepreneurial adventures, which as all entrepreneurs and especially I would say immigrant entrepreneurs without safety nets, it's a risky proposition. And so my mother ended up getting a union job actually at a supermarket in Los Angeles so that we could have health insurance, so that we could have reliable safety nets. It was that experience that led me to understand what it was to be an entrepreneur and frankly not know anything else. When I was 20, I ended up starting my first dot com.
Farai Chideya:
Why did you pivot out of the technology industry? If I understand correctly, you're now off to other adventures, which you may or may not be able to talk about yet, but you've got pots all over the oven, pots all over the stove top, but pivoting in new directions.
Nathalie Molina Niño:
In my mind, I was taking a sabbatical. Everyone expected me to go away for a year and come back. But in the back of my mind, I knew I wasn't coming back. So I expected to take a couple of years off. I went to Columbia. I both went back to school, but then I also started the Center for Women Entrepreneurs within Barnard. So my first pivot was just that. It was let me leave tech and focus on paying it forward and hoping that I can give a leg up to the next generation and make things hopefully a little bit easier for them than it was for me.
Nathalie Molina Niño:
And then while I was in New York and while I was in that world, it became really clear to me that while education was important and all the education in the world will make a difference in the lives of many, the fact is if we're really honest about what's at the root of the issue and what's holding women, especially women of color back, it's money. And so after a few years of that, I became an investor, and that was about in 2016, and that's where I am now. I'm a full-time investor and I'm constantly thinking of ways to give women, especially women of color and communities of color, an unfair advantage.
Farai Chideya:
Tell me why you deliberately chose the word unfair advantage.
Nathalie Molina Niño:
We lost Ruth Bader Ginsburg last year and I would say when I say unfair advantage, I'm referring to the exact same logic that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was using when she was asked, when will enough women chief justices be enough? And she said nine. We've had hundreds of years of all-male chief justices. It's fine for there to be an all-female group of justices and I'm feeling the same way. We have systemically and we continue, people are obsessed with the history of unfairness and injustice from a financial standpoint in this country. They have to understand, and even the ones that don't pay attention, you have to understand that if you think redlining was unfair, how do you feel about over $500 billion being released to "small businesses" in the last year and 90% of that money not going to people of color. Redlining is happening right now, it's not a historical thing.
Farai Chideya:
I have written about this in my neighborhood in Crown Heights. I actually ended up lending money, which I got back to a black, small business owner because she had no way to get these loans. So it became very personal for me. And if she'd never paid me back, it still would have been fine for me but not fine for the system.
Nathalie Molina Niño:
Not okay.
Farai Chideya:
Not okay.
Nathalie Molina Niño:
Not okay, especially when you think about the fact that women are starting more businesses than men in this country at about twice the rate and of those, 8.9 out of 10 of them are women of color. Really there were over $500 billion deployed into small businesses. And if you don't care at all about the community and all you care about is just the math, then you should have focused on directing the majority of that money towards women of color owned businesses. That's the opposite of what happened.
Nathalie Molina Niño:
And so the amount of correction that will have to happen, the same way that someone might say giving a woman a preference in becoming a chief justice might feel unfair, that is a correction that is well overdue and the kind of financial platforms and strategies and policies that I want to see put in place that are needed in order to correct hundreds of years of injustice. Some people might perceive as unfair as well, but it's not even close to what's needed in order to truly level the playing field. We have so much work to do. It's not going to be done in my lifetime, or even in anybody who's currently alive this lifetime.
Farai Chideya:
Where is the inflection point that you are most dedicated to right now, because you're playing in very different lanes: politics, investing, entrepreneurship. If you had to pick the inflection point that you find most useful and most high impact, what would it be?
Nathalie Molina Niño:
It's what my next company is going to be. And honestly, it's where I want to focus the rest of my life, and that is we worry, and we rightfully should worry about who is in elected office, and we worry about heads of state, and we worry about things that make headlines. Like the fact that very few women get venture capital. If we look at women of color, women of color get less than 1% of all venture capital. There is no freaking way that the single most entrepreneurial group and demographic in this country has less than 1% of the good ideas. So it makes absolutely no mathematical sense.
Nathalie Molina Niño:
But if we took more of a macro perspective and we look at all money worldwide, less than 2% of all money worldwide is managed by women or people of color. People of color who represent over 70% of the global population have a say on how less than 2% of all money is distributed in the world. And so I want to step back from the details and I want to think macro level. If I look at someone like Larry Fink at the helm of BlackRock managing over $7 trillion, this is not someone who was elected and this is arguably one of the most powerful people in the world.
And I think about, for example, in the United States, if just African-Americans and Latinos channeled their economic power, it would be a $3.9 trillion economy. It would be the fourth largest economy in the world if all we did is shop from each other, loan to each other, Farai, the way you did to that small business, and actually transact with each other. We could harness the fourth largest economy in the world. And so that's my focus. My focus is how do we build the black indigenous people of color owned version of BlackRock? How do we make sure that in addition to civil rights and voting rights and all of the other things that are really important, that we also focus on ownership. We need to own the hospitals. We need to own the insurance companies. We need to own the banks. Our communities need to be in positions of ownership, and we need something like a competitor to a BlackRock that has majority people of color onto.
Farai Chideya:
Well, I can't tell you how excited I am to hear that that's your next venture, and I hope you'll come back once it launches to talk to us. Thank you, Nathalie.
Nathalie Molina Niño:
Thank you. Anytime.
Farai Chideya:
Nathalie Molina Nino is president of O³, a private investment company. The name stands for outcomes over optics.
Our Body Politic has been covering COVID-19 for months from perspectives you may not hear often. We've highlighted the many ways the pandemic heightened inequality, especially among people of color. One of the most important conversations we had was with Steven Thrasher. He's a professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and for years he's reported on issues, including the Black Lives Matter movement and the criminalization of HIV and AIDS. Professor Thrasher, thanks so much for joining us.
Steven Thrasher:
My pleasure.
Farai Chideya:
You've studied and reported extensively on HIV and AIDS and how the epidemic was criminalized, how it impacted marginalized communities. How do we compare this to COVID-19. Different viruses, different demographics, what are the similarities and differences that have stood out to you in doing the kind of research you do?
Steven Thrasher:
In the beginning of the pandemic, what really stood out to me was that they were affecting similar populations and that they were both considered disposable populations. I initially was thinking about how disposable the Reagan administration considered the people who first appeared to be affected by HIV and AIDS, particularly men who had sex with other men, people who used injection drugs. They were not considered anyone worth running around trying to help. And something very similar has happened with the coronavirus is that it's considered to affect people who are "weak, elderly, already have set conditions".
And so ableism has really been a plague, I use that word intentionally on this virus in that people who think they're strong enough to survive it give off the air that those who don't are too weak and therefore somewhat deserving of what they're getting. And that dynamic has been made worse as world leaders have gotten it and gotten over it, particularly Boris Johnson in England, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. And of course, President Trump here in the United States. When they've transferred the virus and moved through it, they've sort of said, "I'm manly enough, I'm strong enough." And so if people don't survive it, that's on them.
Farai Chideya:
You've written a lot about the criminalization of HIV, including one very specific case. Can you tell us a little bit about that work which is going into a book that's going to be called the Viral Underclass, which encompasses different diseases and different types of bias. Why is it still relevant today?
Steven Thrasher:
I've been studying for six or seven years now the case of Michael Johnson, who was a young man, also known as Tiger Mandingo. That was his nickname on social media. He was accused of transmitting HIV to six other young men and was in prison and initially sentenced to 30 years in prison. But the case to me really encompassed a lot of problems in American society. People who are uninformed about it might think that it's good to prosecute people for disease, but it really isn't. It creates all kinds of biases and even at a tactical level, it simply disincentivize people to get tested because if you don't know that you're living with the virus, you can't be prosecuted for it.
I started looking at viruses and how they're prosecuted as a lens to understand the many ways that black people and sickness and queerness are police and prosecuted in this country in ways that are not helpful. And so it's been really informative and helpful to rely on that lens, but extremely disturbing to look at the early calls to criminalize COVID, which have happened in states and nations around the world very early on starting I think first in China and also in civil countries in Asia and Europe, and then of course in the United States.
Of course, when it has been dealt with as a police matter, it's very disparately affecting the same kinds of people that are prosecuted for HIV, which is black people and poor people. In New York City, the first data that came out when they briefly were arresting people for not wearing masks or so many people on beating people for not wearing masks, they were overwhelmingly black and Brown people. And of course the people who can stay home and have everything delivered and have their work happen remotely are never going to be prosecuted for anything. A lot of early criminal matters around COVID were happening to essential workers. People being accused of being out past curfew during protests, even if they were coming to or going from a hospital for their work shifts.
So there's a real class element that's a problem too. And in Minneapolis, this is one of the cities where we could really see the tension between policing and public health. George Floyd died, of course, from a police encounter when a police officer crushed the air out of him, but he was found to be, in his autopsy, living with the coronavirus. And so who knows whether he would have lived or died from that? He was a black man of a certain age, so he was certainly a high risk category. But the fact that we know that he had it shows that the same sort of societal forces are making someone like him live with this virus, and they also are putting them in harm's way for the policing. And so when I was hearing people call for the abolishment of prisons and the defunding of police, I thought of what would have happened in a city like Minneapolis if they were spending less money on policing and more money on public health. Maybe George Floyd doesn't get killed by the police, maybe George Floyd doesn't get the coronavirus.
Farai Chideya:
Professor Steven Thrasher, I'm so glad to talk with you. Thanks a lot.
Steven Thrasher:
Thanks so much Farai. It's always a pleasure.
Farai Chideya:
Professor Stephen Thrasher is currently working on a book called The Viral Underclass: How Racism, Ableism and Capitalism Plague Humans on the Margins.
COVID-19 has hit certain groups the hardest: healthcare workers, the elderly, and essential workers. At the center of these three concentric circles are Filipino Americans. At 4 million, they only represent about 1% of Americans, but they're 4% of nurses and 28% of immigrant healthcare workers across the country. The organization National Nurses United says Filipino Americans were the largest non-white ethnic group of nurses to die from the virus. A new Filipino organization, Tayo Help, wants to raise awareness of the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on this community while dispelling dangerous myths that are hurting the most vulnerable among them.
Leezel Tanglao:
Tayo, in Tagalog, a major Philippine language, means us. So we'd like to say that the Tayo Help Desk is powered by us for us.
Farai Chideya:
That's Leezel Tanglao. She's a multimedia journalist, senior editor for membership and innovation at HuffPost and program director and spokesperson of Tayo Help. Tanglao says Tayo Help makes official information about COVID more accessible to groups of Filipinos for whom cultural norms can sometimes be barriers to access.
Leezel Tanglao:
If my lola and lolo, which means grandparents, grandmother and grandpa respectively in Tagalog, if I were to give them let's say an official CDC website article, or a World Health Organization article, it's factually correct but it may not be always easily accessible to them. So what we've been trying to do is take from official sources as well as tapping into our expert network and putting together articles that make it more accessible to some of the most vulnerable sectors of our community.
Farai Chideya:
Tanglao and her colleagues are also using Tayo Help to create safe spaces for Filipinos to get support.
Leezel Tanglao:
Oftentimes in the community, you don't want to let people know you're sick or you don't want to ask for help. You want to be independent and you don't want to be indebted to somebody. But you do need the help. So we're trying to create a space that's safe enough that it's okay and we can't help you if we don't know you need the help, for example. There's also a cultural barrier of Bahala na, loosely translated to leave it to God. It's like, I'll be fine. God's going to take care of me. Well, part of that too is also meeting him halfway.
Farai Chideya:
And Tayo Help Desk is fighting misinformation too.
Leezel Tanglao:
We have a large number of our population that are senior citizens. Most of them are on a lot of messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. I can't tell you how many times I've been forwarded a meme or some piece of information that's just completely false. What we're trying to do is also provide more reliable information that is also shareable so that instead of them sharing a graphic that purports to have a home remedy for COVID-19, they can be sharing something that's actually true.
Farai Chideya:
That was Leezel Tanglao, program director and spokesperson for Tayo Help. You can support Tayo Help Desk by donating at tayohelp.com. That's tayohelp.com.
Farai Chideya:
I love inviting writers and public thinkers on the show like my next guest. I talked with her a few episodes ago and it's one of my favorite conversations. Tressie McMillan Cottom is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She's a sociologist and was chosen as a MacArthur fellow in 2020, the so-called genius grant. I spoke with her about her collection of essays titled Thick. In the book, Tressie writes about everything from family to beauty, to Obama's presidency, plus a horrific labor and delivery experience which resulted in the death of her newborn daughter. Welcome Tressie.
Tressie McMillan Cottom:
It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Farai Chideya:
I love the fact that you talk about your process and how you step out of the frame and yet give us this first person experience. I wonder if you could read us just a little bit from a section you have about visiting a party that was to support then candidate Obama running for office in a fancy white part of town, and do you have a reflection in that chapter that was just fascinating?
Tressie McMillan Cottom:
For all of his intimacies with his white mother and white grandparents, my first black president doesn't appear to know his whites. There's no other way to explain Obama's inability to imagine that this nation could elect Donald Trump. Those of us who know our whites know one thing above all else, whiteness defends itself against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, against its own laws and customs. Even after Donald Trump was elected, Obama told Ta-Nehisi Coates that all is not lost. Obama is still hopeful about the soul of white America. He said nothing about the soul of black America. That is where my hope resides.
That hit me because it felt like me in some ways and what I mean by that is in some ways I have been in what you perceive as the Obama role of constantly putting my hopes on white America to change. And I admit that it's not about me having a white savior complex, but about for years believing the angels of our higher nature to reign. Other people may disagree with me but I do believe some of the discourse that President Obama has engaged in. Relatively recently he talked about snappy slogans like defund the police. There seems to be this game of keep away with certain sides of the black community. What are we to make of that in the sense of, can you just come out and say I want black people to be happy. I mean, if you want to be a president or a senator, is that acceptable?
I think there's a maturation of your racial self. We all start in the Obama role, which is hopeful. You think you're being pragmatic, like let's just work this out because it seems like something that can be worked out. You feel like if you just get the right words and the right vocabulary and you develop the right shared experiences, right? We do the same thing at work. That's the premise of everything we do in public life. The challenge is that the racial minorities, black people, are doing that maturation, but white people are not. And so if they are never doing the process, if they're never moving, all of the work on the other side is not going to change how white people view themselves in their own racial identity. That's the work that has to happen. And I do think we get to a stage, or for us to be mentally healthy, I think that you have to get to a stage with just saying I have to make sure that I'm okay but I also have to divest from the potential of white people to reach their highest selves. Is this going to be tough? Yeah, but that honesty thing again, which is, I don't know that Barack Obama has gotten to that level. I think he is still very invested in a narrative of how whiteness can be saved and remediated that sets him apart from parts of the black community who have matured beyond it. That's all. And I really do think that's where the mismatch is. So the sort of casual dismissal of something like defund the police when people, many of them disproportionately black, are quite literally living in police states in this country. They're not talking about a slogan. They really are afraid of being murdered by the police. When that is your reality, you don't have a whole lot of room for developing the capacity of hope for white people. But yeah, sometimes I listen right now to Barack Obama and I revisit that piece and I wonder if it needs revision because I'm always checking myself on that. As I say in the book, I never want to have my beliefs fixed in time. And I got to tell you, it hasn't needed revising yet.
Farai Chideya:
I think the whole idea of the double consciousness, I think that there's many layers of consciousness where you're looking through the layers of class, gender, race, but within... I was just about to go on and on, but one thing, and this is, it was just so hard to read your journey with your pregnancy. Reading it is a tiny fraction of what I can only imagine it took to live it, but you have a line in your book, "When my daughter died, she and I became statistics." That relates to I think this question of how the lived experience of black people is determined by this nation that we live in. What happened to you and your family?
Tressie McMillan Cottom:
I'd said I'd never write about my medical trauma, which is fundamentally what the essay is about. And then I started writing about neo-liberalism and found myself wanting to talk about my pregnancy story. I was thinking, what the hell is going on there? It took me a moment to figure out that I was uneasy and hope I'm always uneasy with how black lives get extracted into a data point and into a statistic. We can forget that a statistic is a lived experience. One of the things I wanted to do was re-animate one of the most horrible statistics that I think we produce in this nation at the moment, and that is that black women and black babies are more likely to die in childbirth in the United States of America than almost any woman anywhere in the world.
I mean, that's just... I mean, are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? The basic function of life, reproducing, in the wealthiest country in the world in the history of the world and a moment of technological advancement that we are seriously talking about colonizing the moon, and a middle-class black woman can go into the hospital, have a baby and die. And so my own birth experience became a way to think about what it means to be living in the most fortunate time in human history, and that this is still the best that it's ever been to be a black woman.
Farai Chideya:
What is the role of incompetence? You talk about assumptions of incompetence in a way that really illuminated this horrific journey that you were forced to take.
Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Well, because I, kind of like you were talking about seeing yourself in the Obama character in the essay, I saw myself in the narrative of the... Oh, it's almost an immigrant narrative that we have in this country, which is if you work hard, you do everything right, there's a way that you can preempt and plan for the inevitable racism, sexism, classism that will shape your life. We have this saying, work twice as hard, dah, dah, dah. And how much that shapes our expectations of ourselves. I think I was angry with myself for how I had accepted that I could somehow be decent enough, middle-class enough, respectable enough, that I would have a different experience than the typical black woman.
And so my reflection is on how the healthcare system, this bureaucracy is set up for certain bodies to always be incompetent. There was never a performance of competence that I was going to be able to do in the emergency room when I present and say, "I'm having pains," and no one tries to figure out why I'm having contractions.
Farai Chideya:
And not just pains, you were bleeding.
Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Yeah. I wanted to let myself, it was a process of me forgiving myself too for believing; believing it could be different, believing it can be better. I hope that's what I offer to other black women in particular who read it, that there's a reason why you thought it could be different. And none of that is your fault, just like it isn't your fault when the outcomes are not different.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. I could talk to you all day, but you don't have all day. And so I just want to end with you reading a little bit more from your book, and one final question.
Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Sure.
I am, by most measures, pretty smart. My grandmother was smarter. She was do the Times crossword in pen smart. She was teach herself liberal arts with a library card smart. She was, for most of her life, a domestic worker for rich Jewish people who sent me cards when I got good grades in school: the Edelmans, the Goldmans, the Finkelsteins. When she died, quickly thank God, all of my grandmother's possessions fit inside the one bedroom, senior living apartment in the small town where she had been born. She was far smarter than her PhD-having granddaughter, and she died poor. Smart is only a construct of correspondence between one's abilities, one's environment, and one's moment in history. I am smart in the right way and the right time on the right end of globalization.
Farai Chideya:
What would you tell your grandmother today about how you are? What would you tell her if you could?
Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Oh, wonderful question. Thank you. Because one of the saddest things for me is I'm having the greatest period of my life, both professionally and personally, and my grandmother didn't live to see it. Now, I don't necessarily ascribe to the same doctrine or religion that my grandmother did. I like to say that I'm culturally Baptist. I know how to go to church and I know how to do the rituals, but I talk to God all of the time and I would want her to know that I had figured out how to talk to God and that we had a fine relationship going, and I know that my worth is not determined by this world and that I was going to be okay.
Farai Chideya:
Tressie, thank you for joining us.
Tressie McMillan Cottom:
Thank you so much not just for having me, but for such thoughtful, wonderful questions. It's been a pleasure.
Farai Chideya:
That was Tressie McMillan Cottom, who's also the co-host with Roxane Gay of the podcast, Here to Slay.
We often reach out to listeners to get a sense of what they're thinking about the pandemic, their priorities, politics, and more. One question we asked recently was how would your day be different if you spent as much time on community, family, creativity, and wellness, as you do on working. That's something the futurist organization, the Guild of Future Architects, has been working on. Sharon Chang is the founder and creative director of the Guild. Hey, Sharon.
Sharon Chang:
Hi Farai.
Farai Chideya:
And Kamal Sinclair is the executive director. Welcome back, Kamal.
Kamal Sinclair:
Hello Farai.
Farai Chideya:
Why is this question important? I want both of you to answer. Sharon, why don't you start?
Sharon Chang:
This question is important to me because of the way I look at how we define work. We look at work as a matter of survival, and we get into the framing of, okay, if you're lucky enough to find a job that also is your passion, good for you. But most people just have to do the job and have a hobby, and then in their spare time, go take care of all these other things that are actually essentially really important to one's wellbeing and to community, to the health of our entire world. So until the day we can really start to think about and really question how do we even come to this definition of work, and start to integrate the idea of work and life in a way that we haven't been able to do since the industrial age. And I find this question fascinating because it allows us the opportunity to really start to fundamentally question why we even follow this kind of mental model.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. Kamal, what about you? What is this calling up for you?
Kamal Sinclair:
Over the holidays, I got a chance to synthesize through just all these futures writers' rooms that we had run with people. Two themes came up pretty regularly. One was, do we really believe in the unique fingerprint of every person on this planet? Do we really believe that each person has something unique to contribute that only they can contribute? And if that is true, why are we not designing our work and life systems to invest in that particular person so that they can unleash that potential for the betterment of everybody? And I think about this whole idea around how we're going to spend our time in the future is very much tied to the shift from industrial age systems that are antiquated now, especially with the systems coming on board that are supposed to supply an abundance of time because of the future technologies like artificial intelligence.
If that's true, then what do we do? We can stop investing in human beings just as kind of cogs in the wheel of production to investing in people for unlocking their human potential. And I think that human potential is not just tied to the particular service they do through their job, even though I think that should be very much tied to what their passion is and what they can contribute, but also how they are serving in terms of community, in terms of family life, in terms of their relationship with nature, and in terms of making meaning, making a meaningful life lived.
Farai Chideya:
Sharon, human beings may not always want shared prosperity. There's some evidence that we want advantage over equality. How do you factor that into how you look at your shared futures?
Sharon Chang:
I believe there really is a different model that's based more on relational construct, understanding our relationship with living and non-living systems. Once we start to discover our relationships with those things, I think it opens up a very different kind of awakening. It's not shared prosperity versus competitive advantage. All of those things can be true at the same time.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. I'm going to end actually with retirement because one of the little twist was, the question again was how would your day be different if you spent as much time on community, family, creativity and wellness as you do on working. But one thing we got was a few people saying, well, I'm retired, so I don't have to spend my time working. Kamal, it raises the question of does our society ask people to wait to choose what to do with their time until they are retired, and does there need to be a rebalancing there?
Kamal Sinclair:
I absolutely think so. We tend to miss a lot of value, even from this fact that someone can go from being at work in a traditional sense of work as something that earns you money to spending time in community and having a different relationship, and then bringing that knowledge back into their work life. We miss a lot of even the ways in which those things create value. And I think when it comes to retirement, if we identify work as I work myself to death until I get to a point where I can just relax for the rest of my life, versus a modality of from the beginning of my work life all the way through to the end of my life, I have a relationship of making meaning, I have a relationship of learning, I have a relationship with my community that's supported by this ecosystem of resource generation that work does, I think that's a really exciting prospect.
Farai Chideya:
And Sharon, I'm going to let you just give us any further thoughts.
Sharon Chang:
I think we need to abolish that term altogether. It's so straight incremental and everything is predefined and labeled for us when life really should be just a continuous spectrum of beauty, because I think the very question of am I doing the right thing, am I in the right place now is what really limits everybody's potential.
Farai Chideya:
Sharon, Kamal, thank you so much.
Sharon Chang:
Thank you.
Kamal Sinclair:
Thank you, Farai.
Farai Chideya:
That was Sharon Chang and Kamal Sinclair of the Guild of Future Architects.
Thank you so much for joining us on Our Body Politic. We're on the air each week and everywhere you listen to podcasts. Our Body Politic is produced by Lantigua Williams & Co. I'm the creator and host, Farai Chideya. Juleyka Lantigua-Williams is executive producer. Paulina Velasco is senior producer. Jen Chien is executive editor. Cedric Wilson is lead producer and mixed this episode. Original music by associate sound designer Kojin Tashiro. Priscilla Alabi is our producer. Julie Zann is our talent consultant. Michelle Baker and Emily Daly are assistant producers. Production assistance for this episode from Michael Castañeda and Mark Betancourt.
Funder Credit:
Funding for Our Body Politic is provided by Craig Newmark Philanthropies and by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, empowering world-changing work.
CITATION:
Chideya, Farai, host. “How the Covid-19 Pandemic Raises Issues of Ableism, Investment Opportunities in WoC Entrepreneurs, and Black Maternal Health Disparities.” Our Body Politic, Diaspora Farms LLC. March 5, 2021. https://our-body-politic.simplecast.com/