This week Farai Chideya talks with Representative-Elect Jamaal Bowman of New York about his plans for a more just and equitable district, with a major focus on education. Contributor Errin Haines of The 19th updates listeners on the latest moves in the incoming Biden Administration, and NPR correspondent Hansi Lo Wang explains why the 2020 Census is still not over. Advocate Imani Barbarin discusses the intersection of disability and social media. And Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom beautifully annotates her lived experience as a Black woman and sociologist in her collection of personal essays.
EPISODE RUNDOWN
1:13 Representative-Elect Jamaal Bowman of New York on why he ran for office.
4:05 Bowman discusses possibilities for adapting education for Covid safety, and why it’s hard to make change in education systems.
8:13 In years prior, Bowman didn’t align with any particular political party, because he “didn't feel either party spoke to my needs personally or the needs of my family and my community.”
14:00 Errin Haines discusses the lack of diversity in President-Elect Joe Biden’s administration so far.
15:35 Susan Rice is slated to become the next Director of White House Domestic Policy Council, Haines says, a position that crucially does not require Senate confirmation.
18:37 A new poll out of Georgia finds that a majority of registered Black female voters are highly concerned about the outcome of the Senate races.
21:04 Our Covid update highlights the crisis in Navajo Nation, and the systemic difficulties that health care providers face there.
24:06 NPR national correspondent Hansi Lo Wang breaks down the importance of the 2020 Census, and how the Supreme Court could be making some historic changes to the way it operates.
33:00 Disability activist Imani Barbarin talks about how she uses social media to get her message out and connect with others in the disability community.
35:02 Barbarin explains the parallels between those impacted by Covid and those in the disability community.
37:48 Having lived in France, Barbarin says having a disability in the two countries is a completely different experience.
38:38 Author, professor and sociologist Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom talks about her latest collection of essays and her lived experience of being a Black woman in America.
40:09 “..whiteness defends itself against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason,” McMillan Cottom says.
41:46 McMillan Cottom talks about the trauma of her own birthing experience, and explains the dangers of the US healthcare system for Black women and others who are meant to understand their bodies are “incompetent.”
Farai Chideya:
Thanks for listening and sharing Our Body Politic. As you know, we’re new and creating the show with lots of input from listeners like you. So I want to ask you 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. Thanks so much.
This is Our Body Politic. I am the creator and host, Farai Chideya. We're covering a lot of ground on our show this week, a Supreme Court case about the 2020 census, the Senate races in Georgia, and I talk to an outspoken advocate from the disability community, a MacArthur Award recipient, and of course, our very own Errin Haines on politics. But first I had the pleasure of talking to an incoming member of Congress.
There are all kinds of fresh faces coming into Congress next year. One of them is Jamaal Bowman. He's the representative-elect from New York 16th congressional district. He beat a 16 term incumbent Democrat in this year's primary, and he's an incoming member of The Squad, the formerly all female progressive group of congressional Democrats, which includes Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Bowman was raised in New York City by a single mom, grew up without a father, and told me he had family and friends impacted by the crack epidemic and the country's school-to-prison pipeline. He says that all of that led him to become a teacher then to go on to found one of the best public middle schools in the city, and eventually to run for office. Representative-elect Bowman, thanks for joining us.
Jamaal Bowman:
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Chideya:
If you had to describe what motivates you in one word, what would that be?
Bowman:
Children. If I could use two words, I would use my children, both my biological children and the children I've had the pleasure of serving over the last 20 years in public education. When you work in public schools, particularly Title I schools, particularly in places like The Bronx, you see and experience so much. And despite our schools being underfunded, under-resourced, large class sizes existing within communities that have been neglected for decades, our kids come with unbridled energy, ideas, passion, and excitement from learning. So for me, I'm just driven to do whatever I can to make sure we meet the needs of kids both here, across the country and all over the world. Children shouldn't suffer because of our BS. Let me put it that way. And that's been going on for far too long.
Chideya:
And it's going on now, especially for Black children and all children of color. I was looking at some headlines, there was a New York Times story, just recently, 12,000 more white children returned to New York City schools than Black children, and a Washington Post piece about how a study predicts that white students will lose seven to eight months of math learning because of the pandemic, but it will be 11 to 12 months for students of color. What do you want to do once you get an office that could help deal with some of these questions?
Bowman:
Yeah, so we're not even waiting until we get into office. We're working with organizers right now on the ground who are doing everything they can to fundraise and bring resources to our kids who are most vulnerable. As you mentioned, Black and brown kids are more likely to choose remote learning, but unfortunately, they don't have the hardware or access to Wi-Fi to access the remote curriculum. And for me, right here in New York City, if we're going to have Facebook and Twitter and other companies come buy up a bunch of real estate so they can expand their monopoly on tech, let them provide the funds and the resources that we need to give our kids, the hardware, the Wi-Fi, and the software that they need to access the curriculum. But once we get to Congress, the fight is going to continue because we're going to have to hire more teachers, more tutors, and do everything we can to give students small group and individualized instruction to help close the gaps that are being created by this pandemic.
At the beginning of this pandemic, we partnered with the University of Pennsylvania to do a report around what would in-person instruction look like, or what could it look like based on the current circumstances? We knew we couldn't be in schools because the schools didn't have the ventilation systems needed to create the airflow that would keep students safe. So we proposed an outdoor learning program that could be remarkable in a place like New York City in New York State occurring in parks, occurring near waterways, occurring in spaces that are not being used. But again, when you don't center all kids, you don't have the urgency and you don't have the resources and you don't have the creativity to implement something like that. And lastly, I would say for something like that to work, it has to be local, state, and federal elected officials working in concert. And unfortunately, historically, we do more bickering and fighting than working together.
Chideya:
Well, speaking of bickering and fighting, the Democratic Party seems to have a..
Bowman:
Some beef? We got some beef?
Chideya:
Yup, exactly. Beef is on the political menu, but what do you make of the Democratic Party as an institution? For example, should the Democrats carry the Senate races in Georgia in January, then the Democratic Party will still have to deal with itself. And how do you think the party should deal with itself?
Bowman:
Well, we were able to come together to do everything in our power to get president-elect Joe Biden into office. We organized both collaboratively and in our own spaces, we collaborated around the Democratic Platform for Joe Biden, which became one of the most progressive if not the most progressive Democratic Platform in US history, and we were able to get him into office. So now we're doing the same thing in Georgia. And there's going to be debate and there's going to be disagreement, and hopefully it remains respectful and doesn't always become public, but that stuff is necessary to make us as strong as we need to be so we don't have QAnon worshipers and Trump supporters taking power in Congress and taking the White House in 2024. That's the existential threat.
Chideya:
Well, just to jump in on the Trump supporter thing, there were more Trump supporters of color this time around significantly than in 2016. And how do you imagine not your dialogue personally, but your party's dialogue and The Squad's dialogue with people of color who said, "The Democratic Party isn't for me, or at least the presidential candidate is not for me?"
Bowman:
Yeah, well, Trump took advantage and the Republicans took advantage in the gap, a gap that was present in our organizing and our engagement. I used to be not registered to any party because I didn't feel either party spoke to my needs personally or the needs of my family and my community. And I know there are many people in the Black and Latino community who feel the same way. They feel that this government has failed them. So we have to do a better job of engaging the Black and Latino community, not just those who are college educated, but those who are working class. We have to create a space and a platform to listen, to learn, to engage, and to bring them in so that we can grow our base, grow our electorate and be stronger going forward.
Chideya:
I want you to talk a little bit about your Reconstruction Agenda that deals with people who are working income service providers, people who are now deemed essential workers, but don't always get compensated for that.
Bowman:
That's right. We need a platform for the working class in this country. And I'm using the term working class to describe those who are not college educated, those who finished high school or may have not finished high school and are looking to work and grow our economy. We're talking people within the care economy, so health aides, early childhood providers, childcare providers are part of that conversation. We're talking about the manufacturing industry for people of color, particularly in this district, but also across the country, and we're talking about creating an infrastructure and a pipeline to engage all people in that process.
Now, when you look at the New Deal and the Works Progress Administration, it created a federal jobs guarantee. And unfortunately, during that time, many African-Americans were kept out of those conversations. But now in the 21st century industrial economy, we're fighting to implement a Green New Deal. And the Green New Deal is right in alignment with our Reconstruction Agenda, which includes a federal jobs guarantee targeting historically oppressed communities and communities of color. And this third installment of the Reconstruction Agenda, which also includes a process of truth and reconciliation and a process that will lead us towards reparations is a part of that conversation.
Chideya:
What do you mean when you say reparations?
Bowman:
So, I mean identifying the descendants of slaves. Once they are identified, I mean giving them free access to higher education, very low cost access to housing and land, and cash payments for myself and my children as an example. And this precedent here when you look at the Japanese Americans, Jewish Americans what happened in Germany, Rwanda, South Africa, there's precedents for reparations for the descendants of slaves. And to me, it's not a fringe conversation, it's common sense. For us to reach the ideals of our democracy, we need a process of truth and reconciliation and a process of reparations so that we can move forward and become the true post-racial nation that we tried to become after Barack Obama.
Chideya:
Well, Representative-elect Jamaal Bowman, thanks for joining us.
Bowman:
Thank you so much.
Chideya:
Jamaal Bowman is the representative-elect from New York's 16th congressional district. Coming up later this hour...
Errin Haines:
I've just gotten ahold of a new poll out of Georgia of about 500 Black women who were registered voters, and eight in 10 of them said that they care a good deal about who wins the Georgia Senate run-offs, and they feel that their vote has a lot of power more than a million mail-in ballots already requested. And Black women organizers on the ground have been really doing a lot of work to try to get more folks registered and turned out here in the next several weeks. But more than seven in 10 Black women in this poll ranked coronavirus as their main issue, more than half said that racism and discrimination was their top priority. 42% ranked healthcare as their most important issue. These are folks that are also tying those priorities to policies that they prioritize.
Chideya:
You're listening to Our Body Politic.
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Now we get an update on all things political from Errin Haines. She's editor-at-large at The 19th and a regular contributor here at Our Body Politic. She joins me for our weekly update, Sipping the Political Tea.
Hey, Errin.
Haines:
Hey Farai, how's it going?
Chideya:
It's good. You have been writing up a storm.
Haines:
Oh my God.
Chideya:
You know the future of politics. And so you have written about a meeting that president-elect Biden had with civil rights leaders. Why and what happened?
Haines:
So there are a number of constituencies, frankly, that have voiced concerns about the diversity in Biden's administration as it begins to take shape, including members of the Hispanic Caucus, folks from the Asian American community, and also members of the Black community, including civil rights organizations and Black lawmakers who are looking for the coalition that helped to elect Joe Biden, including folks of color to be represented in his governing structure. What they said when they met with Joe Biden this week was that it wasn't enough for Black folks to just have a seat at the table, but for them to really have decision-making positions at the highest levels in his administration. People who were going to have a direct line to the president-elect and the vice president-elect. People who were going to really have influence in shaping policy, particularly as Joe Biden identified, racial equity as one of the four crises that he feels that he and Kamala Harris will hear once they step into office next month.
Chideya:
Speaking of which Susan Rice, Ambassador Rice has been named to a new position that does not require congressional approval. Can you explain what position she's going to be playing in the Biden and Harris administration and also why Senate approval is actually an important question?
Haines:
Absolutely. So Susan Rice is now slated to be the next director of White House Domestic Policy Council. And that is not a position that requires Senate confirmation. Susan Rice, somebody who was in the conversation for the veepstakes if you remember earlier this summer, and was certainly discussed to run the State Department given her extensive foreign policy background in her beginnings in that arena, but there was also some concern that somebody like Susan Rice given the controversy over Benghazi, for example, that she would be somebody who would be difficult to get through a Republican controlled Senate. They may take issue with her nomination, and a lot of the nominees at least up to this point are seen as folks who could have bipartisan appeal. She's somebody who's known Joe Biden for the better part of two decades. So she will be joining the administration just not in a role that requires Senate approval.
Chideya:
And I went to her next, not just because she's a Black woman, but also because she's talked about race as a national security issue. Can you tell us a little bit more about her and what she brings to the table?
Haines:
Absolutely. So, like I said, this is somebody who is known as a person who's had extensive experience dealing with foreign policy, but when I spoke to her this summer as among the women who were being discussed to be Joe Biden's potential vice presidential running mate, this is of course before he picked Kamala Harris, what Susan Rice told me was that she believes that our divisions along race and racism have the potential to be exploited.
Chideya:
Yeah, one of the many interesting data points on that is that Russian disinformation-
Haines:
Exactly.
Chideya:
As well as domestic disinformation explicitly targeted Black folks.
Haines:
Exactly. And we saw that in 2016 and we saw it again in 2020. And so what Ambassador Rice said was that our adversaries have figured out that because these divisions exist, all they need to do is really pit us against each other. And so really healing those divisions is a matter of national survival and it's going to be crucial to our democratic viability. And so it'll be interesting to see how she brings that worldview to this role.
Chideya:
So let's dip into the Georgia run-off. From what I've seen at the polls, they're incredibly close. What do we know about, if anything, about how the math is shaking out here, who's likely to vote, and also what motivates Black women?
Haines:
Yeah, well, it's interesting that you ask that because I've just gotten ahold of a new poll out of Georgia of about 500 Black women who are registered voters, and eight in 10 of them said that they care a good deal about who wins the Georgia Senate run-offs, and they feel that their vote has a lot of power to affect what happens in those races, and nearly nine in 10 are making a connection between the Senate and the impact that the Senate has on their daily life, which is super interesting. Obviously we know that Black women, Black voters, but Black women in particular played a pivotal role in flipping Georgia blue in last month's presidential election. First time that's happened since 1992. And there seems to be a lot of enthusiasm. More than a million mail-in ballots are already requested for the January 5th run-off. Early voting is set to begin soon, and Black women organizers on the ground have been really doing a lot of work to try to get more folks registered and turned out here in the next several weeks.
But more than seven in 10 Black women in this poll ranked coronavirus as their main issue, more than half said that racism and discrimination was their top priority, 42% ranked healthcare as their most important issue. These are folks that are also tying those priorities to policies that they prioritize. Three in four Black women polled said that they considered legislation on both pandemic relief and police reform as the most impactful for Black women and for their communities. Four in 10 Black women said that they planned to vote early in-person, and a third said that they planned to vote by mail. So really getting information out to them about how they can participate, what those deadlines are is going to be crucial and could be a factor in how we see Black women showing up in this election.
Chideya:
Errin, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much.
Haines:
Thanks for having me.
Chideya:
That was Errin Haines, regular contributor at Our Body Politic and editor-at-large at The 19th. Coming up later this hour...
Hansi Lo Wang:
Counting has ended for the 2020 census, and people think, oh, the 2020 census is over. And it's not over because we don't have the results yet. We don't have the first set of results. And the Census Bureau is trying its best right now to review all of the information it's collected, trying to run quality checks.
Chideya:
This is a critical time in the arc of the COVID 19 pandemic with a mix of devastating and hopeful news. We also drill down on the impact on communities of color, this week focusing on Native Americans. The top lines for the country are that the US is now averaging more than 200,000 coronavirus cases per day. A New York Times analysis this week found that more than a third of Americans live in areas where hospitals are running out of intensive care beds. And for the first time this week, more than 3,000 people died from the virus in a single day.
The per capita death rate from coronavirus on the Navajo Nation is double that of any of the 50 states. That goes hand in hand with high rates of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and poverty. Even hand-washing is a challenge because many of the homes on the Navajo Nation lack running water. The Indian Health Service has only 14 intensive care beds in the entire 27,000 square miles of the Navajo Nation. They serve over 170,000 people and they're under serious strain. Dr. Jill Jim is the executive director for the Navajo Nation Department of Health, and she was recently named to president-elect Biden's COVID-19 Advisory Board. Here's what she told KOB TV in Albuquerque.
Dr. Jill Jim:
There is never enough funding, and I think that has crippled our response to the pandemic. The inability to have updated electronic health records, updated health facilities and enough staffing and enough money for staffing.
Chideya:
The federal CARES Act set aside $8 billion for Native American tribes, but it's designated for COVID medical supplies only, not to address systemic problems.
Data is another sticking point. The federal government shares data about the spread of COVID-19 with states, but tribal health centers have had to fight to get access to information about their own populations. When someone enters the hospital, the forms they fill out might not even have a space for them to self-identify as American, Indian, or Alaska native. That makes it harder to track the infection rate.
Abigail Echo-Hawk:
We're fighting for the lives of our people every single day. We step into rooms where they hear our names, they see our faces, they listen to our voices and they decide for us who they think we're supposed to be.
Chideya:
That's Abigail Echo-Hawk, executive director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, speaking on a recent panel by Vibrant Hawaii. She says the data on COVID-19 infections is "a national disgrace."
But let's end on the hope that vaccines represent and the complications. This week, the first citizens in the United Kingdom got a vaccine and the first Americans probably aren't far behind. But getting everyone vaccinated, especially people living in rural areas, including some tribal lands, is going to be a challenge. We'll get into that in next week's update.
There's another big data drop affecting the US and that is the census. Every 10 years, the census aims to count every living person in the United States and where they live. Officials use that to figure out how many members of Congress each state gets. Plus it determines how at least $1.5 trillion in federal funding gets distributed each year. The pandemic made counting a challenge, plus the Trump administration politicized the process. Hansi Lo Wang is a national correspondent for NPR. His beat is the people, power, and money behind the 2020 census. Hansi, thanks for joining us.
Wang:
Thank you for having me.
Chideya:
I would say that your beat reporting on the census has become what I would call nerd sexy. It is a highly data-driven, legal, strategy-driven, policy-based topic that also has a ton of vibrancy to our current moment. And when you look at what's going on out of all of the threads, and we'll get to a bunch of them, what is top of mind for you right now?
Wang:
Well, we don't know... Counting has stopped. Counting has ended for the 2020 census, and people think, oh, the 2020 census is over. And it's not over because we don't have the results yet. We don't have the first set of results. We don't have any results yet. And the Census Bureau is trying its best right now to review all of the information it's collected, trying to run quality checks, something that it has done every decade after counting ends to make sure that every person counted is counted once, only once and in the right place. A big problem that often comes up are duplicate responses. Some folks who have moved around or maybe they have multiple homes filled out more than one form and the Census Bureau needs time to deduplicate and make sure that no one is counted twice.
And there is a big question right now whether or not the Census Bureau will have enough time to do this really important sets of quality checks because the Trump administration is pressuring the Census Bureau to try to finish this as soon as possible. The Trump administration wants it done before the end of President Trump's term. And that may not be enough time for the Census Bureau based on how this has gone in the past. Something that usually takes place over around five months is now being cut down in half in about two and a half months.
Chideya:
There are so many other things that are unknown, which is including how undocumented immigrants will be counted. How are they typically counted? And what is the Trump administration asking for?
Wang:
Ever since the very first US census in 1790, the numbers used to determine how many congressional seats, how many House seats each state gets. Those numbers have always included both citizens and non-citizens regardless of immigration status. What the Trump administration is calling for is an unprecedented change that would go against almost 230 years of US history. And what President Trump wants to do is to come up with the count of unauthorized immigrants that would allow him to subtract those numbers from the total population counts, those latest state population counts the Census Bureau is expected to release first. And again, these are the numbers that determine how many House seats each state gets and how many Electoral College votes each state gets.
Chideya:
And there seems to be a clear demographic weighting of people who might fit that status in blue states, particularly on the coast and in other regions of the country or emerging purple states. I also think having studied immigration a bit myself, how there are undocumented immigrants who generally fly under the radar more easily, particularly ones who are white. How do you as a reporter continue to focus on the empirical questions of the census and also take into account that there is partisanship in this too?
Wang:
I think I'm trying my best to answer the empirical questions, which sometimes those answers are not so obvious and are not easily attainable. Three lower courts have already ruled that what President Trump is calling for, this change, is unlawful. One of those courts has ruled it is unconstitutional. But then putting the legal questions aside, is this even practically possible to do? And these are empirical questions that there is no clarity on right now. The Trump administration has told federal courts that so far, it is only deemed feasible at this point that it can only come up with a count of some unauthorized immigrants and not all unauthorized immigrants.
And specifically, one potential group here are unauthorized immigrants in ICE detention centers, which is a very small percentage of the estimated 11 or so million undocumented immigrants, unauthorized immigrants, living in the United States. These are facts I'm still trying to nail down because these facts will also be part of the determination of whether or not Trump administration can actually carry out this policy change. And that would then also have ramifications on which community specifically would be impacted, which states would be impacted.
Chideya:
We will keep track of how this goes because without the census, we don't know who we are, we don't know where to put resources. And your research has been... Your reporting has just been really valuable. Thank you Hansi.
Wang:
You're very welcome.
Chideya:
That was Hansi Lo Wang, national correspondent for NPR.
We've been receiving wonderful voicemails and emails from listeners through our platform, SPEAK. This month, the prompt is how would your day be different if you spend as much time on community, family, creativity, and wellness as you do on working? Here's what one listener shared with us via voicemail.
Listener Clip:
I feel like i I have somewhat tried to sidestep that by trying to do jobs that aligned with some of the values that I would want to cultivate within my community. Even then I feel like I definitely just would be more enraged at the fact that my community is the way it is because there's a lack of resources and there's a lack of mobilization to get better education or better water quality. And then if I was spending it with family and doing creativity, I think that honestly, that would be more relaxing just because I believe that I don't have as much time to read or to do things that I really enjoy. So I would enjoy being able to do that more.
Chideya:
If you'd like to leave us a message, you can call (929) 353-7006. That's (929) 353-7006. Leave us a voicemail or go to ourbodypolitic.show, yes, .show is a real thing, and scroll down to find a Google form to respond in writing. Coming up next...
Tressie McMillan Cottom:
We all start in the Obama role, which is hopeful. You think you are being pragmatic, right? Like let's just work this out because it seems like something that can be worked out. The challenge is that the racial minorities, Black people are doing that maturation, but white people are not.
Chideya:
You're listening to Our Body Politic. Imani Barbarin has one of the best taglines on social media, Rude For A Disabled Person. It speaks to all of our society's demands that disabled people be quiet, unseen, and grateful, part of a much bigger picture of ableism or the way we're not inclusive of the quarter of Americans who have disabilities. A public intellectual writer and podcaster with cerebral palsy, Imani Barbarin uses social media to advocate for the disabled community and for herself. Imani, it's so great to have you on the show.
Imani Barbarin:
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Chideya:
I am a super fan. There's something about your kind of salty social media presence that I absolutely love. How did you start doing social media and choosing that as a way that you interact very profoundly with the world?
Barbarin:
I had started a blog around 2016, and my mom had admittedly stopped reading my blog. So I wanted to connect with other readers and connect with other disabled people who might enjoy and relate to my content. And so social media was the best way to do that because you could sit in a room remotely and talk to the world. And with the disability community, they always talk back. So it's been a real rollercoaster and really happy and really humbled by the people that follow me and the people that I've connected with online.
Chideya:
There are so many different types of content streams that you did. I love your TikToks. I'm not even on TikTok, but your TikToks also get put on Twitter. You have one about disabled kids and sex ed, which you just have to watch because it's a very pointed joke that doesn't even have words with it. It just has a song. I thought that was great. And then there's ones that are just really deep. A couple of them that really come to mind are the one on being left for dead in emergency rooms and relating it to COVID. So tell us a little bit about why you did that specific TikTok and what you're trying to communicate.
Barbarin:
I was really likening it to our current era with this pandemic. And a lot of the things that we're experiencing now are almost parallel to the ways that disabled people are treated in society normally throughout the year. And so it's been really disheartening to see so many non-disabled people come to the realization right now that we're in an emergency situation in which, again, disabled people are being left behind. And so much of it is run of the mill for disabled people. We deal with this feeling that we're not really worthy of saving all the time. It's just now with the pandemic it's been sped up and hypermobilized. And I think that other non-disabled people are finally relating to that feeling.
Chideya:
I was really struck by a blog post that you did about wanting to go to the swimming pool and thinking about all these different ways that other people might sabotage you enjoying swimming, whether it was looking at you or moving your crutches away from the side of the pool, all these different things. And from what I understand, you said you were raised to be Black first and disabled second. Can you explain a little bit about that and what you mean?
Barbarin:
Growing up, I was very much so aware of how difficult it is for Black people to talk about disability. When you're a person of color or Black, especially Black women with disability, you have to choose a lot of the time. You have to choose what you decide to go into the world with. People choose the parts of their identities that will keep them the most left behind by society. If prioritizing being a Black woman over being a disabled person could save my life, I'm going to prioritize that first. If the most barriers happen with my physical being, a lot of people identify with their disability first. And for me, my mother raised me to be a Black woman first because that's what she knew, and that's what she knew she could teach me how to survive. And this identity of disability is like a new thing for a lot of my community. And I'm proud about the conversation that we're having. However, it is still very much whether mindset is... This is what's going to leave you behind first, this is what we get to address first.
Chideya:
I was also fascinated by the fact that you're a world traveler. And from your bio, it sounds like you studied at the Sorbonne and presumably speak French from your educational bio. And it sounds like you've had a lot of adventures. How do you speak to other people with disabilities about the ability to have adventures, the ability to be a person in the world, even if it must be exhausting at times, and not just exhausting physically, but exhausting to deal with other people?
Barbarin:
Yeah, it's really interesting because disability is different culturally. And so the experience that I have in United States as a disabled person is completely different than when I lived in France. I lived there for about three years off and on. And I love having adventures. I love traveling. I love going places by myself and just exploring the city or the town that I'm in. And I think that it's very, very hard, and I try to be very mindful that there are so many other disabled people that want to travel, that want to see the world, but just can't because of inaccessibility.
Chideya:
Well, Imani, it's great to talk to you.
Barbarin:
Thank you so much. I enjoyed talking with you.
Chideya:
That was Imani Barbarin, disability representation and inclusion advocate, public speaker, writer, and blogger. You can follow her and find her videos on social @Imani_Barbarin.
My next guest also writes about her lived experience as a Black woman and all the pain and wisdom it's brought. Tressie McMillan Cottom is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She's a sociologist and this year was named a prestigious MacArthur Fellow. I recently spoke with her about her latest collection of essays titled Thick. Dr. Cottom writes about everything from her 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.
McMillan Cottom:
It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
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 you had a reflection in that chapter that was just fascinating.
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.
Chideya:
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 me having a white savior complex, but about for years, believing the angels of our higher nature [crosstalk 00:39:42] rain. And other people may disagree with me, but I do believe that some of the discourse that President Obama has engaged in. Relatively recently, he talked about snappy slogans like defund the police. And 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. If you want to be a president or a senator, is that acceptable?
McMillan Cottom:
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, right? Like let's just work this out because it seems like something that can be worked out, right? 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 which is 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. And this is going to be tough. And 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, right? Like 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.
Chideya:
I think it's... 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. And 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. And 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? What happened to you and your family?
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 neoliberalism and found myself wanting to talk about my pregnancy story. And I was thinking, "What the hell is going on there?" Right? And 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. And especially as a sociologist and as an academic, I feel like we can rely on people's trauma for our own professional and personal gain, and we can forget that a statistic is a lived experience. And 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.
Chideya:
Yeah.
McMillan Cottom:
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 at 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. Right?
Chideya:
Yeah.
McMillan Cottom:
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.
Chideya:
And 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.
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, right? We have this thing work twice as hard, right? Dah, dah, dah, and how much that shapes our expectations of ourselves. And 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.
Chideya:
Not just pains. You were bleeding.
McMillan Cottom:
Yeah. And 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 the 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.
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.
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 yourself 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, in the right time, on the right end of globalization.
Chideya:
So what would you tell your grandmother today about how you are? What would you tell her if you could?
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'd like to say that I'm Baptist, 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.
Chideya:
Tressie, thank you for joining us.
McMillan Cottom:
Thank you so much, not just for having me, but for such thoughtful, wonderful questions. It's been a pleasure.
Chideya:
That was Tressie McMillan Cottom, who's also the co-host with Roxane Gay of the podcast Hear to Slay. Thank you so much for joining us on Our Body Politic. We're here on the air each week and everywhere you listen to podcasts.
Our Body Politic is presented and syndicated by KCRW, KPCC, and KQED. It's produced by Lantigua Williams & Co.. I'm the creator and host, Farai Chideya. Juleyka Lantigua Williams is executive producer. Paulina Velasco is senior producer. Cedric Wilson is lead producer and mixed this episode. Original music by Kojin Tashiro. Our political booker is Mary Knowles. Our producer is Priscilla Alabi. Michelle Baker and Emily Daly are assistant producers. Production assistance from Mark Betancourt, Michael Castañeda, Zuheera Ali, Sara McClure, and Virginia Lora.
Credits:
Funding for Our Body Politic is provided by Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and by The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, empowering world-changing work.
Chideya, Farai, host. “Tressie McMillan Cottom on Black Womanhood, Why the 2020 Census Remains in Contention, and Jamaal Bowman on a Divided Democratic Party.” Our Body Politic, Diaspora Farms LLC. December 11, 2020. https://our-body-politic.simplecast.com/