Black Genealogy & Reparative Justice: Honoring the Ancestors, Restoring Our Families
COVID & Incarceration: What We Have Learned
Sources of Spiritual Wellbeing for Our Children in the Face of Trauma and Disruption
REHEMA KuTUA - “PHYSICIAN STRESSES AND UNCERTAINTIES AMIDST COVID-19”
“For many patients of color, I’m the only Black physician they’ve ever seen. I take care of myself to continue to be present for my friends, my family, my fiancé, and my patients.” — Rehema Kutua, M.D.
QADIRA HUFF - “COVID-19 AMONGST MY PATIENTS”
“In a recent Washington Post poll, I saw that 31% of black Americans personally knew someone who had died of COVID-19, versus just 9% of white Americans. That psychological toll and sense of sadness and burden is a whole other level in terms of toll of this pandemic on the families that I am personally serving. When we hear about the higher rates of infection and serious illness and death form COVID-19 amongst black Americans, we have to interpret it through this lens of the social determinants. All too often we do see that the individual person being fully in charge and autonomous of their health and wellness. That narrative is completely outdated and wrong. The preponderance of “essential jobs” falls upon black and brown communities, whether it’s grocery store workers, fast food, other service industries, delivery. Thinking about families that I’ve worked with who have multi-generational households and relying on elders in their family for childcare, there’s going to be some level of exposure as other adults show up to work and then potentially bring Coronavirus back home knowing that there’s going to be increased risk of infection and mortality to elders.” — Qadira Ali Huff, M.D.
Nigel Hatton - On the Braxton Institute
Nigel Hatton - On Incarceration
“So I was teaching my class at the university and then once I dismissed those students I immediately got in the car and drove down to this prison. What I wanted to do was to help them [those incarcerated] understand the ways in which we could look at narrative and literature and look at masterful works within the tradition that dealt with themes and issues that would be pertinent to them, and also build upon what was their knowledge and their abilities to theorize about some of the important problems in our society because they’re brilliant women.
They’re there often for crimes that in other societies that are understood as advanced or developed Western democracies, they would not be in prisons. Instead, they would be in programs designed to rehabilitate them and would return to society and they would participate in that society once again. So our model is different. It seems to me it’s a model that throws away lives. I’m hoping for ways in which teaching literature and also narrative medicine is going to stress the importance of life and to say that we cannot throw these lives away. These are human beings and they are part of what is going to make our society great. The idea of throwing them away is what we must resist.
There is a startling statistic that in the past 25 years the State of California has created 20 new prisons and one new university. I teach at the one new university, but the 23 prisons are surrounding us. So I wanted to really think about the ways that a literature professor could participate and resist what is that continued effort to create this prison industrial complex at the cost of human life.” —Dr. Nigel Hatton