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What Happens When You Give People Money?

What happens when you give people money? Dr. Aisha Nyandoro and Natalie Foster know: through their research, they’ve seen the impacts of guaranteed income firsthand.

On November 9, as part of the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy’s Sulzberger Distinguished Lecture series, these experts discussed their work and what we can learn from it at “What Happens When You Give People Money: The Future of Economic Security for Children and Families.”

Natalie Foster

Foster, co-founder and co-chair of the Economic Security Project, began with the big idea of guaranteed income. Before the pandemic, wealth and income inequality were at all-time highs — disparities that “can be traced back to the origins of racialized capitalism.” But recently, things have gotten even harder. Wages have remained stagnant despite increases in productivity — and despite inflation, making it harder to afford things like rent. Foster denounced the “strong ideology that says that lack of security in this system is a personal failing. That if you can’t pull yourself up, there’s something wrong with you.” There’s something wrong with the system, Foster said. “People are working. The economy isn’t.”

Foster explained that the 1996 “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act” fundamentally changed welfare by converting the old New Deal-era unlimited grant program into the flat-funded block grant we now know as TANF, leaving determination of eligibility to state discretion and generally “making welfare more punitive.” The Act, Foster said, was built on racist stereotypes, like that of the welfare queen. To make matters worse, it was passed against the backdrop of a persistent devaluation of the labor of people of color

Foster said that even though there didn’t appear to be room in these political conditions to do things differently, she had the “audacity to imagine something else: the ‘adjacent possible.’” She wanted to give cash to people directly, ensuring an income floor regardless of whatever crises that may abound.

Foster worked with the mayor of Stockton, California on the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED), which provided 125 Stockton residents with $500 monthly payments for two years. 

Dr. Aisha Nyandoro

Foster was connected by a mutual friend to Nyandoro, the CEO of Springboard to Opportunities. Nyandoro had launched The Magnolia Mother’s Trust, which provides low-income Black mothers in Jackson, Mississippi with $1,000 monthly payments for one year. 

With The Magnolia Mother’s Trust, Nyandoro sought to shift away from economic policy “rooted in ‘what is,’ and toward ‘what could be.’” This concept has a rich history, she said, and includes the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panthers. She had a specific ‘what if’ in mind: “What if when Black women told us what they needed, we believed them?” What if we sought to overturn the very structures that keep these people down, and subverted the “paternalistic nature of the social safety net”? 

Nyandoro stated that as a researcher, when she has questions, she “goes back to the people.” When she did, she found that although people’s needs were individual, “cash was ubiquitous” — cash was a solution that could address every single one of the problems that she heard. Giving cash directly could help combat a system that “penalizes people for being poor, rather than trying to lift them out of poverty.” 

Why low-income Black mothers? Nyandoro explained that in order to do the work of economic liberation, one must identify what’s wrong with the system. In this case, that meant identifying those who are the most negatively impacted by the system, and using what limited resources are available to help them specifically.

Nyandoro turned to her findings: giving people cash works. These mothers are often working tirelessly, holding down two or three jobs and struggling to make ends meet. After receiving the money, people continue to work and often do so at higher rates (a major fear of opponents of guaranteed income). As a result, their income is often doubled — with life-changing results

Beyond the numbers, Nyandoro emphasized that “we are seeing joy. We don’t talk about joy enough as it relates to Black women.” This money allowed Black women to feel free, to be entrepreneurial: to “dare to dream for the first time — for themselves and for their families.” 

She referenced Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s famous speech “The Danger of a Single Story,” explaining that in order to change the narrative, “we need to change the narrator.” It’s time to think about whose voices we center.

In Jackson, Mississippi and Stockton, California, the pair had carried out research about the ‘adjacent possible.’ They’d used cities and states as “laboratories in democracy.” Foster said that their work was paving the way for gradual advances in guaranteed income — slowly, but surely. Then, the pandemic hit.

Suddenly, ideas that had recently been dismissed as too radical were viewed as necessary. Often unable to work, people needed money fast in order to put food on the table and cover their most urgent needs. The federal government rose to the challenge with the American Rescue Plan, providing stimulus checks and pandemic unemployment insurance, plus expanding the Child Tax Credit. “The ‘adjacent possible’”, Foster said, “had become the possible.”

The country saw an “immediate drop in poverty.” The pandemic was revealing, said Foster. It revealed that cash provides time, stress reduction, and resilience. It revealed that cash serves as a tool to create economic security and “build back better.” Above all, it revealed that “poverty is a policy choice that we’re currently making. We could make a different policy choice in order to eliminate it.”

The pandemic also revealed that stimulus checks and the Child Tax Credit were “very popular policies.” Nyandoro has observed support in the form of petitions for monthly cash transfers, the founding of organizations like Mayors for a Guaranteed Income and Guaranteed Income Community of Practice, and the launch of over a hundred guaranteed income pilots of some sort. All these efforts, Nyandoro said, are pushing toward “the same North Star”: centering the needs of families and achieving economic liberation through federal policy.

Foster turned the discussion toward next steps: “these victories have been immense, but could disappear” if the Build Back Better Act does not pass. The Act includes a year-long extension of the expanded Child Tax Credit, a key instantiation of guaranteed income. The Child Tax Credit has bipartisan support

If the extension of the Child Tax Credit passes, then according to Foster, guaranteed income is one step closer to becoming a cornerstone of social policy. This would be a “nail in the coffin of the way we’ve done policy for the last fifty years — that you’re only worth what you do in the world. Every human has dignity and worth, and we have the opportunity to build a policy that says just that.” 

Nyandoro agreed with Foster. As an anti-poverty advocate, she believes in a world without poverty: a world where “everyone can have a life of dignity for themselves and their families.” She believes that the ‘adjacent possible’ is achievable if “we can move beyond our own individual needs in order to view life as a collective, where prosperity is shared rather than hoarded.” She ended by quoting Toni Morrison: “if you have some power, then your job is to empower someone else.”

Last Friday, the House voted to pass the Build Back Better Act, which now heads to the Senate.

Post by Zella Hanson

Building a Just Foundation for Our Energy Transition

Swine Country Documentary Project

As conversations about the energy transition away from fossil fuels become increasingly important (and time-sensitive), some experts in environmental policy aren’t just worried about the conversations themselves. They’re worried about who has a seat at the table — and who doesn’t. 

Sherri White-Williams

On November 8, at “Building a Just Foundation for Our Energy Transition,” a few of these experts — Sherri White-Williamson, Environmental Justice Policy Director at the NC Conservation Network; Josh McClenney, the North Carolina Field Coordinator at Appalachian Voices; and J. Spenser Darden, the Assistant Dean for Diversity and Inclusion at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy — spoke about this and other issues. Thomas Klug, a Research Associate at the Duke Energy Access Project, moderated the panel, which was put together by the Sanford Energy & Environment Club.

Klug asked the panelists to define what a “just transition” really means in the context of the panelists’ work, and whether it differs from a diverse and inclusive transition.

J. Spenser Darden

McClenney answered that a just transition entails recognizing that Black, brown, and indigenous communities, as well as low socio-economic status individuals, have historically faced the worst effects of fossil fuel economies. Living in the “physical and economic traction zones,” they’re the ones that lose jobs — like coal miners, in the case of McClenney’s work with Appalachian Voices. 

However, where a diverse and inclusive transition involves “getting people to the table,” just policies will actually reflect the conversations had at the table. An unjust transition, McClenney said, is one where “people clap themselves on the back for doing such a great job having these diverse, inclusive discussions — then make policies that work against their participants.” Ensuring inclusion for communities that have historically been excluded is important, but it’s equally important to make sure the resulting policies are actually inclusive.

Josh McClenney

White-Williams agreed with McClenney — inclusion should never end at “checking the box.” The goal should be to incorporate the input of marginalized voices into resulting policy. White-Williams also added that fairness, while not necessarily guaranteed by diversity and inclusivity, is a key part of a just energy transition. 

Spenser stressed the need to move away from “extractive, colonial” ways of thinking about energy and who makes up society, and to instead incorporate indigenous ways of thinking. He stated that diversity and inclusion is reactive: people realize flaws in the way they’ve built something and try to address it later by incorporating new elements. A just system, on the other hand, is built to be “for and by” communities that have been excluded from the very start.

Klug asked the panelists to recount some of the ways they’ve seen organizations, utilities, and decision makers putting the processes required for a just transition into practice.

McClenney spoke of revelations from the onset of COVID-19 in March 2020. Preventing utility shutoffs became critically important: people were losing jobs or forced to stay at home. They couldn’t come up with the money to pay their utility bills. While fighting utility shutoffs with Appalachian Voices, he saw a group of Knoxville organizations, including Knoxville Water and Energy for All, bringing attention to the fact that the shutoffs were not just a COVID problem. For some Black and brown communities, McClenney said, “keeping the lights on had always been an issue.” These grassroot groups’ advocacy expanded beyond the pandemic: they wanted energy and water recognized as human rights.

Klug asked the panelists how they feel about President Joe Biden’s performance with regard to just transitions in the energy sector — specifically, his January executive orders and recent bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill

White-Williams cited a major concern with Biden’s policies: they don’t give enough attention to rural issues. In Sampson county here in North Carolina, massive hog farms overwhelmingly surround communities of color. North Carolina’s new Farm Act will allow Smithfield Foods to build a system to trap methane from hog waste to be processed and eventually used as renewable electricity. But residents living near hog farms already experience toxic water, unbearable stench, and heightened risk of other diseases, and this system would likely make the problem even worse. It’s a textbook example of an unjust energy transition. That’s why environmental and civil rights organizations have asked the EPA to intervene — to no avail, at least thus far. (White-Williams is featured in this article about the current state of affairs.) “Rural America is suffering,” White-Williams said. She wants to see federal agencies using their power to ensure a just energy transition.

McClenney echoed White-Williams’ concern about hog farms, adding that deaths have resulted from providing workers with limited information about the conditions they would be working in — especially those who don’t speak English and whose undocumented status puts them in a vulnerable position. 

On a different note, he thinks Biden’s expansions to Broadband and clean water are a step in the right direction. He stated that with North Carolina’s House Bill 951, which requires the Utilities Commission to cut emissions by 70% by 2030 (even more ambitious than Biden’s executive order, which seeks to cut US emissions in half by 2030), “there are opportunities right now to effect positive change — we just have to do a good job.” It’s about how we get to that carbon reduction goal.

Klug asked how people at universities — faculty, students, and staff alike — can contribute to this work in policy and in advocacy.

White-Williams told the audience to recognize that “having a degree does not make you an expert when you walk into these communities.” Community members have lived experience: they can tell policymakers and activists what they need, not the other way around. Change should be a partnership, and so should research: “Academics have a research question before they’ve even spoken to anyone.” Instead, “listen and learn from the people who have been there all their lives.”

Spenser invited the audience to think about “who the real experts are” in unique and different ways. Institutions like Duke are often separate from the communities they inhabit, serving as a sort of beacon on the hill. “We need to invert this paradigm,” he said.

McClenney added to Spenser’s criticism of schools like Duke, who “throw food out every day and hold dorm rooms empty during the summer while people go hungry and unhoused.” What’s needed is a fundamental reimagination of the university’s relationship to the community it inhabits. He also added to White-Williams’ point about research: it can be merely “another type of extraction” if not carried out in a just manner.

Klug asked the panelists whether we need to assess the impacts of energy policy differently through the lens of research.

McClenney flagged the words “affordability” and “reliability” in energy research, asking the audience to consider who that applies to. Affordability is not just about how rates compare to New York City or California, but whether someone has to forego insulin or go hungry in order to make a payment. By thinking through these words and what they really mean, we can “begin to understand impacts on a deeper level.”

Spenser implored researchers to use an intersectional lens: instead of considering economic impact and efficiency in isolation, to consider the way in which policies “contribute or ameliorate historic disparities.” In order to truly measure impact, efficacy, and outcome, researchers must be “historically aware and community invested.”

White-Williams agreed with McClenney and Spenser, asking researchers to consider whether policies are a “band-aid or a true fix.” She cited North Carolina’s Weatherization Assistance Program, which allocates tens of millions of dollars toward fixing “patched-up” homes that may have serious underlying problems. She wonders whether it may be better to simply spend the money on programs to place people in housing that is “actually livable.”

Klug opened the panel to questions. One audience member asked the panelists what concrete steps they recommend in order to “harness the power of diversity.”

White-Williams reiterated the importance of working with impacted communities, stressing the need for local leaders who can serve as experts on the needs of the community. Elected officials might “sacrifice the needs of these communities for some other interest,” but local advocates can apply pressure where needed.

Spenser pushed back on the question, stating that instead of urgency and speed, “we need to commit to a longer process” — honoring historical legacies and “spending time helping people understand what the conversation is.” 

“Environmental policy isn’t sexy,” Spenser concluded. (“Except,” he added, “for pipelines.”)

Maybe not. But it’s important that it gets made — and that it gets made justly.

Post by Zella Hanson

“News for the Rich, White, and Blue”: Nikki Usher on her new book and the state of American journalism

Erik Carter

News organizations are facing an economic crisis

In their battle for survival, they are “realigning their priorities in ways that favor audiences who are willing to pay.” And those who are willing to pay tend to be rich, white, and politically blue.

On November 3, as part of the DeWitt Wallace Center’s Fall 2021 Information Inequalities Speaker Series, author and University of Illinois associate professor Nikki Usher discussed her new book News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism.

Usher began by explaining that as newspapers face “market failure,” only non-geographical news is in a position to survive. As news becomes a private good (The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New York Times come to mind), the result is inconsistent and unequal access to news. 

According to Usher, 1800 local communities lack any regular access to local news. Usher stated that political consequences result when news organizations pull back from places that don’t exhibit that aforementioned willingness to pay. 

She gave an example of one such consequence: many journalists had their “heads in the sand” about the rising tides of populism in rural America. As a result, they were blindsided when Trump won the election. But the win simply revealed what had been the case all along. 

The New York Times editor Dean Baquet acknowledged this after the election: “We’ve got to do a much better job of being on the road, out in the country… and remind ourselves that New York is not the real world.”

Usher said that another consequence of the delocalization of news is reduced trust: only 11% of Republicans say they trust the media a great deal or a fair amount. Additionally, when places lose news, they grow more polarized, with reductions in split-ticket voting. 

Usher said that she practices a kind of “gestalt scholarship,” employing the tools of ethnography and lived experience as well as quantitative data. She dipped into this side of her research, recounting a few anecdotes which represent the “materiality” of the loss of local news.

In 2018, the LA Times moved from its Downtown home, near Skid Row, to El Segundo. The move was not without controversy. In a 2018 editorial, an anonymous author wrote that “location matters, on both a physical and symbolic level, and… moving the headquarters far away from the local power base and the most important entities and stories the Times covers… is the wrong choice.” 

The Miami Herald’s old home got demolished in 2015. Now the newsroom is near the airport, across from a cow pasture. “It’s bad for the psyche for there to be no building to exist for people to see every day,” said an editor. (A recent bit of unnerving news regarding the future of the Herald and journalism at large.)

Usher then stated that newsrooms are “places of power” that are becoming “increasingly inhospitable places for those who are non-white and who lack financial resources.” 

In June 2020, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s top editor resigned after the publication of an article with the headline “Buildings Matter, Too,” led to a walkout by dozens of staff members. At the LA Times, Latinx journalists penned an open letter drawing attention to the fact that its 13% Latinx newsroom does not reflect its nearly 50% Latinx community. In Detroit, the disparity is even worse: an 80% Black population is served by a newsroom that is only 14% Black. 

In 1968, the Kerner Commission put down a series of recommendations to improve diversity, noting that the journalistic profession was “shockingly backward” in its absence of Black journalists. The American Society of News Editors set a target date for newsrooms to be at parity with the populations they represented: 2000. They’ve since pushed the deadline to 2025. 

It’s not looking good. That’s because, according to Usher, newsrooms aren’t hiring, and “when newsrooms don’t hire, they don’t hire minority journalists.”

Usher also touched on the “death of the working class reporter.” Increasingly, the only young people who are not deterred by journalism’s instability and lack of lucrativity are those who come from copious amounts of privilege. Add this to the inability of poorer students to pursue resume-building journalism activities alongside work-study jobs, and the preference of news outlets for the oft-wealthy students of elite universities, and one can see why “journalism is becoming a profession for the elite.” 

Usher said that when “newsrooms become bastions of privilege, [that’s] bad news.” Losing journalists who come from blue-collar backgrounds means losing the ability to “empathize” with a whole set of experiences.

Usher said that as news revenue goes increasingly digital, reliance on those willing to pay is even more pronounced, with “consequences for equity in access and geographically specific news coverage.” She referenced The New York Times, whose rise “mirrors the rise in inequality” of access to news. “They know they’re leaving people behind,” Usher said. She quoted Dean Baquet, who acknowledged that 98% of Americans “were now excluded from The New York Times’ journalism and might well have to do with substandard information.”

Usher also discussed “Goldilock newspapers” — not too big, not too small, but just right for survival according to the “upside-down logic” of digital advertising. The problem is that, as Mike Wilson of the Dallas Morning News put it, “the pursuit of digital subscriptions has honed our focus on what we’re covering” — sometimes to the detriment of local readers. As a result of this phenomenon, Usher has seen reduced coverage in places considered too low-income to get advertisers. In one instance, she saw a dismissal of concerns about ad- and malware clunking up the computers of those with inferior Internet access because “those people are less likely to subscribe anyway.” 

Where does this leave us? Usher identified a few potential solutions. She reiterated calls for more inclusive newsrooms, and added her own call for higher-ed financial aid reform so that lower-income students can have a fighting chance at pursuing journalism. She discussed the need for a “post newspaper consciousness” — to acknowledge that we cannot save the newspaper, but we can identify what journalism does best and save those “special parts.” 

She left the audience with a final recommendation: journalism should “embrace the partisan media system.” Usher clarified her position: the news media like The New York Times “hides behind a veil of neutrality,” when this is only an (unconvincing) illusion. “People want to see them advocate for social justice,” she said, and she agrees. Usher doesn’t think polarization is inherently bad “if it’s polarization toward social justice and breaking down systemic inequality.”

“There’s no use assuaging people who have given up and aren’t listening. And then you have lots of people unsubscribing because the phony neutrality was irritating them,” Usher said. For organizations like the Times, the veil of neutrality is looking like a lose-lose.

She advised them to “go for those who are still listening. And just own it.”

Post by Zella Hanson

School Segregation & Culture War: Color of Education 2021

Mary Hassdyk

Perhaps you’ve heard of the 1619 Project. A Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalism project which sought to place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative,” the project has been controversial and is thought to have sparked the current debate over critical race theory in the classroom.

Its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, spoke at the Color of Education virtual summit on October 26. She discussed her journalistic research on systemic racial inequities in the education system, as well as the 1619 Project and the struggle over teaching race in the classroom.

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Hannah-Jones defined the public school as an “intimate place” where young members of society come together to “exchange ideas and culture, meeting across class and race.” The public school serves to create community, which, she stressed, is necessary for a healthy democracy. “A sense of community prevents polarization,” she said. “I know that a person who’s different from me still wants, fundamentally, the same things.” That gives us more of an opportunity to solve political problems without hostility. 

Instead, she often sees “segregated” low-income mostly-Black schools and “integrated” mostly-white schools, separated by a disturbing chasm of resources and opportunity. (She’s written about this in several Times pieces.) She remarked that “this bifurcation doesn’t serve our democracy and it doesn’t serve humanity.”

But that’s been a problem since before Brown v. Board of Education. What’s changed in the last few years, according to Hannah-Jones, is that in the wake of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, there is now a “culture war” being waged over critical race theory. 

Critical race theory is an academic framework that examines the intersection of race with law and public policy. The theory is controversial: many fear the fundamental critique of the US legal and economic system that the theory ultimately implies. (In 2020, whereas white conservatives and more moderate liberals tended to blame fatal incidents of police brutality on “a few bad apples,” the viewpoint consistent with critical race theory is that “the problem is the barrel and the systems that produce it.”)

Laws banning the teaching of critical race theory have already been passed or are in the works in several states, including here in North Carolina, where Governor Roy Cooper recently vetoed a bill which sought to regulate the teaching of several race-related concepts, including whether “a meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist.”

There’s also historical revisionism, known pejoratively as ‘revisionist history’: the reinterpretation of orthodox views surrounding historical events, or, according to fellow Times contributor and historian Timothy Snyder, “the parts of history that challenge leaders’ sense of righteousness or make their supporters uncomfortable.” (Snyder says that in the US, “the ‘revisionists’ are people who write about race.”) 

Critical race theory ultimately requires some revisionism — to critically examine the intersection of race with the laws and policy of the current moment, we must critically examine how we got here, and that means taking another look at the US’ legal history, war history, even its history of infrastructure. Critical race theory is usually taught in college humanities classes. (Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in the 1980s, and her work is decidedly college level — I’ve read her here at Duke, but certainly not before.) But because critical race theory and revisionism are linked, it’s come to pass that any K-12 effort to teach about how racism has informed US history now gets labeled as “critical race theory” by adversaries of these efforts. 

Critical race theory has become a buzzword — and in many circles, it’s a bad word. These days, if a parent thinks you’re teaching critical race theory, you might soon find yourself without a job. (The summit required a passcode and was not recorded for fear that educators participating might be “outed as believers” in critical race theory and subsequently maligned.)

Along with educators in the Zoom comments, Hannah-Jones discussed this problem: teachers are getting accused of teaching “critical race theory”; the term is being used as a weapon and to imply wrongdoing; and it seems that parents, legislators, and even some educators don’t know what it actually means. 

Hannah-Jones asserted that this is “how propaganda works.” The term “critical race theory” is being used to produce fear and automatic condemnation, which distracts from the content of the theory and shuts down further (more rational) conversation. Hannah-Jones gave some advice to educators: “When a parent says, ‘I do not want my child to learn critical race theory,’ Ask them what they think that it is. They don’t know. And then you get to say, ‘Well, no, that’s history. Well, no, that’s anti-slavery.’ You get the point.”

Hannah-Jones explained that “as educators, you have to have these conversations with people.” Parents don’t necessarily know what their children are learning in school — and that can be a source of anxiety. So when “bad-faith actors are fear mongering, saying ‘Don’t you know what terrible things your kids are learning?’” it’s all too easy for parents to become distraught and distrust their child’s teacher.

Moving to discussing other issues in education, Hannah-Jones emphasized that schools are generationally deprived of resources, which is a problem that “can’t be fixed overnight.” She’s seen parents trying to advocate for their children and failing because they lack proximity to social, political, or legal power. “Maybe they can’t come to PTA because they’re a single mother, or they work at Popeyes — they get dismissed,” she said. “There’s no meeting with the superintendent. They can’t call the media in.” And when power dictates one’s ability to make change, the generational deprivation of resources can only continue.

Jayden Grant, a senior at Falls Lake Academy, asked Hannah-Jones how to ensure that these issues are addressed on the level of charter and private schools, which aren’t governed by the same policies. 

Hannah-Jones replied that she is fundamentally opposed to charter and private schools, viewing them as “undemocratic by design.” As such, “holding them accountable” is only possible through public advocacy, namely through the media. Students have the strongest voice, she told Jayden. They’re the reason these schools exist in the first place; it’s up to them to challenge policies or actions they see as unfair and make the public aware. 

On that note, Hannah-Jones brought the conversation back to the question of which version of our collective past will be taught in the K-12 classroom. Hannah-Jones said that based on the feedback she’s gotten and conversations she’s had, the 1619 project has inspired kids. It’s made them excited about history and learning in general. She denounced the neoliberal “privatization and commodification of education,” stating that often, parents wrongly view themselves as consumers. “We need to center kids in these discussions,” she said.

Hannah-Jones wrapped up the discussion with a call to action. She told the audience to “get angry” that authors like Ruby Bridges and Toni Morrison are being blacklisted, because “that is the same kind of thinking that’s led to the inequality we see now.” She claimed that “people wouldn’t be freaking out about the 1619 Project if it wasn’t having an effect,” but the Project is making waves, because “those who control the stories about who we are control the culture.” And the culture Hannah-Jones wants to see is one which sees the “least of us as just as deserving as anyone else.”

Professor Emeritus at UNC Harry Amana had the last word, saying that one cannot be an educator without being an optimist. That’s because, as an educator, you believe that “if people knew better, they would do better.” 

Maybe one day, we all will.

Post by Zella Hanson

Will the Humanities Save the World?

Lorenzo Gritti

The bad news about the energy transition, according to Dr. Matthew Huber, is that it’s not happening. At least, not at the scale we need it to. A June report stated that the share of fossil fuels in the world’s total energy mix is still about 80%, as it has been for several decades. “We still live in a system fueled by fossil fuels,” Huber said. 

Matthew Huber
Jennifer Wenzel

On October 18, Huber, author of Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital and a professor at Syracuse University, joined Dr. Imre Szeman, author of On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy and professor at the University of Waterloo, and Dr. Jennifer Wenzel, author of The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature and professor at Columbia University.

Moderated by Dr. Ranjana Khanna, professor and director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute here at Duke, the panel discussion “What Can the Humanities Contribute to the Global Energy Transition?” explored the potential of humanities fields to help supplement perspectives offered by the sciences, teaching us about new ways of living for a greener world.

Imre Szeman

Khanna posed the titular question: what do the panelists think that the humanities have to contribute to the energy transition?

Huber responded that in dealing with climate disaster, the “critical issue of our time,” there’s a civic responsibility to engage with the “public and political struggle” for change.

Humanities scholars excel in the art of persuasion and argumentation, and they can use that in public forms, like the Op-Ed and social media. Whereas the public conversation is skewed towards economics and engineering, humanities scholars can emphasize the equally important political and cultural barriers toward the energy transition. 

Huber also called on history scholars to help recover the “deleted history” of what is politically possible.

“After four decades of neoliberalism we’ve forgotten what the public sector can actually do,” Huber said, “but when we remember the Soviet-style planned economy during World War II, and the New Deal, we recover that these large mass scale transformations have happened, and are possible,” Huber said. He also lamented that the social movements of today’s Left have become “atomized, neutralized, and largely ineffective” such that “students don’t believe in large-scale social change anymore.” With public history, activists can show how and why struggles of abolition have won in the past, and how that could be applied to the struggle for carbon abolition. 

As the Climate Critic in the Green Party of Canada’s Shadow Cabinet, Dr. Imre Szeman drafted the Green Party’s proposal for the energy transition. He says that upon seeing the recommendation to end all production of fossil fuels, journalists asked Szeman, “Is this realistic? Here? Now?” They seemed to view such a change as “impossible — even though they might want it.”

Szeman argued that whether climate solutions are considered ‘realistic’ isn’t so much a question of cost, but of “our ability to conceptualize another way of being in the world,” which is where humanities fields come into play. He then posed a series of questions, including “What do we love about our current habits and behaviors? Who is culpable for the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? How did we get here, and what does this say about our ability to get somewhere else?” He said that the role of the humanities in the energy transition is to answer all of these questions — and to remind us of the need to ask them in the first place.

Wenzel agreed, explaining that energy humanities can help us examine the literary and cultural narratives that shape our experience. She explained that fossil fuels enable a “chain of ease” wherein the primary mode of thinking about fossil fuels in everyday life is not thinking at all. She discussed the oil inventory activity she does with her students, where they account for the ubiquitous significance of oil in their lives. We develop an “embodied attachment” to the things that oil makes possible — the smoothness of plastic, the speed of auto, the smell of a butane stove. This leads us to an “impasse: we know where we stand, but we’re unable or unwilling to take action at the scale we know we need to.” 

Wenzel explained that the oil inventory was actually invented by the oil industry with an insidious intention — to get consumers to consider the indispensability of petroleum products in their lives “to produce wonder and appreciation.” She showed the audience an Exxon commercial, in which scenes of vast, interconnected energy grids play across the screen as a soothing voice tell us, “you don’t need to think about the energy that makes our lives possible. Because we do.

Wenzel emphasized that the effect of rhetoric like Exxon’s is to “ensure passivity.” The lesson? When we take stock of the impact of oil on our lives, how we use that information matters most. Climate activists must reclaim the oil inventory to “disrupt habits of mind” rather than entrench them.

Khanna noted that one of the humanities’ core methods is a “revelatory gesture of critique,” and asked the panelists what they thought about “moving past that initial gesture, toward some broader consensus for change.” 

Wenzel said that doing the work of the oil inventory is powerful, but “not the last move.” We must make other moves, and in terms of thinking about what we might do otherwise, we must take care to be “forward thinking, but deeply, critically, historically informed.”

Huber said that we need to interrogate the “politics that attach oil to life,” because it’s a strategy of moving politics away from work, production, and who decides its conditions. Production today feels invisible — it’s offshore, outsourced — so that we fail to ask questions about who’s controlling it, and to what effect. He called upon the 1930s, when a “radical politics of production was on the table,” and said that climate-conscious humanities scholars need to work to recover this history.

Szeman had one “next move,” in the words of Wenzel: to realize that oil companies in the US are private, unlike in much of the rest of the world. “There’s a decision made very early on” about how and in what quantities oil is to be used — a decision that could be amenable to change.

Khanna opened the panel to questions. One audience member asked about how to advocate for an energy transition in light of the fact that capitalism is ultimately responsible for much of the status quo and the damage it has caused. How can humanities scholars critique the status quo without critiquing capitalism to the point of suspicion from would-be supporters?

Szeman emphasized the need for recognition that there are some things that one can do in the political sphere, and some things one can’t. Even though the Green Party falls squarely on the political left, “we don’t explicitly criticize capitalism right off the bat, because that doesn’t seem like the winning position.” It’s important to give voice to discussions about change “to the extent possible within the official political sphere.”

Wenzel told the audience about giving a talk on energy humanities at the Pipeline Safety Trust conference. She had to “stand in front of the oil industry” — regulators, landowners, executives — which meant “thinking about which values and assumptions to share.” By establishing credibility, she could “make conversations about this problem, which implicates all of us, possible” — despite their different perspectives.

Huber contended that when the enemy is as abstract as the quasi-global system of capitalism, it can “induce paralysis.” He’s “not sure we can absolish capitalism on the time scale” necessary for the energy transition. He quipped that the earth is not dying, it’s being killed, and “those who are killing it have names and addresses.” Those people are the target, he said — just as in the abolition of slavery, when the target of struggle was the slave owning class, another oligarchical power representing about 1% of the population. Although he supports a systemic critique of capitalism, right now “we need to be more concrete. These people have names and addresses,” he reiterated.

Another audience member asked about how to “break down the concepts of beauty and pleasure” that support the current oil regime.

Huber discussed the need for “low-carbon luxury” and an investment in open green space as part of any Green New Deal. Climate politics has often been about “shame, fear, guilt, sacrifice,” he said, and “we’re not going to win on that.” A beautiful, pleasurable vision of the future is what’s needed to win people over.

Wenzel identified the role of literature in “collecting and borrowing” ideas of beauty, arguing that beauty is always constructed. To those who view renewable energy, like wind and solar, as an eyesore, Wenzel posed the question: “Are oil spills ‘beautiful’?” (Take a glimpse.)

Someone asked a question about science fiction’s ability to “dream futures into being” — what should humanities scholars aspire to read and write? 

Wenzel said that there are many ways to think about the future, and that apocalyptic renditions of science fiction are essentially “practicing for possible bad futures.” Huber agreed, stating that apocalyptic visions can be galvanizing — but there must be a positive vision that wins people over (he pointed to AOC’s “Message From the Future”).

Szeman said that utopian narratives tend to say more about the viewpoint by which a fictional world is considered a utopia than a “prescriptive way to get there,” and suggested that humanities scholars interested in fiction might consider creating more of the latter.

Revolutionary ideas were discussed during the two hours, and panelists acknowledged that humanities fields can’t do all of this work alone. 

Wenzel told the audience about a discussion she had with an economist from the Energy Policy Center. She’d said, “we’re interested in the non-technological obstacles to transition and non-technological tools to foster public demand for these changes. We want to understand why people remain so attached to the world that fossil fuels have created.” The economist said, “Right. We call that demand-side management.”

The audience laughed, understanding the frustration that often results from the disparate methodologies of science and humanities fields. Wenzel said she “felt a bit deflated” — but also learned a word she could use in future collaborations with economists and policymakers. 

The humanities have many valuable contributions to the energy transition: recovering histories, disrupting the status quo, crafting new narratives. But what’s important right now is communicating this. Wenzel left us with an instruction: “We need to learn to build bridges across different disciplines.”

This event was organized by the Energy Humanities Working Group in partnership with the Duke University Energy Initiative, Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, and John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. Duke students or faculty members can join the Energy Humanities Working Group by contacting Dr. Tom Cinq-Mars (tom.cinq.mars@duke.edu).

Post by Zella Hanson

Restoring the “Sacred Link”: Water Rights in Australia

(Jenny Evans/Getty Images)

For 223 years — ever since Britain established its first Australian colony in 1788 — indigenous Australians have exercised resistance to colonial plundering and exploitation. One thing colonizers have plundered and exploited is water — water that is “cultural, spiritual; water for our people, water for our country,” according to Tati Tati Elder Brendan Kennedy.

As part of the Fall 2021 Global Environmental Justice Speaker Series — part of a student-led Environmental Justice course here at Duke — on October 6th, Dr. Bruce Lindsay, the Senior Lawyer at Environmental Justice Australia (EJA), discussed indigenous water rights in Australia. 

Because the Australian constitution is “silent on key issues” of land and water use, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, water use was regulated according to English riparian rights in conjunction with English common law. Under this colonial law, whoever owned the land on which water flowed had the right to that water. 

Dr. Lindsay argued that Australian law was designed according to the “gross fantasy of the empty continent.” Upon the premise that Aboriginals simply did not exist, colonizers proceeded accordingly — buying and selling land that was already occupied and under aboriginal custodianship. Because Aboriginals didn’t own land in a way recognized by the law, they were “marginalized and excluded” from decisions about water infrastructure and allocation “while degradation [went] on around them.”

Dr. Lindsay and the EJA work primarily with aboriginal communities and organizations in the Murray Darling Basin. The Murray Darling Basin is the largest river Basin in Australia, hosting 90% of the population, 70% of irrigated land, and providing 40% of agricultural production. A precious resource amidst Australia’s hot, semi-arid climate, the Basin has been the site of major conflicts over water since the early 19th century. 

The Murray Darling faces a problem called “over allocation,” which means that more entitlements for water use have been issued than can be sustained at their full value. By the 1990s and 2000s, over-extraction had led to drought and unprecedented water shortages, and the ecosystems supported by the Murray Darling Basin were “on the verge of ecological collapse.” The Australian government passed the Water Act of 2007 and the Basin Plan of 2012 to bring the Basin to a “healthier level” and “ensure that the Basin is managed in the national interest” as they saw fit. 

To highlight the tension between the Australian legal view and the Aboriginal view, Dr. Lindsay read the Aboriginal anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose’s definition of country. According to Australia’s indigenous people, country “gives and receives life… is lived in and lived with… is a proper noun… is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow with a consciousness, and a will toward life.” For Aboriginals, the flow of water should support this notion of cultural wellbeing and “genuine coexistence.” But according to Dr. Lindsay, Australian law (being a “pillar of the settler state”) does not currently provide for “life, ecosystem health, and spirit except for where it intersects with the utilitarian purpose.” Thus, Dr. Lindsay believes that the law needs a massive upheaval in order to be reconciled with the indigenous vision.

The EJA is currently working with Aboriginal communities on one such upheaval: the “cultural flows” concept of water management. Cultural flows necessitates reallocation and redistribution of water rights by the Australian government in order to increase Aboriginal control and authority over water. To restore life to country, reverse environmental catastrophe, and revitalize their economic health and culture, Aboriginals hold that there must be a change from the current model where water is understood as something to be continually exploited. Such a change is not without historical precedent: in New Zealand in 2017, the government granted the Whanganui River legal status as a living entity, so that New Zealand law now views harming the Whanganui tribe and harming the river as equivalent. 

Ultimately, the EJA hopes to implement the cultural flows framework across the Basin. They’re starting by working with the Tati Tati First Nations community to implement cultural flows in the Margooya Lagoon. Because this requires the Victorian government to deliver the rights to manage water there, the EJA must work with both Australian law and the Aboriginal view. Dr. Lindsay claimed that they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. The EJA seeks to find the intersection where water as a public good to be managed in the public interest can also be water managed for the good of country and the health of the community. Thus, the EJA aims to advocate for policy that enables that mutually beneficial outcome.

Dr. Lindsay ended by recalling his earlier point of reconciling Australian law with indigenous vision. He stated that a “broader set of changes” need to occur in order to really bring justice to Aboriginal communities. Although the Australian High Court’s passing of the Native Title Act of 1993 ostensibly ended riparian rights by recognizing “native title” (the aboriginal traditional ownership of land “according to their own laws and customs”), native title is a “limited device” as far as water rights. Indigenous Australians have native title rights over 30% of the Australian continent, but own only 0.01% of water entitlements. Because state governments have a large role in reallocation, cultural flows projects would have to proceed on a case-by-case basis.

What Dr. Lindsay really hopes to see is a legal mechanism other than native title that will grant legitimacy to aboriginal traditional ownership. He recalled the Uluru Statement from the Heart. It states:

“[Our] sovereignty… has never been ceded or extinguished. How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?”

Uluru Statement from the heart


How could it be? Sadly, the fact that only 0.01% of water entitlements are owned by indigenous Australians indicates that the sacred link of traditional ownership has disappeared — at least in the legal sense. So this is the ultimate goal of Dr. Lindsay and the EJA’s work with indigenous communities: to restore this sacred link.

Post by Zella Hanson

Cemetery, Community, Classroom: Collaborating to Honor the Dead

Open Durham

The institutional neglect and indignity faced by many African Americans during and after the Jim Crow era in the South didn’t end when their lives did. In a panel hosted by the Duke Office of Durham & Community Affairs on Sept. 10, a community leader, Duke professor, and undergraduate student discussed some of the work they are doing to combat the marginalization of Durham’s deceased in Geer Cemetery, two miles from Duke’s campus. 

Debra Taylor Gonzalez-Garcia, President, Friends of Geer Cemetery

Founded on land purchased from Frederick and Polly Geer by John O’Daniel, Nelson Mitchell, and Willie Moore in 1877, Geer Cemetery is the final resting place for over 3000 of Durham’s African American citizens. As Maplewood Cemetery was segregated, from 1877 until the opening of Beechwood cemetery in 1924 Geer served as the only cemetery for the African American dead. Lacking public funding and under fire from the health department for overcrowding, Geer Cemetery closed in the 1930s and, in the absence of a plan for its continued upkeep, fell into a state of disrepair

President of Friends of Geer Cemetery Debra Taylor Gonzalez-Garcia provided a brief history of Geer Cemetery. 

The nonprofit Friends of Geer Cemetery was formed in 2003 by “concerned citizens and neighbors” and has worked to “restore the cemetery’s grounds and research its histories” under their mission statement “restore, reclaim, respect.” According to Gonzalez-Garcia, work consists of maintaining the cemetery grounds, repairing headstones, writing life stories, and advocating for recognition. 

Friends of Geer Cemetery has accomplished a lot in terms of restoration: in 2004 the cemetery was unrecognizable, with broken headstones, overgrowth, and sunken burials. Today, with the help of Keep Durham Beautiful, Preservation Durham, and other volunteers, the entire cemetery can now be easily viewed.

The organization also continues to work tirelessly toward their other objectives, reclamation and respect. By mining local records, research volunteers have created a database which includes approximately 1,651 burials, but efforts are ongoing. 

Gonzalez-Garcia expressed excitement about the organization receiving grant funding for an archaeological survey. “[The survey] will help us to map out burials, because currently, there is no map,” Gonzalez-Garcia said. “We aren’t sure where people are buried.” 

The community leader discussed how efforts to reclaim Geer Cemetery bring about questions that reckon with white supremacy in general. “We’re not told stories of the African Americans who built Durham,” Gonzalez-Garcia said. “Why do we know so much about Washington Duke, and nothing of Augustus Shepard? Why should Maplewood still exist and not Geer Cemetery?” 

Adam Rosenblatt

Associate Professor of the Practice in International Comparative Studies Adam Rosenblatt expressed his interest in how care for the dead is “bound up with human rights and social justice.” This interest is personal: he has his own graveless ancestors who disappeared in the Holocaust. He expressed his passion for educating others about “places of mourning in our midst” through “community-engaged” scholarship.

Along with Gonzalez-Garcia, Rosenblatt sponsored a Story+ program at Duke entitled Geer Cemetery: Labor, Dignity, and Practices of Freedom in an African American Burial Ground. With the help of sponsors and a graduate mentor, Duke undergraduates Nyrobi Manuel, Kerry Rork, and Huiyin Zhou researched the cemetery closely in order to “uncover the stories of ordinary citizens and add these stories back into the historic narrative about Geer.” The researchers produced three unique, interactive digital projects which will contribute to the Friends of Geer Cemetery’s online platform for education and outreach. 

Rosenblatt discussed one challenge the Story+ engaged with: What really constitutes a human subject? The IRB’s definition doesn’t include the dead; there’s no IRB protocols for researching the dead and their stories. Many archives disappear entirely, or are fragmented.

Nyrobi Manuel

Nyrobi Manuel, a Duke undergraduate, was one of Rosenblatt and Golzalez-Garcia’s mentees. Manuel took Rosenblatt’s course “Death, Burial, and Justice in the Americas” and says the course inspired her to dig deeper into African American death practices. Through the Story+, Manuel researched John C. Scarborough, who established the fifth-oldest Black-owned funeral home in the country. She produced a project entitled “Scarborough and Hargett Funeral Home: Dignified Death and Compassion in the Black Community.” 

Manuel discussed her findings. Many funeral directors became important figures in their community, and John C. Scarborough was no different. A philanthropist and important community member, he helped to establish Scarborough Nursery School, North Carolina’s oldest licensed nursery school.

What’s always drawn Gonzalez-Garcia to Geer Cemetery is its “quiet beauty” and sense of connection. Though her ancestors are buried in Virginia, where she’s from, Geer Cemetery seeks to tell stories of African Americans through “emancipation and reconstruction: throughout history.” Geer is special because it seeks to tell the story of her “blood relatives” while also celebrating the history of Durham, which, she said fondly, is “my community now.”

The Diversity Problem in Science

With COVID-19 being a fixture of our lives for nearly a year now, science has been a staple in the news. Along with science, though, a long-overdue conversation about the state of race relations in America has taken center stage, which makes diversity in science a critical topic to delve into. COVID-19 has highlighted not only a national crisis in healthcare response, but also longstanding health disparities across racial and socioeconomic groups that have only been exacerbated by the pandemic.

 On Wednesday, January 27, Dr. Gowthami “Gow” Arepally, known for her work as Professor of Hematology at the Duke School of Medicine, led a talk called “The Diversity Problem in Science” that aimed to highlight not only the obvious problems in research but the urgency with which everyone, from the individual to the collective level, should aim to address the problem within their spheres of influence. Dr. Arepally is not only known for her work in the medical school but also as a valuable mentor for colleagues, undergraduates, and high school students — a point that was highlighted as an important way non-URM (under-represented minority) scientists can make a difference.

Gowthami Arepally, M.D. 

Underrepresentation in science starts early, Arepally says. For example, while discrepancies in graduation rates between Black/Hispanic students and their white/Asian peers are not bad in high school, they get progressively worse through college and beyond. In 2016, 18% of degrees nationally were awarded overall in STEM fields — but this number drops to 12% for Black students and 15% for Hispanic students. As of 2015, Black applicants have lower medical school acceptance rates than peer applicants – 34% versus 44% for their white counterparts. And the numbers get worse further into medical school; Black students and Hispanic students each represent less than 6% of medical school graduates, while a staggering 80% of graduates are either white or Asian.

This perpetuates a cycle going into the workforce that discourages young underrepresented minority (URM) students from entering STEM, seeing a lack of role models that look like them. As of 2016, only 39% of full-time faculty at medical schools were female, and a mere 4% of faculty were Black. This results in barriers to NIH research that further hold URM scientists back. Between 1999 and 2012, 72% of NIH awards were given to white scientists and 24% were given to Asian scientists, but only 2.4% of these awards were given to Black scientists.

This is a story that is shocking when told through statistics but is all too familiar, as an experience, for minority students and researchers interested in pursuing careers in the sciences. However, there are concrete ways to counter the problem. As Dr. Arepally pointed out, NIH Diversity Supplements for existing NIH grants can be obtained from the high school to faculty level as an added source of support for URM researchers. Medical societies themselves can be sources of diversity initiatives, such as Dr. Arepally’s society, the American Society of Hematology, which boasts one of the most aggressive minority recruitment initiatives. Within Duke, many pipeline programs exist for researchers to support URM students and new researchers and faculty.

Chart of pipeline programs at Duke

Most importantly, it’s important for individuals to enact change on a personal level. Whether it means educating oneself on underrepresentation, advocating for the advancement of other URM trainees and colleagues, or committing to the success of URM students through pipeline programs, individual steps can add up.

And as Dr. Arepally highlighted, these steps, however small, are important to prioritize. Increasing diversity in medicine, for example, can help address existing health disparities. URM physicians are more likely to address the care of minority populations, while minority patients are more likely to choose URM populations. And the existence of more URM physicians improves the cultural competency of all trainees. Sex diversity, too, has a positive effect on the quality of science in collaborative groups. The impacts of diversity extend to role-modeling for younger students, who may be at a crossroads in terms of determining a future career. In this way, current measures to increase diversity can foster a cycle of more diverse students entering STEM and being supported there, for generations to come.

Diversity in science is not only good for science and scientists, Arepally says, but for all of us. Science should reflect the society it serves, and with more diversity in science, breakthroughs will be applicable and accessible to every person —  not just the majority.

Post by Meghna Datta

Scholars Examine Duke’s History of Unequal Medical Care for Black People

Conversations on and actions toward making American medicine less racist continue to grow. At Duke, that includes looking at our own history as a hospital and medical center serving a diverse community.

In a Sept. 22 virtual conversation, Duke physicians Damon Tweedy M.D., Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and Jeffrey Baker M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and History of Medicine, spoke about the history of Duke’s legacies of race and memory. (Watch the presentation here.)

The career of Dr. Baker, who is a professor of both pediatrics and history, has taken him around the globe, right back to his hometown of Durham –where he said he has found the most interesting story of all.

After becoming Director for the Trent Center in 2016, he was approached with “hunger” by Durham natives to know their hometown’s story. Through oral and archival sources, Dr. Baker has broached Duke hospital’s history with humility in hopes of uncovering and contextualizing the historical roles of race in Duke medicine and Durham.

Dr. Tweedy, author of Black Man in a White Coat, attended Duke for medical school in the 1990s. He was warned that it was a plantation and an institution built on tobacco and slave money.

Though Dr. Baker proposed that in many ways the hospital structure often reflects plantation hierarchies in which there is racialization of who holds what jobs and power, he said Duke’s endowment money actually came from technological progress within tobacco production rather than slavery or plantations directly.

The Duke family’s vision for the hospital was quite different from actual outcomes in practice, Dr. Baker said. The Dukes were considered racial progressives in their time and the endowment they provided to launch the Duke Medical School and Hospital in 1930 was meant to improve health and education in North Carolina and train primary care doctors for the state.

“However,” Dr. Baker said, “there were two realities: Jim Crow and the Great Depression.”

Dr. Tweedy and Dr. Baker via Zoom

During the era of Jim Crow segregation, Duke’s primary care doctors were all white, and nearly all male. Though the hospital cared for both Black and white patients, they were segregated by race. Black patients had separate wards, and waiting areas for pediatric care were separated racially by days of the week. Waiting areas for adult patients functioned without appointments, but only white people were seen before noon. It’s likely that the care granted to white people in the first half of the day was superior to that of Black people receiving care at 4 pm or told to return the next day, he said.

Original floor plans for the Duke Hospital.

The Great Depression also generated a diversion from plans in the 1940s. When the Duke Hospital came close to bankruptcy, it chose to open private clinics on the side for revenue – which had an unintended consequence. The clinics brought a lot of money into Duke, Dr. Baker said, but it also reinforced distinctions between those who could pay for treatment and those who couldn’t. Over time, the disparities expanded with shifts towards hospital beds for insured and private patients.

In one terrible example, Maltheus “Sunny” Avery, a North Carolina A & T graduate who got into a car wreck in Burlington, NC in 1950, was diagnosed with an epidermal hematoma — a clot near his brain — and sent to Duke for emergency brain surgery. But he was refused treatment due to inadequate room in the “colored” ward.

Avery was redirected to Lincoln Hospital, Durham’s Black hospital, where he died shortly after admission. Though Dr. Baker said this story quickly faded from white memory, it is something that has retained severe importance in the popular memory of Black Durhamites. This narrative is also often conflated with a similar story about Dr. Charles Drew, the Black inventor of blood banking, who died despite attempts at rescue at a white hospital in Alamance, NC. He is often misremembered as having died from the refusal of care in a racially divided South, even though he was not.

News coverage of Sunny’s death.

Duke’s first Black medical student, Delano “Dale” Meriwether, arrived the same year the hospital began desegregation, 1963, and he was the first Black M.D. in 1967. Meriwether was the only Black medical student for four years before other brave pioneers joined the school.

Dr. Tweedy reflected on his own medical school experiences at Duke during clinical rotations just a little more than 20 years ago.

“I was asked to help suture a deep gash on a Black patient’s forehead,” he said, “The patient asked if we were experimenting on him since I was still a student.” In the private clinics, he once “couldn’t go anywhere near” a white patent with a minor lesion on their arm, let alone suture that patient.

Dr. Baker said there are two narratives surrounding Duke Hospital’s desegregation. One assumes that desegregation was quick and easy and uneventful, while the other proposes that systems of racial segregation were simply transformed rather than eradicated. The latter narrative better applies to the public and private clinics that had become nearly completely racialized over time, Baker said.

Even though segregation was no longer legal,  Black patients received care from less experienced medical residents in the public clinics, while white patients received care from attending physicians in the nicer, private environments.

Dr. Baker said that Duke has a complicated relationship with the community of Durham. He said the merger of Durham Regional Hospital with Duke Health in the late 1990s tapped into some long-term tensions and distrust between Duke and other medical facilities of Durham.

Dr. Tweedy pointed out that Duke researchers always have trouble recruiting Black patients for clinical studies, despite the fact that Durham County is about half Black and Hispanic. There is some distrust to overcome, but a diverse patient population is essential to creating robust study data that ensures that treatments will work for everyone, he said.

Medical professionals “need more than just science,” Baker concluded. He said that being trained as scientists often inclines doctors to think that they are above the larger contexts and histories they exist within, and that they can somehow remain objective.

“We have come out of specific stories and backgrounds,” Dr. Baker said. “[When we treat patients], we have to think about what story we are walking into.”

“We all carry our bags of ‘stuff'” that complicate patient prognosis and care, Dr. Tweedy concurred.

As Ann Brown (M.D., M.H.S), Vice Dean for Faculty, stated at the beginning of the conversation, “In order to move forward, we must understand where we come from.”

This is true of our nation as a whole, and Duke is certainly no exception.

Post by Cydney Livingston

Covid Tested the Resilience of Duke’s Research

Like nearly all other aspects of life, the normal routines of Duke research labs came to a grinding halt due to COVID-19. Duke researchers shared their reflections on the struggles and insights the process of research shutdown and reboot has had within their labs during a Virtual Research Town Hall on Thursday, September 3rd.

The Town Hall, titled “The Impact of COVID 19 on Research at Duke, Overcoming Challenges and Pressures” was moderated by Duke Vice President for Research, Larry Carin (Ph.D.). Dr. Carin mentioned that discussion of shutting down the research enterprise began in February, and at that point in time it seemed nearly hysterical. However, by mid-March shut-down plans were fully in progress, leaving labs out of commission until mid-June. To get research at Duke back underway, labs were forced to significantly reduce the density of people in facilities and no undergraduate students were allowed to participate.

Though most of the basic science labs are back in operation now, human subjects research trials have had a slower return. In no way is it business as usual. Detailed planning and scheduling, a focus on social distancing, and daily health surveys are all part of the new normal. “There is almost a Big Brother feel to this,” Dr. Carin said, comparing the moderated tracking of who enters facilities through their DukeCard swipes to George Orwell’s 1984 dystopian society.

Associate Professor Debra Silver Ph.D. spoke about her neurodevelopmental lab in molecular genetics and microbiology (MGM). In the three-month shutdown, lab members focused on writing reviews, grants, manuscripts, and took online classes to improve skills. Since re-opening, Silver’s lab has implemented lab shifts, pre-scheduled experiments, and coordinated use of shared equipment. Some of the biggest issues are the trainees missing out on critical networking and undergraduates forced to transition to nearly exclusively online work. Silver also voiced serious concern for the mental and physical health of lab members, logistical coordination of childcare and homeschooling, challenges faced by international trainees, and the need for flexibility. However, there were some silver linings as well. The Silver Lab engaged with lots of seminars, had joint lab meetings, and the mutual support for one another grew immensely under the unique circumstances.

Dr. West points out the enduring emotional impacts of COVID.

Both Silver’s lab and the West Lab, led by professor Anne West Ph.D. in neurobiology, are heavily reliant on mice for wet lab work. The mandates to reduce their mouse colonies by more than 50% was a large task and now that the labs are up and running, re-expanding the colonies has been a primary focus. West said that, similar to the Silver Lab members, half of her team picked up writing or a computational project while the other half attended online classes or meetings during shutdown. Undergraduates read and presented research papers – which turned out to be a very fruitful training experience.

One major roadblock for the West Lab’s reopening were the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmoud Arbery. The civic unrest surrounding these deaths and the revivalism of the Black Lives Matter movement became a frequent point of discussion in lab meetings. Some members of the West Lab were unable to work during this time. West emphasized the importance of lowered expectations. She asked everyone to focus on one core experiment and to try to come into the lab for at least a few hours a day, a few days a week. The lab has been gaining traction with new data and research papers nearing completion. Like other panelists, West discussed prevailing issues including anxiety and depression, continued societal uncertainties, and the questionable financial future for research.

Assistant professor of anesthesiology Jamie R. Privratsky MD, Ph.D. highlighted COVID’s impact on clinical and critical care research. Among the positive impacts are the Society of Critical Care Medicine’s COVID-19 registry database, the abilities to do observational and database research work, and research opportunities for working with COVID patients. However, the rest of critical care research has been completely sidelined, clinician-scientists have been moved to mostly clinical duties, and there have been lots of administrative hurdles for conducting COVID related research.

A slide from Dr. Pivratsky’s presentation.

Many colleagues share Dr. Privratsky’s mixed thoughts on the gains and losses during the halt of critical care research. For those who were able to conduct some research, the risks to personal health also posed looming anxiety and danger. Dr. Privratsky chose to do what he could being physically away from his lab and worked to update protocols, maintain electronic lab notebooks, write methods sections of papers, and care for his mouse colony. He also submitted three grant proposals and said that he left the shutdown with a clearer vision and direction for his research.

The School of Medicine’s Vice Dean for Basic Science, Colin S. Duckett Ph.D. closed the town hall with encouraging reflections. Out of 17,000 Duke administered COVID tests, there have been very few positives. Duckett emphasized how seriously the Duke community and its recently returned students are taking the continued threat of Coronavirus. Though communications persist as a challenge and many argue that life right now just doesn’t feel right, Duckett called attendees’ attention to the fact that the research enterprise was successfully ramped down, ramped back up, and lab activities have made a nearly completely return. This was and continues to be no small feat and is possible due to highly collaborative efforts, he said.

Good news from Dr. Duckett about the state of Duke’s research enterprise.

Further, there were large insights gleaned from this collective experience; those of researchers’ resiliency, the importance of community, and the need to look beyond work and check in on each other as human beings. Research and the people who make it possible do not exist in a vacuum away from society. Their work and their well-being are subject to the pandemic just like everyone else. Yet, similar to the broader global public, researchers and their research are emerging stronger than before in the face of COVID-19.

Post by Cydney Livingston

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