Transcript of interview with Gail Christopher, DN, vice president of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation enterprise
Interview conducted by Natalie McGill, reporter for The Nation’s Health newspaper.
Listen to this interview as a recording on our podcast page.
What is the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation enterprise and what inspired its launch?
The Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation enterprise is an effort to adapt the traditional and internationally recognized truth and reconciliation process for the United States. It is being launched by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation as the next phase of our work on racial healing and racial equity. We have for decades invested in this, but in the last decade in particular, we created what's called America Healing and we've learned so much from that and helped to change the national discourse around the issues of race, racism, and the need for racial healing. And we looked at the polling data right now, which is unprecedented in its indication that America is beyond denial about racial issues and there is a palpable readiness for some serious work to overcome our legacy of racial division.
How does racial inequity lead to health inequity in the U.S.?
We have known for some time that there are just consistent and persistent racial health disparities and inequities. And many of those disease conditions are directly linked to stress and key environmental factors or the social determinants of health and well-being.
Because of our residential segregation and our lack of equitable investment in communities and in neighborhoods, there is more adversity, there is more stress oftentimes that takes the form of violence. Sometimes it takes the form of just chronic unemployment and the lack of access to resources. And this translates into physiological and biochemical precursors for altered body function. The link between adversity and trauma and disease is much better known and understood today than it was 50 years ago. So there's that sort of predisposition, if you will, to illness that's aggravated by the social conditions in which people live. But there's also a lack of access to equitable health care because of the residential segregation and the inequality that shows up on the ground with a disinvestment or patterns of disinvestment within communities.
The enterprise has roots in truth and reconciliation commissions that have been used in other countries, what is the truth and reconciliation model?
Well, and there's no "the model" in the sense that there are nuances in all of the more than 44 attempts that have happened around the world. But the core idea is to acknowledge the human rights atrocities and the human rights violations and the injustices that have happened usually over a protracted period of time that have led to divisions that seem irreconcilable in communities and to engage communities in an open and honest fact finding and truth telling with intention of bringing people together to make amends, to share a spirit of acknowledgment and also a desire to move beyond that which has divided and hence the term reconciliation.
They usually involve private sessions and opportunities for healing, but they also involve public testimonies, if you will, public hearings, public fact findings. Sometimes, they are created by governments and then sometimes they are not. There are various ways that they come about. But essentially, they acknowledge the harms. They acknowledge the injustices and they also bring the perpetrators together with those who have experienced the victimization and we get a truth telling, if you will.
We acknowledge that our situation is unique, but we do envision that there will be opportunities for helping to bridge the divide in the sense that we will have healing circles and healing experiences that are supported all over the country that will bring diverse groups together to share their narratives and to share their stories in ways that they may never have before.
What is racial healing and why is it significant to this model?
You know, you can do truth in reconciliation and many of those commissions have happened around the world and they have nothing to do with racism. So we felt it was very important to be explicit that this effort is about acknowledging the belief in a hierarchy of human value — the fallacy of a hierarchy of human value — but the fact that that belief itself is embedded in our constitution, it's embedded in our systems and structures, and it's embedded in our culture.
And so we believe that racial healing is the process of engaging to uproot and jettison that belief and its consequences, because that belief created, if you will, a society that led to the decimation and annihilation of millions of people. I think the atrocities are so great that we have chosen to deny in many ways both the reality and the consequences, and certainly the implications and the feelings that they bring up in many of us. The healing comes in from the engagement and the relationships and the capacity for trust building and the capacity for rational and civil decision making and civil discourse that leads to policies and practices that make for a more equitable society.
How will the Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation process spur action beyond just having conversations about race and equity and conflict?
It is certainly more than conversation. It is real work to bring communities together, to analyze and to interrogate and to develop meaningful trends and approaches to uproot the belief in racial hierarchy and the consequences of that belief. In a democracy, it's about engagement. And it's about exercising one’s sense of empowerment and responsibility to help to inform public dialogue and public debate. So we can't underestimate the significance of engagement and dialogue around these critical issues. But that leads to mobilization and to movement and to policy decisions and proposals that will lead toward greater equity.
Every ZIP Code, every county, every state, every city in America has a unique racialized history and footprint. The fact that you have 15- and 20-year differences in life expectancy from one ZIP Code to the other and you have comparable disparities in income from one ZIP Code to the other — there is a unique set of circumstances that help to bring that about over time. And so as a result of bringing folks together to be honest about the pattern, the historic patterns that got us to where we are now, hopefully will build stronger coalitions and stronger love of a public will.
One part of the enterprise is the Remix the Narrative campaign, which invites people to share personal stories via social media on how race and equity play out in their lives. How can we harness personal narratives into improved health?
There's a growing movement, I think, in psychology and in other fields to recognize that we are more than just ourselves and our tissues. We as human beings are also our stories, our collective stories and our individual stories. And those stories reflect our relationships, our relationships with our immediate family, our relationships with our community and certainly in a racialized hierarchical society, our relationships with the broader society as a whole. So understanding those stories and translating what might have been stories of victimization and oppression only, the stories of resilience and power and connection and survival and overcoming, when those stories, which you know our brains are wired to, not only receive stories, but to hold stories. And when we hold stories, those stories affect our chemistry. They affect our self-regulatory, physiological mechanisms within our body, the autonomic nervous system.
Something as simple as blood sugar regulation and blood pressure regulation, these things are affected by the stories that we hold and by the stresses that we experience.
And so story is a powerful part of who we are. It's a powerful part of our health and more and more we're beginning to see how story plays a role in our therapeutic intervention to bring about balance and to reduce stress. But also our collective story as a society, we're not just trying to heal individuals, we're trying to heal our culture and our collective story is, I believe, hungry for a balance. It's hungry for truth.
How can individual public health workers and APHA members get involved?
We are in a co-design phase right now and we are really honored to have the American Public Health Association as one of the hundred or more partners that are helping us in this design phase.
We'll ask public health departments and public health institutions to be partners in the work on the ground in communities. We'll also invite public health historians to help fill in the missing stories and the missing information about the racial history of public health in America, the history of Native American, immigrant communities, African-American communities, Latino communities from a public health perspective. And we'll also continue to work collaboratively to design ways that we can track and measure the impact, if you will, or the outcome of this healing work in terms of the evaluation.
What are the possible health outcomes that would define success for this enterprise?
We think on an individual level, people are going to be healthier. They're going to have less of a stress response and they're going to build relationships that are more authentic. And they'll also have tools and resources for being less reactive to the over riding ethos of a racialized culture in society. And that speaks to the internalized racism in America, those who experience it, who have been placed arbitrarily at the bottom of that hierarchy. We live every day with micro-aggressions and insults and this broader context of truth, racial healing, and transformation, it creates a container that is helpful in living with those things and experiencing and not internalizing them as readily.
Besides the individual improvements and skills and capacities, we hope that communities will look differently and will be willing to build the political will and the social will and ultimately the compassion and caring that will help us design healthier communities and that will help to foster better health outcomes, particularly in the area of chronic disease, although infectious and acute disease, they're related to social determinants as well.
APHA has laid out a goal of creating the healthiest nation in one generation. How will this enterprise align with that goal?
Well, you know, to create the healthiest nation in a generation will require a focus on prevention. It will require a focus on creating the social determinants of health and well-being. Even though we say social determinants of health, often when we look at them, we're really talking about the social of determinants of illness, but in truth, and racism or the belief in a hierarchy of human value is a social determinant of disease. It is a function of determinants of illness.
So if we are successful, when we are successful in making racism a thing of the past, and truly bringing an end to this legacy of a belief in racial hierarchy, we will, in fact, be contributing to the prevention of illness and the prevention of disease and moving us forward to being a much healthier nation.