Connecting Racism and Public Health

was not the case. COVID nineteen was actually further exposing the deep inequality we are living through on a daily basis. This week on woke f Daily, I was proud to be joined by several professionals who were able to connect the dots between race and public health, not just our medical health, but our overall well being as a society and folks, we're not doing that. Great to hear these full conversations. As always, check out woke Daily on Patreon

at patreon dot com, slash will gay app. For just five dollars, you can hear hundreds of shows, with five brand new podcasts going up every single week. For now, let's jump into my conversation with the doctor Tarika Barrett, CEO of Girls Who Code, an organization dedicated to closing the wide gender gap in the tech industry. She's talking about the coronavirus pandemic and how it has made the gender and racial gap in tech more obvious than it

has ever been. COVID has really laid bare the inequities that so many of our girls and our women, especially our girls and women of color, are facing, both in school and in the workplace. You know, as a lifelong educator and equity advocate, and as someone who's helped lead Girls who Code now for the past five years. As challenging as this past year has been with the layers of inequity, I also feel energized to build on this incredible foundation that Rushma has laid to close this widening

gender gap in tech. You know, as you pointed out, a space that is typically you know, white, male dominated, and we have worked so hard over close to nine years now to build this incredible movement of girls and women who now see a path forward in tech. And as CEO stepping into this seat, it is my job to harness that movement and really expand and extend the pipeline so that more girls and women, especially girls and

women of color, have opportunity. And you know, it means tangible things like tripling the number of after school clubs that we launch over the next few years. It also means launching workforce development programs and mentorship programs so that our young women know that we're going to support them

as they move into the workforce. We know that as bad as things are now, tech is still going to be central to the job markets recovery, and we can't have our girls and women, especially our girls and women

of color, being left out when these opportunities present. So this moment is dire, it is urgent, and as I step into this seat, I want to make sure that are most marginalized girls, the ones who've dropped out of remote learning opportunities, that we are paying attention to them and supporting them, you know, in our work moving forward. You know, let's talk about that for a minute, the

fact that young girls are dropping out of learning. You know, UNICEF estimates that we're looking at roughly twenty million secondary school age girls around the glow around twenty million dropping out of school because of the pandemic. We hear reports in the United States with at least two million women

dropping out of the workforce because of the pandemic. Why do you think that this is affecting girls and women more so than it is any other demographic And what is Girls who Code doing in order to stemmy the to stop it from happening, or at least bring attention to the fact that it is happening. Yeah, Danielle, I'm so grateful for that question. You know, if we think about it, our girls and young women are the caregivers.

They're the ones who are often turned to in families to support, to take care of siblings, to take care of parents. It's also connected to the culture shift that Girls who Code has been so committed to changing. We know that when you think about a computer program or a coder, you don't think of a girl. They're often not encouraged by parents, by peers, by teachers. Our education system doesn't it's not set up to funnel them into these opportunities. So in this moment, I find that our

girls and young women are the burden bearers. They're the ones who are spoking in and doing all of this work. And we know what's happening to young women with children they've had to step out of the workforce to support families. AT Girls who Code, the way that we think about this urgent issue is to me make sure that all the programming that we design and that we've launched contemplates

the needs and challenges that our girls are facing. So, for example, we would run typically a seven week summer immersion program. We shifted that with COVID to a two week program. We surveyed our girls. We checked on what they needed. Were they taking care of loved ones, did they have to do, you know, get earned money on the side, Did they have a computer? Did they have

access to internet? We have to make sure that we are asking our girls what they need, but that we are also planting seeds of hope and remembering that as much as we're talking about learning loss in one breath and disengagement and marginalization, we know that our girls are going to be the key to what gets transformed in this world. You know, passionate, ambitious and diverse young women

are going to change our workforce. So we have to continue to invest in them, and so AT Girls who Code, our programming is very much designed to support them in spite of the bird that they're facing in this moment

with COVID. You know, we oftentimes you don't deal with things until we're in crisis, and the reality is, you know, I was just speaking with New York City MARYL candidate Maya Wiley, and in our conversation talking about New York City Public Schools, who you and I both worked for at one time, the largest school district in the country, I said to her, you know, we knew years ago

that these communities didn't have broadband. We knew years ago that they didn't have the access to technology, let alone the devices that we're going to set them up for where we are now with remote learning, But we did nothing. You know, we continue to create pandemic on top of crises, on top of pandemic on top of crisis, as if we're layering some type of lasagna, and the reality is that we have the tools right and the awareness to fix it. Why don't we tackle these things on the

front end. You think at such a question you had me when you said a lasagna nothing to do with Danielle. I mean, that is an important question, but I would say that very often. You know, inequity is complex, and you know, people deal with what's in front of them. When you think about this digital divide that you've said has been here forever. That is true. We've always known it, but we decide to pay attention to other the gaps

in schools or other things. And now we're recognizing, like, oh, we wonder why our black and brown kids were never succeeding in school when they would go home and they couldn't Google search up the answer to their homework, just like these kids who had access to high speed internet. So it's really laid bare the inequities in a really stark way. I'm hopeful though that the steps that are

being taken now to level the playing field. I think it's something like over a third of you know, black and Latino students don't have access to computers, you know, and high speed internet, and we know that twelve million students don't have access to high speed internet overall. This is the moment to not only sort of bridge that gap,

but go a step further. We have to take the learnings that are positive in this moment around blended learning and digital learning and the ways in which some kids have been given some different kinds of engagement and opportunity, and we have to build on that and do even more. I wish I knew why folks didn't act on some of these things. But let's be honest. Racism is real inequity, and very often it becomes a hierarchy of needs, and it's a messed up hierarchy. It shouldn't be you know this.

Instead of that, I would say access to high speed internet is a human right. You cannot succeed in society without it, and so I'm hopeful that it's a complete paradigm shift that we're looking at moving forward. It's true that we've been facing multiple social pandemic so long before we were hit by COVID nineteen. The lack of internet and access has been an issue facing millions of people

of color across the country for years. We have no choice but to address and remedy these issues, especially as we expect more people to transition to a lifestyle of working from home. Another pandemic we've been facing for decades is the vulnerability of healthcare to all Americans. After a year of living through an unprecedented public health crisis, we are still fighting to make sure everyone can get the care that they need. Doctor Abdul Lsayed wrote the book

on Medicare for All. Literally, it's entitled Medicare for All, a Citizen's Guide. So he joined me to break down the systemic forces that are blocking healthcare progress in this country. Let's talk about why polling shows most Americans are for Medicare for all, and yet the people that we put in control of our Congress are not. Where's the disconnect here? Well, the industry spends a tremendous amount of money making sure

that that's the case. Last year alone, the health insurance industry spent one hundred and fifty two million dollars lobbying across eight hundred and forty five lobbyists. That's nearly two lobbyists per member of Congress. To make sure that that disconnect exists. They spent one hundred and twenty million dollars in addition to one hundred and fifty two electioneering, so

giving money through their pack to politicians. And then that doesn't include all of the money that they spend disinforming the public on the airwaves, which has reframed this issue rather than being about providing every single person a good, a tangible good, real insurance that doesn't come with the same kind of out of pocket costs that doesn't leave them when they turn twenty six, or get married or

get divorced, or get a job or lose a job. Rather, they're framing this about the loss of quote unquote choice or the fact that it's going to cost. You know, they say more than more than we can afford, despite the fact that we spend eighteen percent of all the money in our economy on healthcare in the current system, So you know, there's a lot of money being spent to shape public opinion and in particular, to shape the

opinions of politicians. You know what's funny is that when we talk about the fact that Republicans continued battle against Medicare for all, is this idea that it is a loss of choice, right, that Americans deserve freedom, and yet millions of Americans are tied to jobs they hate and don't want to be in because of the fact that there is no other opportunity and no other actual choice for them to have in order for them to get healthcare. I know many people that are locked into jobs because

what is the alternative? And so I think that it's really interesting to me that it's consistently the mantra of the right to talk about choice and to talk about freedom while robbing the American people of both. That's right, Daniel, I'll tell you this. You know, when you think about what a choice is, it is the ability to, regardless of your circumstances, be able to select what you would like to do, when you would like to do it,

how you'd like to do it. And you know, the choice that they tell us that we should be so excited to have is about the choice between different corporate bureaucracies that charge some difference in an allocation of money that always has them finishing up on top, right, based on where you work and what your employer has told you,

your choice is. So, you know, we get our insurance through my wife, who's a psychiatrist at the university here, and she gets to choose quote unquote between a few different corporations who charge a few different rates, some in quote unquote premium, and premium is which you pay every two weeks or every month, some in quote unquote deductible, another opaque term, which is the paywall that exists before you actually get the healthcare you already paid for in

your premium, and then some amount of copay or coinsurance, which is what you pay to get, you know, basic care at the point of care. And I mean, honestly, I'm a physician who wrote a whole book on the

healthcare system. My wife is a physician, and every time we have to make this quote unquote choice, we got to pull out a whole actuarial table to figure out how likely it is that me at thirty six, her at thirty four are gonna get really sick, our daughter at three is gonna get sick, or that she's gonna have a baby, which is probably the highest cost thing that happens conditional on us staying healthy. So all of that is to say that that's no choice at all.

It's a completely opaque and is conditioned by an employer in the first place, and is dressed up in all of this language that's really really hard to penetrate. The choice that I want is what doctor I see, what hospital wh I go to? And that choice right the number one gatekeeper on that choice is the insurance industry

itself telling you who you can see. And you know why, because they've negotiated a bunch of sweetheart deals with various providers that they have reimbursement relationships with and so they want you to stay within that network of providers with

whom they've negotiated sweetheart deals. So if you dare stray outside of the sweetheart deal that that insurance corporation is negotiated, then you're going to feel the financial penalty of that, so that their CEO can continue to make tens of millions of dollars a year, denying you the care you already paid for. You know, I don't want to lose part of the reality here. So one is just the corporate greed, right, and you unpack that often when you

come on wok F. The other piece of it is racism. Right. We know that the countries that in fact do pay for their citizens healthcare are more or less homogeneous, right, Like we know that everybody looks alike. So there are countries that have universal basic income, fine, because everybody looks

the same, praise the same, what have you. We can't decouple race from this, and so how do we have what is a very real conversation about the two evils that are driving the most disparities in this country, which is capitalism, right, this extractive principle of capitalism and the idea that everything is built on a pyramid, which means that the only way that the pyramid survives is if

people are on the bottom right. And then racism, which has created this stereotype and this ideology that has prefaced on the fact that people of color are less deserving right of other people, and so white folks will go ahead and cut their nose to spite their face as healthcare is presented to them. No, no, no, we don't want it because we don't want the people down the street to have it. So how do how do we

reconcile these things? How do we have this conversation while advocating for what is necessary in order to make America well and not just well enough that you're addicted to pharmaceuticals and what have you. But actually, well, yeah, thank you for saying that, Danielle. Look, I actually got a piece coming out about the biggest obstacles in the way of medicare for all on Racism is definitely one of them.

In what I thought it was a fantastic book, Heather McGee really dissects the way that racism has been leveraged against the well being of all of us because of

this zeroum kind of thinking. But I honestly think the way that we do it is to call it out right, because what happens is that you've got really powerful people in these corporations that recognize that the best single way to deny people access to a set of services that they need and deserve is to divide them such that they cannot build the power to actually be able to

engage that. And even worse is that you turn one group of them so inextricably against another that rather than fight to actually beget a set of public goods that benefits everyone, they will fight to actually deny it. And that is the circumstance that we have at this point. And you know, I hate to say it, but I feel like the Republican Party and so much of the base has hit this sort of peak white identity politics where now ideology has fully decoupled from the conversation. There

is no Republican policy ideology anymore. You know, we were debating a one point nine trillion dollars COVID relief package and Republicans were in the corner talking about doctor Seusan, mister potato head, come on, And so you know, we're at this moment now where they don't even have to talk about policy ideology anymore, because at this point it has just become about this sort of white idnated politics and the weaponization of that in our public space. And

so you know, we've got to call it out. And I think what I've found. You know, I can't paid for governor in Michigan, and I had a lot of conversations with folks who don't see this the world the same way that I do. And you know, I was campaigning as the former health commissioner for the country's largest majority black and poorest city in the country in Detroit. And you know when I when I sit down with folks, i'd say, look, you know, I get it. My name

is Abdurrahman. Right, if you say the whole thing, it's abdual to you, and you're not primed to agree with me. But I'm just going to say a couple of things, and I want you to nod your head. If this is your experience. You pay a tremendous amount of money

in health insurance. You don't know where that goes. And if you or a loved one gets sick, what's going to happen is they're going to send you an additional bill on top of what you already paid, which is going to send your financial circumstances in a tail spin. All that money you were saving, whether it was to send your kid to college or to take them on a nice little vacation, that's gone because someone had the

audacity to get sick. And that's if you're insured. And if you're not insured, right, what you're seeing is that you've got to reapply and reapply to get on Medicaid, and they're trying to cut and cut and cut those services.

And if you're in rural Michigan right, your experience is that even if you have healthcare, you're driving an hour to two hours because the closest hospital shut down a couple of years ago because it couldn't make ends meet, because too many folks in your community are either uninsured or on Medicaid, and so the reimbursements are too low. And you got folks. By the end of everybody's nodding their head, and I said, listen, that is the same story. Whether we are here in rural Michigan or we are

in Detroit. It is the same exact story. And the fact is is that none of you all have heard one another tell the story, because you all have been too busy, right, We've been too busy being told right that the reason you don't have is because they have. Well, I'll tell you what they don't have and you don't have. And the only way that we take this on is that we all come together and decide that all of

us ought to have. And the system that is keeping us from having right is making tens of millions of dollars. Seventy percent of the market share in health insurance in Michigan is Blue Cross Blue Shield in Michigan. And guess what their CEO made nineteen million bucks last year. They were the most profitable that they've ever been in the midst of a pandemic. That's all fifteen million people kicked off of their health insurance. This system is fundamentally broken.

It has become fundamentally a tool of extraction, and it doesn't serve the purpose that it's supposed to serve. White identity politics. That is what is behind the minority rule, emotional apartheid government we have in this country. Right now, I got mine, but you can't have yours. We cannot afford to continue down that path, and it's crusaders like doctor Terka Barrett and doctor Abdullah L. Sayed, who are putting in the work to alter our course for a

better tomorrow. There are so many more amazing guests on wokef Daily this week, like doctor Kyless, Story Out, Emily's List, President Stephanie Shriach, and doctor Yaba blay So. To hear from them and my bevy of woke a F guests and contributors, head over to patreon dot com slash woke AF and subscribe. You can't put a price on the value of getting woke, but five dollars is pretty low. And as always, share, Share, Share this podcast with your

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