Episode 1: Black COVID Stories with Dr. Kaye Whitehead

1:43AM Sep 29, 2021

Speakers:

Dr. Ian Anson

Dr. Kaye Whitehead

Keywords:

umbc

cs3

whitehead

people

country

social sciences

community

associate professor

black

hear

racism

lecture

podcast

connect

problem

center

moreland

research

vote

global pandemic

Hello, and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, associate professor of political science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers and community partners about the social science research that they've been performing in recent times. Quantitative, qualitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences we bring the best of UMBC's social science community to you.

So this is a really exciting moment for all of us here at CS3, because it's our first episode. And I think first I should introduce myself and everybody who's behind the scenes making this podcast happen. So I'm an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at UMBC. And I'm especially interested in public opinion and, surprise, surprise, political communication. Hence the podcast. And I'm a member of the CS3 advisory board. Let me just read you part of our mission statement. So the statement says that "we promote excellence across the Social Sciences at UMBC. Spanning disciplines and programs, we connect scholars who engage in social scientific study, asking key questions about social life, addressing problems of local and global concern, sharing knowledge about public issues, and connecting research to practice and policy." So sounds like a mouthful, but really, I think the CS3, three does a lot at UMBC, and we want more people to know about it. Our director is Dr. Christine Mallinson, who's a professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture. And our associate director is Dr. Felipe Filomeno, who's an associate professor also in the Political Science department. We're being assisted in on this podcast by Amy Barnes, who's our program coordinator and Myriam Ralston, who's our external relations coordinator. And of course, I've got to give a huge shout-out to our intern and producer, Jefferson Riva,s who's responsible for a lot of the content in these episodes, an undergraduate in the Media and Communication Studies Department. And by the way that theme music it was composed and produced by undergraduate music composition student D'Juan Moreland. Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it? So this podcast has been a few months in the making, and I'm really excited for you to hear it. So since COVID-19 hit we've been meeting online as an advisory board, trying to think of new and better ways to help connect our community to the social sciences. And in fact, you know, we've even been trying to connect to each other a little bit better because sometimes, and especially during a pandemic like this, getting out of our departments to interact with one another is actually pretty tough. And so really, that's what this podcast is all about, I think. Every episode what we want is for you to be able to learn something about what's going on in the social sciences at UMBC in recent times. And so for this first episode, why don't we just jump in and we'll learn a little bit more about this week's feature presentation.

Dr. Kaye Whitehead is an Associate Professor of Communication and African American Studies at Loyola University here in Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Whitehead is a scholar who does it all: teaching research, public outreach, and she does it really well. Not only is she the director of the Carson Institute for Race, Peace and Social Justice, her radio show, Today with Dr. Kaye, is an award winning mainstay on WEEA. 88.9 FM. Recently Dr. Whitehead returned home to UMBC, her alma mater, to deliver the 42nd annual W.E.B. Dubois lecture, organized by the Department of Africana Studies. The lecture was featured as a part of our Social Sciences Forum Distinguished Lecture Series in the fall of 2020. The subject of Dr. Whitehead's lecture is: Black COVID stories, Black Lives Matter and Protest. And in the following excerpt we hear about how these contemporary topics connected to a long history of anti-blackness in America, a topic that is central to the social sciences today. Let's hear what Dr. Whitehead had to share with us on the occasion of her visit to UMBC.

I feel that I have come full circle tonight coming back virtually to give this prestigious lecture. History is not the past it is the present. W.E.B. Dubois said that the cost of liberty less than the price of repression. We are now 11 months into a global pandemic. The economy appears to be crashing down around us we are on the brink of an eviction crisis. The Supreme Court is now six-three right leaning. The President has yet to concede. Mitch McConnell was going back to DC, and we are close to having 10 million people infected with COVID-19. My topic tonight, which I believe could not be more appropriate, is Black COVID stories, Black Lives Matter and Protest: a Conversation About the Ongoing Struggle for Justice and Change. My hope is to address some of these issues and open up the space to continue to think deeply about what type of world we want to live in, and what type of world we want to leave our children. I think when you talk about the enormity of this moment, and you recognize it in the midst of a global pandemic, for black people, we are in the midst of a syndemic, and a syndemic talks about multiple points of oppression coming at you at one time. It's not just COVID-19 impacting the black community. It's also the history of redlining. It's also living in a food desert. It's also what's happening in our schools. It's also what happened with the economy. It's the fact that we are unable to live and be free in this country. And it is impacting us. So we are in a syndemic. In this moment, we have to understand that in order for oppression and racism and white supremacy to end, then we're talking about the hearts and minds of people. When we look across the landscape of this country, there are days when I feel that this syndemic, which is a term that was introduced by Merrill Singer, which talks about those multiple points of oppression and hostility that I pointed out, that it just might break us all that there are days when I feel that when there's nothing left to take from us that they're going to take our soul. These are the days when I get so frustrated, and I feel tired in my spirit because I know that America will survive this pandemic. America at large. A vaccine will come. Life will move on, and things will go back to whatever the new normal is. I wonder though, what will happen to the most economically challenged black and brown communities in America, communities that never actually came back after the 1968 riots. Communities that have never actually survived and move forward from Black Lives Matter, communities that are still trying to find places to get fresh fruits and vegetables in their community, communities when you can't walk in those neighborhoods and be completely safe, what will happen to them once a vaccine happens. And given the fact that we have a history of medical racism and medical apartheid in this country, not just with the HeLa cells with Henrietta Lacks, we can go back to the Tuskegee experiment, and the ways in which they experimented on black women during slavery to figure out the ways in which they can then heal white bodies. We are the descendants of men and women who chose to survive and they did it by gathering together. I was thinking a lot as I was looking at the Maya Angelou quote that the need for change bulldoze a road, down the center of my mind, we were at 52-51%. And then to put that in context out of 35, developing or developed nations in terms of voting, we ranked number 30 out of 35, in terms of voter turnout, I think there was a sense that democracy was not something you had to protect, that we have seen this country work, what we thought were laws written in stone, it was really social norms. And what we found over the last four years is that it woke people up. You saw more women, more people of color, voted into office, Democracy is something that we have to shape. We were trying to understand when it comes to not just police brutality, but to COVID-19, that you live at a time when you have to balance both. And I'm not saying we haven't done it before. Black COVID Stories means Black Lives Matter shows that we are strong willed and stubborn people. It shows that we understand every time we have a struggle that we have nothing to lose but our chains. I'm the daughter of a native South Carolinian. My dad grew up in the Jim Crow South, and he remembers the days when they called him boy, even when he was a man. He remembers being dismissed and overlooked even when he followed the rules and of hearing his mother cry when she realized that he had decided to fight back and not give way. These are the type of decisions he would say that are best made once you realize that you're willing to die to be free. Growing up, it was hard for me to understand how someone could be arrested for being black and for how someone could be lynched because they didn't step off the sidewalk quick enough. How is it that someone could go to jail because they look somebody else in the eye of a different race. I thought these were just longtime stories, until of course, between Black Lives Matter 1.0, which is what I call the first Black Lives Matter to happen in this country, which many people did not recognize that momen,t to what was happening just two years ago, when every time black people moved in this country, somebody was calling the cops on us for simply living our lives. Now back in 1965 President Lyndon Baines Johnson, in response to the violent racial attacks that were happening throughout the country, stated that the problem that this country was facing was neither a negro problem, nor a southern problem. LBJ said it was an American problem. And speaking before a joint session of Congress, he argued that the nation had to work together to overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry, and injustice. Now, he was preparing Congress and the world to receive his bill, which would later become the 1965 Voting Rights Act that was designed to eliminate illegal barriers that prevented black people from exercising their legal right to vote. It was that, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that open up the ways for the black women and Hispanic women and Asian American women and indigenous women can get to the ballot, that we don't celebrate completely the 19th amendment for black woman in the vote, we celebrate the 1965 voting rights. We cannot overlook the fact that the courts right now are stacked against us. And it's the court that's going to determine what is going to look like. They determine how long you go away from. I believe that we're in the midst of some dark days, and we have more dark days to come before we get to the light. I believe the morning is going to come. I believe we're at just a day away from tomorrow. But in order for us to get there, we have to recognize that when we show up to vote, when we show up to do the work that we may not benefit from that. We're doing it for our children. And we fight white complicity and privilege and we fight white nationalism, white supremacy. We're doing it because we recognize that this country is going to change. If we're going to come through the storm, one small step at a time, we will all grab our weapons, whether that's your pen, your paper, whether it's the book you're writing, or the voice, you're speaking with, and we're going to be well trained and brilliant, and we're going to be the hope and the dreams of our ancestors and doing that, that I believe we will win to transform the society, maybe not for us, for the children of our children. It's who I think we should fight. Thank you so much. You can follow me on twitter at @KayeWhitehead. I'm sorry, I'm all over social media. I'm not hard to find. You can find me every day from 3-5 on the radio. So give me a call. We have these conversations every day. And we struggle through the important questions together.

Campus Connections (x6)

It's time for a regular segment. This is Campus Connections, a part of the podcast where we connect today's featured research to other work on UMBC's campus. I'm so grateful that Dr. Whitehead was able to deliver the W. E. B. Du Bois lecture this year, Albeit in a virtual setting, because her words are such powerful reminders of the hard work to be done to combat anti-blackness in America today. In today's Campus Connection, I want to connect Dr. Whitehead's presentation to some of the work that's being done on UMBC's campus on this front. CS3, in partnership with the Dresher Center for the Humanities, and CIRCA which stands for the Center for innovation, Research and Creativity in the Arts, are together co-sponsoring a new working group. This group is called Anti-Racism and Action. And it was designed to promote new coalition, conversations and creative work surrounding anti-racism. It was envisioned as a collaborative, interdisciplinary community of scholars that will spur research and teaching activity focused on anti-racism. The group is currently meeting regularly to read, discuss, listen to experts, and to plan research and activism. UMBC faculty from any department, faculty from other area colleges and universities, and advanced UMBC graduate students are all invited to join. If you want to learn more about the Anti-Racism working group, the link is in the show notes.

That's all for today. Stay tuned for our next episode. Retrieving the Social Sciences is a production of the UMBC Center for Social Science Scholarship. Our director is Dr. Christine Mallinson, our associate director is Dr. Felipe Filomeno, and our production intern is Jefferson Rivas. Our theme music was composed and recorded by D'Juan Moreland. Find out more about CS3 at socialscience.umbc.edu and make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where you can find full video recordings of recent UMBC events. Until next time, keep questioning.