Nicole Cardoza Nicole Cardoza Nicole Cardoza Nicole Cardoza

Study Hall! Equity v. equality and the burden on WOC.

Welcome to our weekly Study Hall. Each week I answer questions and share insights from each of you in our community. This week I dove deeper on some pressing topics from our community.

Ironically, I wrote most of this on a plane before I learned of the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Now, as I add the last touches, I write with both deep sorrow and appreciation of her legacy.

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As always, your support is greatly appreciated. You can give one-time on our website, PayPal or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza), or subscribe for $5/mo on our Patreon.

Nicole

TAKE ACTION

  • Reflect on the questions prompted by our community.

  • Ask yourself two questions about one of the topics we discussed this week. Discuss these questions with a friend or colleague.

GET EDUCATED

In review: The newsletters we published this week.
 

9/18/2020 | Reject racial gaslighting.
 

9/17/2020 | Abolish ICE.
 

9/16/2020 | Fight for paid sick leave.
 

9/15/2020 | End Hollywood whitewashing. 
 

9/14/2020 | Stop the use of ketamine in arrests.
 

9/13/2020 | Understand representation in vaccine trials.

Q+A

Do you have any recommendations on words to diffuse the gaslighting?

From 9/18/2020 | Reject racial gaslighting.
 

Jacquelyn Ogorchukwu Iyamah is a social wellness designer that consistently unpacks interpersonal racism on her Instagram. In an article with Refinery29, she offers the following for Black people that may experience this:

  • "calling out: publicly pointing out the person’s harmful behaviour" 

  • "calling in: scheduling a one-on-one with the person to discuss their behaviour"

  • "removing yourself from the conversation to preserve your energy and peace of mind, writing down exactly what happened so that you can refer back to it if you find yourself questioning your truth, or sending the person educational resources and establishing boundaries around the person who racially gaslighted you to limit your interactions with them." 

For those with white privilege, I encourage sticking with the conversation on behalf of the communities of color that have to deal with it.

Q+A

Why would anyone even work at ICE, to begin with, especially a Black woman, considering how long allegations of abuse have been happening?

9/17/2020 | Abolish ICE.

Let's start with the professional aspect of this conversation. Dawn Wooten is a licensed professional nurse, a role that has increasingly limited opportunities in the healthcare industry, driven in part by the industry's history to disregard women of color and queer practitioners. Monica McLemore breaks this down further on Twitter.

Our society is quick to place the blame and burden on women, particularly women of color, for transgressions like these. Here is no different. Just because our bodies are on the line does not make them the shields for harm. And it's unfair to ask people who are already barred from equal opportunities to sacrifice themselves and their families' wellbeing and leave the system. That is certainly their right, but not their obligation.

I don't know Dawn Wooten personally and can't speak for her. No one should have to. It's not productive to blame anyone – especially people from marginalized communities – individually for this system of abuse (especially if she did speak out against it).

Q+A
 

I have spoken with people about this, and their response to me is that only 13% of the United States is Black, so why would this group get more representation than that? This is not an idea I agree with, but what would be a factual response that explains that? 

9/15/2020 | End Hollywood whitewashing.
 

A few people had questions about this survey generally, which wasn't aiming to only demonstrate general stats on the ethnic breakdown, but the fact that there's been little to no change over the course of six years, even though our country is rapidly diversifying. I haven't seen a more recent study with this breadth of data yet.

I'd also consider the movies and roles that may have increased representation on film during these times. Films like 12 Years A Slave, The Help, and The Butler may have contributed to Black actors' representation, and all display Black people enslaved or in servitude. Consider that the two Black women that won Oscars during this time frame were playing Black women overcoming racism and/or horrific violence because of their identity (Halle Berry in Monster's Ball and Lupita N'gonyo for 12 Years A Slave). As did Morgan Freeman, who won the Best Actor role for his depiction of Nelson Mandela, and Chiwetel Ejiofor for 12 Years A Slave.

Let's say these movies and the resulting representation did represent the breadth of stories and narratives that the film industry produces each year. Looking at racism as percentage points aren't enough. That's a lens of "equality" – that everyone gets resources based on population size. But it doesn't take into account the struggles and difficulties that some people have to get there. When it comes to representation in film, likely, we've only just gotten to proportional representation based on population size. It certainly hasn't always been like this, and the movies we're heralding are still perpetuating limited stories of Black people and their experiences.

In my opinion, we need to look at this from the point of equity: what's "proportional" based on the systemic inequities that people have color experienced? What are the systems that have caused this to exist? What would it look like if the industry was truly celebrating Black actors and filmmakers, and a breadth of stories and perspectives?

Q+A
 

If people of all races are biologically the same, why does there need to be diverse representation for drug trials? 

From 9/13/2020 | Understand representation in vaccine trials.

The importance of diverse representation is to ensure that a wide range of health conditions and genetic compositions are represented in the trials. We've discussed in previous newsletters how racism – not race – can shift health outcomes for various populations. It's important to ensure that they're all represented.

It's also equitable, based on our history of medical bias and violence, for us to establish a more equitable practice of testing with broader populations. It means reconciling the deep rifts of distrust, including more diverse medical professionals and institutions, and holding ourselves accountable for a more equitable healthcare system.

Clarifications

9/17/2020 | Abolish ICE.
In our story on forced sterilization, we referenced how transgender people are being forced by state laws to undergo surgery to have their gender legally recognized. The term used by the source we referenced was “sex reassignment surgery,” but the preferred term in the trans community is “gender confirmation surgery”. We have corrected this language in our archives.

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Thank you for all your financial contributions! If you haven't already, consider making a monthly donation to this work. These funds will help me operationalize this work for greatest impact.

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Jami Nakamura Lin Nicole Cardoza Jami Nakamura Lin Nicole Cardoza

Reject racial gaslighting.

It's Friday! And we're introducing a new term to the newsletter: racial gaslighting.

This plays a major part in the systemic medical violence we've unpacked over the past week. And it's playing out in politics. When people and systems minimize the pain and trauma that people of color experience, they shield themselves from accountability and allow that harm to continue. Jami offers some specific examples of how this plays out in various spaces, and particularly how it impacts women of color.

Tomorrow is Saturday, where we host our weekly Study Hall. Reply to this email with any questions or insights from the content we covered this past week and I'll do my best to get to them!

Thank you for all your support! You can give one-time on our website, PayPal or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza), or subscribe for $5/mo on our Patreon.

– Nicole

TAKE ACTION

  • Watch how you and your friends/colleagues respond to the experiences of people of color. Consider how they may be gaslighting based on their comments, and inform them on why their approach is harmful.

  • If you’re considering two sides to a story, make sure you think about the power dynamics between the parties (in race, gender, age, position, etc.)

  • Don’t support businesses or organizations that deny or undermine the experiences of people of color.

  • Consider how racial gaslighting may play a part of the rhetoric of the upcoming election.

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin (she/her)

In March, Margot Gage Witvliet developed coronavirus symptoms after a trip to Europe. Four months later, many of those symptoms still remain, putting her in the camp of what are known as “long-haulers”--coronavirus patients whose symptoms persist for months, deviating from the typically understood trajectory of the illness (read more about her experience at The Conversation). The experience of long-haulers is finally receiving more attention, but for many sufferers, it’s too little, too late. 

“Employers have told long-haulers that they couldn’t possibly be sick for that long. Friends and family members accused them of being lazy. Doctors refused to believe they had COVID-19… This ‘medical gaslighting,’ whereby physiological suffering is downplayed as a psychological problem such as stress or anxiety, is especially bad for women, and even worse for women of color,” writes Ed Yong in his thorough examination of long-haulers, whose numbers could potentially be in the hundreds of thousands (The Atlantic).

Most of our popular understanding of the term gaslighting is within the context of abusive relationships, as that is the context of the term’s origin (BBC). Gaslighting is a psychological method of manipulation used to deny the victim’s experience and make them question their reality, judgment, and sanity (Britannica). The goal is to make the victim dependent on the deceiver. 

But gaslighting can also happen on a structural level. Instead of an individual abuser, the gaslighter is an abusive system denying the reality of entire groups and communities in order to perpetuate power imbalances. “Gaslighting is a structural phenomenon… It is a technique of violence that produces asymmetric harms for different populations,” writes Elena Ruiz, a professor of philosophy and American Indian and Indigenous Studies (PhilArchive). 

Women as a whole are often targets of gaslighting (read the American Sociological Review for how gaslighting relates to gender-based stereotypes and inequality), and articles warning women about gaslighting techniques abound. Less is said in popular media about racial gaslighting, which specifically refers to “the political, social, economic and cultural process that perpetuates and normalizes a white supremacist reality through pathologizing those who resist” (Politics, Groups, and Identities Journal). Racial gaslighting says: the system is not broken, you are broken. 

These are things that most readers versed in anti-racism work will already know (that the system blames people of color instead of itself), but looking at them as forms of gaslighting can help understand how such psychological manipulation is intertwined at the individual and structural levels. Interpersonal gaslighting (within relationships) is usually successful because of systemic gaslighting because the relationship is “rooted in social inequalities” (American Sociological Association). The framework can help us understand how white supremacy remains entrenched in our society. 

Such racial gaslighting appears in many different areas. An academic study on a police force in Hamilton, Ontario, found that the way the police explained away their ID and carding tactics was a form of gaslighting. In their media appearances, the police used “obfuscation techniques” (lies, misrepresentations) to undermine local people of color, who had been arguing that the police’s carding techniques were discriminatory. They used gaslighting to deny their own structural racism (SAGE Publishing). 

In the field of medicine, gaslighting happens when health professionals minimize, ignore, or disbelieve patients’ symptoms and experiences (Health). Examples of this include doctors blaming physical symptoms on mental illness without justification, or providers refusing to request follow-up tests because they don’t believe their patients. Medical gaslighting is especially pernicious because of the inherent power differential between doctors and their patients, even before adding in the intersections of gender and race. Doctors have been socialized to take female patients (NY Times) and patients of color less seriously, and medical professionals still hold many racial biases (National Institute of Health). While practitioners usually participate in medical gaslighting without meaning to harm their patients, individual intent doesn’t mitigate the systemic impact. Their disregard has dire health outcomes, as explained in our recent newsletters on Black maternal health and Black mental health. 

“Missteps and misunderstandings, even by well-seasoned medical professionals, are human, but medical gaslighting is not. Normal test results in patients with chronic pain, unexplained sensitivities to the world, or fatigue should provoke more investigation, rather than a weak handoff.”


Dr. Anne Maitland for Op Med

A 2016 study by patient safety experts suggests that medical error is the third-leading cause of death in America, resulting in over 250,000 deaths per year (Johns Hopkins). But medical error is not nearly as widely researched as other causes of deaths, and we don’t know how many deaths per year can be attributed to medical gaslighting.

What we do know is that medical gaslighting especially affects patients of color. One doctor described the stereotypes patients of color with myalgic encephalomyelitis (a mostly invisible illness with symptoms similar to those of COVID long-haulers) faced: Black and South Asian patients were suspected of faking their symptoms to avoid work, while East Asian patients’ symptoms were thought to be the result of working too much (ME Action). In other words, their actual medical conditions were dismissed and attributed instead to racist stereotypes.

 

Think about the words of Canadian policy expert Emily Riddle: “To be an Indigenous woman in this country is to intimately understand both interpersonal and systemic gaslighting… Any Indigenous woman who questions anyone who demeans her or a system that perpetuates violence against her is bound to be called difficult.” (The Globe and Mail). To effectively combat the effects of systemic gaslighting in our own thinking, we need to question not just what we believe, but who we believe.

Key Takeaways

  • A whistleblower filed a complaint against ICE for “medical neglect" at the detention camp she worked at, including mass hysterectomies without detainees' content

  • Forced sterilization was a state-sanctioned practice, often funded by the federal government, that disproportionately impacted women and women of color during the 19th century

  • Forced sterilizations procedures are sexist, xenophobic, racist, and ableist, and often homophobic

  • Unwanted sterilizations are still happening today

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PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Thank you for all your financial contributions! If you haven't already, consider making a monthly donation to this work. These funds will help me operationalize this work for greatest impact.

Subscribe on Patreon | Give one-time on PayPal | Venmo @nicoleacardoza

Read More