Race Wars: The Critical Conversations Podcast

If we agree that all American institutions are built on systemic racism, American healthcare is no exception. One of the major questions to be answered is to extent are Black people taken seriously at healthcare facilities. From hospitals to the local doctor's office, Black women in particular find their experiences to be both traumatic and racist. When we live in a society where Black women are 2 to 6 times more likely to die during childbirth than their White counterparts, we have to question the racist system our healthcare is derived from. It is our job to remedy the issue by listening to the experiences of Black women who have suffered systemic racism under our broken healthcare system. On this episode, Rhisa aka Negra Con Lyme shares her truth about her experiences with Lyme disease and the traumatic experiences dealing with healthcare professionals as a black woman.

The City University of New York (CUNY), specifically The City College of New York (once the “Free Academy”) educated early European immigrants as they faced discrimination by elite institutions and sought ways to elevate themselves into the middle class. That generation went on to become successful and establish the CUNY system as the educator of immigrants in New York City. In the 1950s, Southern Blacks and Puerto Ricans struggled to gain acceptance in City College to achieve the same goal of elevation into the middle class. Somehow the Black experience in public academic institutions is one of struggle with over policing and lack of acceptance. To understand this experience, it is important to familiarize yourself with the history of CUNY. Even in recent times when CUNY students have organized radical movements over similar issues, they have found themselves down trodden by the system. Tafadar Sourov, a City College alum and community organizer who focuses on labor organizing in construction, joins the conversation and talks organizing and racism in CUNY on this episode of Race Wars: The Critical Conversations Podcast.

When the pandemic hit New York City, there was much debate about whether to close schools. While closing schools so that they did not become an incubator for Covid-19 made perfect sense, you could not help but wonder what would happen to homeless and underprivileged public school students. These students relied on the schools for various social resources. And what about remote learning? With everything else exposing our Nation's inequalities, remote learning struggled to address the needs of children of color. Will remote learning end up widening the "achievement gap" between White & Black children? Some would even argue that the term "achievement gap" should actually read "opportunity gap." This episode seeks to unravel remote learning in its relation to the "achievement gap" [Read "opportunity gap"]. This episode also features a brief interview with Brian China, a Long Island high school teacher as he describes his impressions of remote learning and its challenges.

America has always been considered a "melting pot" especially when referring to its big cities. However, the term "melting pot" minimizes the value of diversity by forcing different groups to conform to mainstream culture. But "melting pot" aside, the current political climate seems to challenge the notion that Americans really value diversity and a diverse society. In labor and education, diversity finds itself competing with a supposed neutral "meritocracy" that provides whiteness above all. So what is the truth? Does America really love diversity or is that as disingenuous a notion as the "American Dream?"

This brief episode discusses the mission statement of the podcast.

We know that when the police are called upon to enforce policy, the risk of selective enforcement is high. For example, we know that speeding and parking tickets are already disproportionately issued to Black and Brown men. So what happens when the United States of America is hit with a once in a generation pandemic? And is part of the problem that our society throws more policing on situations where policing is not the answer?