Host Erik Fleming sits down with award-winning author Kelly Cervantes and nurse-researcher Dr. Monica McLemore for a powerful episode on grief, motherhood, and fighting for health equity.
Cervantes shares her memoir The Luckiest and the work of remembering after loss; Dr. McLemore discusses reproductive justice, rising U.S. maternal mortality, and urgent policy changes to protect families and communities.
00:00:00 --> 00:00:06 Welcome. I'm Eric Fleming, host of A Moment with Erik Fleming, the podcast of our time.
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00:01:15 --> 00:01:20 The following program is hosted by the NBG Podcast Network.
00:02:00 --> 00:02:05 Hello, and welcome to another moment with Erik Fleming. I am your host, Erik Fleming.
00:02:07 --> 00:02:19 So, it is Black History Month 2026, which is a special Black History Month as it is the,
00:02:20 --> 00:02:25 100th year of celebrating Black history in the United States of America.
00:02:25 --> 00:02:29 This was started by an organization, Carter G.
00:02:29 --> 00:02:38 Woodson and several others in Chicago, to commemorate 50 years, at that time,
00:02:38 --> 00:02:46 50 years of emancipation of African-Americans or black people from slavery.
00:02:48 --> 00:02:56 And that organization still exists and we still exist as black people.
00:02:57 --> 00:03:04 It started off as a week celebration and it is now a full month,
00:03:05 --> 00:03:11 and there are people that criticize that and I might get into that in my editorial
00:03:11 --> 00:03:18 at the end of the podcast, but I just wanted to acknowledge that and encourage you,
00:03:18 --> 00:03:22 especially if you're not black, to pay attention.
00:03:23 --> 00:03:24 And I'll leave it at that.
00:03:25 --> 00:03:33 I've got a couple of great guests, two young ladies who fit the theme of this
00:03:33 --> 00:03:35 podcast, of having the fight.
00:03:36 --> 00:03:43 One is an author who is an award-winning author who has written a book about
00:03:43 --> 00:03:50 her experiences in life, dealing with grief and tragedy and challenges.
00:03:50 --> 00:03:56 And it was a very, very compelling book. It brought me to tears,
00:03:56 --> 00:03:58 and I mentioned that in the interview to her directly.
00:03:59 --> 00:04:04 It's very rare. Well, I shouldn't say that anymore because the older I get,
00:04:04 --> 00:04:05 the more sensitive I get.
00:04:06 --> 00:04:12 So, you know, this book took me there, but in a good way, right?
00:04:13 --> 00:04:20 And then the other sister is a lifelong nurse and educator who has been fighting
00:04:20 --> 00:04:25 the good fight when it comes to reproductive justice and health equity.
00:04:26 --> 00:04:33 And both of these ladies have exhibited taking the charge of fighting for what
00:04:33 --> 00:04:37 they believe in and what they're passionate about.
00:04:38 --> 00:04:43 And I think you will feel that in those interviews.
00:04:44 --> 00:04:48 So without any further delay, let's go ahead and get this show started.
00:04:48 --> 00:04:55 As always, you can support this show by going to www.momenteric.com.
00:04:56 --> 00:05:01 You can subscribe to the podcast. You can listen to past episodes.
00:05:01 --> 00:05:03 You can learn a little bit about me.
00:05:03 --> 00:05:07 You know, a whole spiel you heard as the podcast got started, you know.
00:05:08 --> 00:05:14 But in times like these, whatever you can do to support independent podcasts
00:05:14 --> 00:05:17 like this one is greatly appreciated.
00:05:18 --> 00:05:24 All right. It's time to kick it off. And as always, we kick it off with a moment of news with Grace G.
00:05:31 --> 00:05:36 Thanks, Erik. The Justice Department confirmed that the massive release of over
00:05:36 --> 00:05:41 3 million pages concludes the administration's planned disclosures regarding the Epstein files.
00:05:42 --> 00:05:45 Bill and Hillary Clinton have agreed to testify in a congressional probe into
00:05:45 --> 00:05:47 Jeffrey Epstein. The U.S.
00:05:48 --> 00:05:52 Supreme Court has cleared California to use a new electoral map expected to
00:05:52 --> 00:05:54 grant Democrats five additional House seats.
00:05:55 --> 00:05:59 Democrat Christian Menifee won a special election in Texas, further narrowing
00:05:59 --> 00:06:02 the Republican Party's slim majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
00:06:03 --> 00:06:07 President Trump has nominated Kevin Walsh to lead the Federal Reserve.
00:06:07 --> 00:06:12 A federal judge denied a request from Minnesota officials to halt federal immigration operations.
00:06:13 --> 00:06:17 Five-year-old Liam Ramos and his father were released from an ICE facility after
00:06:17 --> 00:06:19 a judge ordered their return to Minnesota.
00:06:20 --> 00:06:25 President Trump announced that DHS agents should only intervene in city protests
00:06:25 --> 00:06:30 if specifically requested by local leaders or federal properties under direct threat.
00:06:31 --> 00:06:35 DHS Secretary Kristi Noem ordered the immediate deployment of body cameras for
00:06:35 --> 00:06:37 federal officers in Minneapolis.
00:06:38 --> 00:06:43 Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson issued an executive order requiring city police
00:06:43 --> 00:06:47 to investigate and potentially refer federal immigration agents for prosecution
00:06:47 --> 00:06:49 regarding alleged illegal activities.
00:06:50 --> 00:06:54 Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard defended her presence at an
00:06:54 --> 00:06:59 FBI raid on a Georgia election facility, claiming she was acting under the president's authority.
00:06:59 --> 00:07:04 A federal judge has dismissed federal murder and weapons charges against Luigi
00:07:04 --> 00:07:07 Mangione, the accused killer of UnitedHealthcare's CEO.
00:07:07 --> 00:07:12 A federal appeals court has dismissed a misconduct complaint filed by the Justice
00:07:12 --> 00:07:17 Department against a federal judge who had clashed with the administration over deportation policies.
00:07:18 --> 00:07:22 President Trump plans to close the Kennedy Center on July 4th for two years of reconstruction.
00:07:23 --> 00:07:28 And South Carolina's measles outbreak has reached 876 cases.
00:07:28 --> 00:07:32 I am Grace Gee, and this has been a Moment of News.
00:07:38 --> 00:07:44 All right. Thank you, Grace, for that moment of news. And now it is time for
00:07:44 --> 00:07:46 my guest, Kelly Cervantes.
00:07:47 --> 00:07:51 Kelly Cervantes is an award-winning writer, speaker, and advocate best known
00:07:51 --> 00:07:53 for her blog, Inch Stones,
00:07:53 --> 00:07:59 and her USA Today bestselling book, Normal Broken, the grief companion for when
00:07:59 --> 00:08:03 it's time to heal, but you're not sure you want to.
00:08:03 --> 00:08:07 She has been published in the Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan,
00:08:07 --> 00:08:13 and Fortune, as well as featured by MSNBC, New York Times, and CNN.
00:08:14 --> 00:08:19 She sits on the boards of Cure Epilepsy and the Undiagnosed Diseases Network
00:08:19 --> 00:08:24 Foundation and hosts Cure Epilepsy's podcast, Seizing Life.
00:08:25 --> 00:08:29 Born and raised in the Midwest, Kelly now resides in Maplewood,
00:08:29 --> 00:08:30 New Jersey, with her family.
00:08:31 --> 00:08:39 Her new book is The Luckiest, a memoir of love, loss, and motherhood, and the pursuit of self.
00:08:39 --> 00:08:44 And we're going to be diving into that new book during the interview.
00:08:44 --> 00:08:48 So ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor and privilege to have as a
00:08:48 --> 00:08:52 guest on this podcast, Kelly Cervantes.
00:09:03 --> 00:09:06 All right. Kelly Cervantes, how you doing, ma'am? You doing good?
00:09:07 --> 00:09:11 I am doing well, Eric. Thank you for having me. Well, I'm honored to have you.
00:09:12 --> 00:09:18 It's not often that I get an author to come on that makes me cry.
00:09:20 --> 00:09:26 And, you know, I told Lissa, shout out to Lissa Warren, who set this up.
00:09:26 --> 00:09:31 You know, she tries to get me people that deal with nonfiction,
00:09:31 --> 00:09:33 and she knows this is a political show.
00:09:34 --> 00:09:41 And, you know, it's just like the stories that I've been very fortunate to get
00:09:41 --> 00:09:44 from her and being able to read the books.
00:09:45 --> 00:09:52 It's really been an honor and a treat. But I never had a book that really hit
00:09:52 --> 00:09:55 a chord with me like your book did.
00:09:55 --> 00:10:02 And I have to say that, you know, because the book is called The Luckiest and
00:10:02 --> 00:10:03 it's been out for a while.
00:10:04 --> 00:10:09 But I wanted to talk about that. And since it's a political show,
00:10:09 --> 00:10:11 I'll dive into some political stuff.
00:10:11 --> 00:10:16 It won't be too heavy, but I think you'll have some input in that.
00:10:16 --> 00:10:21 But I really wanted you to come on to talk about your story.
00:10:21 --> 00:10:27 So how I normally do this thing is that I have a couple of icebreakers.
00:10:27 --> 00:10:31 The first one is a quote. And then the second one is a game,
00:10:32 --> 00:10:34 I guess, or a challenge called 20 questions.
00:10:35 --> 00:10:43 So let's do the quote first. You know shit is bad when people start telling you how strong you are.
00:10:46 --> 00:10:52 That quote means to me that, God, I live that on the daily.
00:10:52 --> 00:10:56 I think people—so funny, I was actually talking to a friend about this,
00:10:56 --> 00:11:00 that I think people, when they tell you, oh my goodness, you're so strong,
00:11:00 --> 00:11:03 or your kid is so strong, or they're like, they think it's a compliment—,
00:11:04 --> 00:11:09 But I think what the person hears is, wow, your life is really shitty or,
00:11:09 --> 00:11:14 you know, thanks for this compliment of being so strong, but I didn't choose this.
00:11:14 --> 00:11:18 I didn't, I didn't, I don't know that I had a choice in the matter.
00:11:19 --> 00:11:23 It's, it's a, it's one of those well-intentioned compliments that people give
00:11:23 --> 00:11:24 when they don't know what else to say.
00:11:24 --> 00:11:30 And it, I think over time, it, it doesn't mean what people think it means.
00:11:31 --> 00:11:36 I got you. All right. So now with the 20 questions, I need you to give me a
00:11:36 --> 00:11:37 number between one and 20.
00:11:38 --> 00:11:44 11. All right. Where do you go to check a fact that you see, hear, or read?
00:11:46 --> 00:11:51 Oh i go to npr
00:11:51 --> 00:11:54 i go to the new
00:11:54 --> 00:11:58 york times i go to google and
00:11:58 --> 00:12:03 but when i go to google i'm usually checking two or three websites two or three
00:12:03 --> 00:12:07 different pages to try and make sure that what i'm reading is accurate okay
00:12:07 --> 00:12:15 what led you to write this book um i think I think, like many authors,
00:12:16 --> 00:12:20 this book needed to be written.
00:12:20 --> 00:12:24 I don't know that I had a choice. I think it had to come out of me.
00:12:24 --> 00:12:29 And actually, there have been several versions. I have rewritten this book several times over.
00:12:29 --> 00:12:33 And the first version of this book was written, actually, I thought that it
00:12:33 --> 00:12:36 was written for public consumption, but it wasn't. That book was written for me.
00:12:37 --> 00:12:44 After my daughter Adelaide passed away, I was terrified of forgetting pieces of her.
00:12:45 --> 00:12:50 And I know that people will say that she's your daughter, you could never forget, but you do.
00:12:50 --> 00:12:54 No matter what, time is a memory, Thief, and memories fade.
00:12:54 --> 00:13:00 And I was so terrified that I sat down and I wrote essentially the story of
00:13:00 --> 00:13:02 her life through my eyes.
00:13:02 --> 00:13:05 And that was part
00:13:05 --> 00:13:10 of my healing journey because i believe
00:13:10 --> 00:13:14 that one of the best ways for us to heal through
00:13:14 --> 00:13:19 our losses is to remember them actually president joe biden regardless of how
00:13:19 --> 00:13:24 you feel about his politics is a man who knows loss he lost his infant daughter
00:13:24 --> 00:13:28 and a wife in a car accident and then a grown son right to breast cancer or
00:13:28 --> 00:13:33 to brain cancer and so he said the night before he was inaugurated,
00:13:33 --> 00:13:36 that he was giving a COVID-19 memorial, he was leading over it,
00:13:36 --> 00:13:39 and he said, to heal, we must remember.
00:13:40 --> 00:13:46 And those words struck me so much because up to that point, I had thought that
00:13:46 --> 00:13:48 healing meant that we had to let go and move on.
00:13:48 --> 00:13:52 And here was a man who had lost so much, and he was saying, no,
00:13:52 --> 00:13:53 to heal we must remember.
00:13:53 --> 00:13:57 We remember our loved ones. We remember everything about them,
00:13:57 --> 00:14:00 and then we learn how to move forward with their memory.
00:14:00 --> 00:14:03 And that, to me, was so pivotal.
00:14:04 --> 00:14:08 And so that was sort of the first iteration of the book. It was me healing through remembering.
00:14:08 --> 00:14:11 And then as time went on,
00:14:12 --> 00:14:15 I realized that instead of telling my daughter's story,
00:14:16 --> 00:14:22 I wanted to tell my story because I look at my life and I could break it down
00:14:22 --> 00:14:29 into so many different ways from the different places that I've lived to the Midwest,
00:14:29 --> 00:14:33 the East Coast, back to the Midwest, times and little blips in L.A.
00:14:34 --> 00:14:38 Or I could break it down to the different careers I've had.
00:14:38 --> 00:14:43 I am 43 years old and I am on my fourth career. And they are all vastly different.
00:14:44 --> 00:14:48 You wouldn't think that they overlap, but that's the interesting pieces that they all do.
00:14:49 --> 00:14:53 Or I could break it down to the different makeups of what my family has looked like.
00:14:53 --> 00:14:59 And I came across a quote from the poet Maggie Smith. And she said,
00:14:59 --> 00:15:03 we are all nesting dolls carrying the previous versions of ourselves inside of us.
00:15:04 --> 00:15:12 And that struck me as so poignant and so true as I looked at this different makeup of my life.
00:15:12 --> 00:15:17 And so I used that quote as the structure to look at my life and all of these
00:15:17 --> 00:15:20 different layers and whether they were.
00:15:21 --> 00:15:29 Gut-wrenching or joyous or whatever they added to me, whatever this layer added.
00:15:29 --> 00:15:34 I don't get to be the person that I am today without all of those layers before.
00:15:34 --> 00:15:40 And the fact of the matter is I'm pretty proud of the person that I am today.
00:15:40 --> 00:15:44 And the life that I have right now is actually really beautiful.
00:15:44 --> 00:15:47 And there's a hundred things I wish I could change, not least
00:15:47 --> 00:15:50 of which is that my daughter was still alive but i don't
00:15:50 --> 00:15:54 get this life i don't get to be who i am without experiencing
00:15:54 --> 00:15:58 all of that and i i
00:15:58 --> 00:16:03 wanted to get that point across to people that no matter what you have experienced
00:16:03 --> 00:16:08 in your life no matter where you are currently we are constantly growing we
00:16:08 --> 00:16:13 are constantly adding new layers and becoming this next beautifully painted
00:16:13 --> 00:16:16 doll in the series of our lives Yeah.
00:16:17 --> 00:16:23 And that's such a great answer because that was, you put the other two quotes
00:16:23 --> 00:16:26 I was debating about using in that answer.
00:16:28 --> 00:16:34 How has your early acceptance of being different shaped your life?
00:16:35 --> 00:16:43 Yeah. So I grew up in very conservative, white Midwest.
00:16:45 --> 00:16:50 And because my parents were not from, I grew up in Nebraska,
00:16:51 --> 00:16:55 my parents weren't from Nebraska, they had transferred there for my dad's job.
00:16:55 --> 00:17:00 So we would travel around the country to see family and, you know,
00:17:00 --> 00:17:10 getting in our, you know, 1992 Chevy minivan and driving across the country
00:17:10 --> 00:17:13 to Philadelphia and up to Maine and everything was road trips.
00:17:14 --> 00:17:18 And so we got to see so much of the country. And I realized standing in New
00:17:18 --> 00:17:24 York that like there were whole swaths of this country that weren't like where I was growing up.
00:17:25 --> 00:17:33 And I always, I never felt like I fit in and I, in, in Nebraska.
00:17:33 --> 00:17:36 And I think that a lot of kids feel that way.
00:17:37 --> 00:17:39 But I write in the book that it wasn't just that I felt different.
00:17:39 --> 00:17:46 I also felt like I needed to be different, like I needed to push back against
00:17:46 --> 00:17:51 these norms, that I didn't want to be a part of the status quo.
00:17:51 --> 00:17:56 And I think that part of that is because I knew there was this wider world out
00:17:56 --> 00:18:00 there, that there were all of these other cultures, that there was so much more
00:18:00 --> 00:18:06 than this tiny microcosm of a culture that I was experiencing.
00:18:06 --> 00:18:10 And I wanted to
00:18:10 --> 00:18:13 see that and I wanted to experience it and so I
00:18:13 --> 00:18:19 the first opportunity I had when I turned 18 and was looking at colleges I I
00:18:19 --> 00:18:27 looked at both coasts because I I wanted to go somewhere where everyone was
00:18:27 --> 00:18:32 different where I wasn't just the one that felt different in this whitewashed society,
00:18:33 --> 00:18:38 I wanted to be among a ton of people who were all different,
00:18:38 --> 00:18:42 who were, you know, come from different religions and different cultures and
00:18:42 --> 00:18:43 different racial backgrounds.
00:18:43 --> 00:18:51 And so that I could experience and learn from that. And we don't learn from
00:18:51 --> 00:18:52 people who are the same as us.
00:18:52 --> 00:18:55 We learn from people who are different from us.
00:18:55 --> 00:18:59 Yeah. So what does the book's title mean to you?
00:18:59 --> 00:19:04 Hmm, the luckiest. I think that it's certainly ironic, right?
00:19:05 --> 00:19:08 I don't think that many people would read the book and look at my life or look
00:19:08 --> 00:19:12 at anyone who has lost a child and be like, that person is the luckiest.
00:19:12 --> 00:19:14 And I don't think that I am.
00:19:14 --> 00:19:18 But I also don't believe that I'm the unluckiest.
00:19:19 --> 00:19:29 I, luck is a concept that I have battled and struggled and thought over for years because I,
00:19:29 --> 00:19:36 even as a child, I was very aware that my upbringing was safe,
00:19:36 --> 00:19:40 it was sheltered, my parents were married, they loved each other.
00:19:40 --> 00:19:47 I never went without, you know, many people would look at my childhood and think that it was lucky.
00:19:47 --> 00:19:52 And I acknowledge that and I own that.
00:19:52 --> 00:19:57 But then you look at a lot of my adulthood and it runs in contrast to that because
00:19:57 --> 00:20:01 of decisions that I made to go into places that were not as safe and to make
00:20:01 --> 00:20:02 decisions that aren't as safe,
00:20:02 --> 00:20:08 but that are more exciting and interesting and that I would learn from.
00:20:08 --> 00:20:10 We learn from challenge.
00:20:10 --> 00:20:15 We learn from not taking the safe road.
00:20:15 --> 00:20:22 And so when do we correlate lucky with safe, with not taking risk?
00:20:22 --> 00:20:30 And I really enjoyed writing about that and looking at the ways that luck shows
00:20:30 --> 00:20:33 up in my life or the perception of luck, right?
00:20:33 --> 00:20:37 Because luck is all about perception. It's what we show other people about our
00:20:37 --> 00:20:44 lives, be it through Instagram squares, or it is what people perceive of us.
00:20:44 --> 00:20:49 There's a scene in the book where my husband played Alexander Hamilton in the
00:20:49 --> 00:20:53 Chicago and Broadway productions for close to eight years, and he's like.
00:20:54 --> 00:20:57 Broadway has just reopened after the pandemic, and Miguel is on stage,
00:20:57 --> 00:21:02 and I'm sitting next to this young woman who is a musical theater student,
00:21:02 --> 00:21:05 and she's like, oh my goodness, she realizes that Miguel is my husband,
00:21:05 --> 00:21:08 and she's like, you are so lucky.
00:21:08 --> 00:21:12 I can't, you know, this light, this is, and she sees my life as lucky.
00:21:12 --> 00:21:16 And all I can think in my head is my daughter died a year and a half ago.
00:21:17 --> 00:21:20 There's nothing lucky about my life, but what she was seeing,
00:21:20 --> 00:21:23 the, the, what she was able to perceive was lucky.
00:21:25 --> 00:21:30 At the end of the day, I, I am not the luckiest,
00:21:30 --> 00:21:33 but I do, but there are certain aspects of my life where I do
00:21:33 --> 00:21:36 consider myself incredibly lucky and one of those
00:21:36 --> 00:21:39 is to have been the mother to all
00:21:39 --> 00:21:43 of my children but especially to Adelaide my daughter
00:21:43 --> 00:21:48 who passed away because I and and I know that that maybe sounds crazy because
00:21:48 --> 00:21:53 what we experienced and what we went through and all of the pain and all of
00:21:53 --> 00:21:57 the heartache but I learned more through the four years of being her mother
00:21:57 --> 00:22:01 than I have through the other year decades of my life.
00:22:02 --> 00:22:06 And I feel so fortunate that I got to know her and that I got to love her.
00:22:06 --> 00:22:11 And I feel sorry for people who didn't. And there is just something so,
00:22:12 --> 00:22:16 I will never have a job in my life that is more fulfilling than having been her mother.
00:22:17 --> 00:22:20 And for that, I absolutely feel like I'm the luckiest person in the world.
00:22:21 --> 00:22:27 Let's dig into that a little more. Explain the significance of the parable of
00:22:27 --> 00:22:30 the farmer and the horse. Yes.
00:22:31 --> 00:22:33 Funny. So I, I had sort of.
00:22:34 --> 00:22:38 I've loved this parable for a long time. And then anyone who has a young child
00:22:38 --> 00:22:45 that has watched Bluey will have also become familiar with this old Chinese parable.
00:22:45 --> 00:22:54 But it's this idea that, so a farmer purchases a horse and it runs off.
00:22:54 --> 00:22:58 And his neighbor says, oh my goodness, that is so unlucky that this horse ran
00:22:58 --> 00:23:03 off. And the farmer says, well, you know, maybe, let's see.
00:23:03 --> 00:23:06 And then the horse comes back and it brings with it another horse with it.
00:23:06 --> 00:23:08 And the neighbor is like, oh, my goodness, how lucky.
00:23:08 --> 00:23:14 And the farmer says, well, we'll see. And then his son gets on the horse that
00:23:14 --> 00:23:18 the other horse brought back and he breaks his leg on this horse.
00:23:18 --> 00:23:20 And the farmer is like, oh, my goodness, that's so unlucky.
00:23:21 --> 00:23:27 And then there's a draft for all of the young men to go fight in a war.
00:23:27 --> 00:23:32 And the farmer's son can't go because of his broken leg and the neighbor is
00:23:32 --> 00:23:33 like, oh my goodness, how lucky.
00:23:33 --> 00:23:39 And so this idea that you have no idea what's around the corner.
00:23:39 --> 00:23:47 So I see that in my careers. I was an actress for the first five years I was
00:23:47 --> 00:23:51 in New York City and it was grueling and it was hard and it was...
00:23:52 --> 00:23:56 It did so much damage to my mental health to the point where eventually,
00:23:57 --> 00:24:02 when I met my husband and we decided to start a family, I chose to walk away
00:24:02 --> 00:24:05 from that and had the opportunity to work in restaurants.
00:24:06 --> 00:24:11 And, you know, at the time, I thought, how unlucky that I didn't get to make
00:24:11 --> 00:24:14 it big, that I wasn't sitting across from David Letterman or Jay Leno being
00:24:14 --> 00:24:17 able to talk about my next movie.
00:24:17 --> 00:24:22 But then I go into restaurants and I realize that all of that experience of
00:24:22 --> 00:24:29 performing and listening as an actor translates very well to selling events
00:24:29 --> 00:24:31 for the event space in this restaurant.
00:24:31 --> 00:24:38 My father was like, oh, thank goodness, you're finally using your communications degree in restaurants.
00:24:38 --> 00:24:41 And I was like, no, dad, it's all of the acting classes I paid for that I'm
00:24:41 --> 00:24:46 actually using in sales to connect and to sell these events.
00:24:46 --> 00:24:55 And so when you hear that parable and you can look at your life and see how
00:24:55 --> 00:25:00 everything in that moment may seem unfortunate,
00:25:00 --> 00:25:02 but there's something else coming around the bend,
00:25:02 --> 00:25:06 you are going to need those skills, you are going to need that transition.
00:25:06 --> 00:25:11 And as I have just dove in headfirst into the world of grief,
00:25:12 --> 00:25:18 I've realized that so much of grief is actually resistance to change.
00:25:18 --> 00:25:23 We are resisting the change that our loss is inflicting upon our lives.
00:25:23 --> 00:25:28 And so in addition to this idea of to heal we must remember,
00:25:28 --> 00:25:31 we also have to learn how to accept our new normals how
00:25:31 --> 00:25:35 to accept the change that has happened
00:25:35 --> 00:25:39 in our lives and all of that is part of that healing process and the ability
00:25:39 --> 00:25:43 to move forward yeah what is
00:25:43 --> 00:25:52 the line asteroids i learned are not fairly rationed mean so in my naivety.
00:25:52 --> 00:25:57 My husband and I, after my son Jackson was born, we got pregnant again with another little boy.
00:25:57 --> 00:26:01 It was discovered at his 20-week ultrasound that he was not going to survive.
00:26:04 --> 00:26:09 Essentially, he had no heart. His heart was taking up his entire chest cavity, and he had no lungs.
00:26:09 --> 00:26:13 He was never going to survive outside of my womb. And...
00:26:14 --> 00:26:18 We made the excruciating choice to terminate.
00:26:18 --> 00:26:28 And I thought that that was my life's trauma, that this was the asteroid,
00:26:28 --> 00:26:31 and now everything else was going to be okay.
00:26:31 --> 00:26:35 I mean, looking back on that now and those thoughts going through my head,
00:26:36 --> 00:26:42 it's just like, it sounds crazy and so privileged and just so incredibly naive.
00:26:42 --> 00:26:44 But I really thought that.
00:26:44 --> 00:26:48 I thought that this was my life's moment, my life's tragedy.
00:26:48 --> 00:26:53 And because of that, when my daughter started to not meet milestones and started
00:26:53 --> 00:26:58 having trouble, I lived in denial because she had to be healthy.
00:26:58 --> 00:27:02 She had to be okay because our son Elvis wasn't.
00:27:02 --> 00:27:09 And as her health continued to deteriorate, I realized that those asteroids,
00:27:09 --> 00:27:14 these flaming rocks that crash into the landscape of our lives,
00:27:15 --> 00:27:19 that completely alter the way that it looks, and you have to now navigate this
00:27:19 --> 00:27:23 new terrain, that these asteroids are not fairly rationed.
00:27:23 --> 00:27:28 And there are certain people who are going to experience dozens of asteroids
00:27:28 --> 00:27:36 in their lifetime. And there are some people who may only have one or two, and maybe that's luck.
00:27:36 --> 00:27:41 Maybe that's the true luck is the less asteroids you have.
00:27:42 --> 00:27:47 But then again, I don't know, because I think you become a stronger,
00:27:47 --> 00:27:52 more interesting, more compassionate person the more asteroids that you survive. Yeah.
00:27:53 --> 00:27:57 So talk about the work that you're doing with Cure Epilepsy.
00:27:58 --> 00:28:06 Yes. So in terms of the political nature of your show, I truly believe that
00:28:06 --> 00:28:10 everything in life is politics. I don't think that we get to separate the two out.
00:28:10 --> 00:28:17 And I experienced that with my son Elvis and how fortunate I was that I was
00:28:17 --> 00:28:20 able to make the choice that I was in the state that I lived in.
00:28:20 --> 00:28:22 And I understand that's not the choice that everyone would make,
00:28:22 --> 00:28:25 but it's the choice that my husband and I made with our doctors.
00:28:25 --> 00:28:30 And I'm so grateful that that was a choice. And so I started advocating for
00:28:30 --> 00:28:32 a woman's right to choose after that.
00:28:32 --> 00:28:40 And then come to my daughter having her first seizure and being diagnosed with epilepsy. And,
00:28:41 --> 00:28:46 going to the doctor and having them just not be able to tell me why she was
00:28:46 --> 00:28:52 having seizures or what medication was going to control them or how they could stop them.
00:28:52 --> 00:28:57 And there was, I had always lived in this world where I thought that like modern
00:28:57 --> 00:29:00 medicine was so evolved that we had all of these answers.
00:29:00 --> 00:29:06 And now I was in, in the world of neurology, there are so few answers.
00:29:07 --> 00:29:09 There's so many more questions than there are answers.
00:29:09 --> 00:29:12 And it was excruciatingly frustrating.
00:29:15 --> 00:29:18 Around the same time that Adelaide was diagnosed with epilepsy,
00:29:18 --> 00:29:25 Miguel landed Hamilton and our family moved from New Jersey to Chicago for the show.
00:29:25 --> 00:29:30 And it just so happens that there was this organization in Chicago called Cure Epilepsy.
00:29:30 --> 00:29:37 It was started by another mom, Susan Axelrod, married to the political professional
00:29:37 --> 00:29:42 guru, David Axelrod of the Obama administration.
00:29:42 --> 00:29:49 And she was frustrated with everyone talking about how to live well with epilepsy.
00:29:49 --> 00:29:53 And she wanted the community to start thinking about how to cure epilepsy.
00:29:53 --> 00:30:01 And she started this organization that is now in its third decade and has raised
00:30:01 --> 00:30:10 so much money for epilepsy research and trying to find the whys behind it all,
00:30:10 --> 00:30:13 trying to find cures, trying to push science forward.
00:30:13 --> 00:30:18 And, you know, science didn't catch up to my daughter, but this is an organization.
00:30:18 --> 00:30:24 I am so incredibly passionate about the importance of research,
00:30:24 --> 00:30:27 medical research, especially, and as scientists.
00:30:28 --> 00:30:32 We look at the current administration and the cuts and the slashes to research
00:30:32 --> 00:30:39 both, you know, at the NIH and across the board with the university research as well.
00:30:39 --> 00:30:48 It's terrifying to me because this is going to have implications beyond just epilepsy research.
00:30:48 --> 00:30:53 We are actually witnessing a brain drain of professors and researchers leaving
00:30:53 --> 00:30:57 the United States to go overseas where their research can be funded.
00:30:57 --> 00:31:02 And so it's one of the reasons I'm incredibly proud to be a part of Cure Epilepsy.
00:31:03 --> 00:31:06 I sit on their board and I host a podcast for them called Seizing Life,
00:31:06 --> 00:31:10 because the organization is working right now actually through a campaign to
00:31:10 --> 00:31:14 raise money to try and help fill these holes in some of these researchers'
00:31:15 --> 00:31:21 labs so that we can keep them stateside, so that we can keep this research going.
00:31:21 --> 00:31:28 And I witnessed the difference in care firsthand last year.
00:31:28 --> 00:31:32 I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and I'm fine now. I am cancer-free.
00:31:33 --> 00:31:38 But what a miracle of medical research that is, because I was diagnosed in January
00:31:38 --> 00:31:43 of 2025, and I was cancer-free by September of 2025.
00:31:43 --> 00:31:50 And that is due to breast cancer being one of the most well-researched diseases in the world.
00:31:51 --> 00:31:56 That is because hundreds of thousands of women have walked and raised money
00:31:56 --> 00:32:01 and I got to go into a doctor's office and they said, this is the kind of cancer
00:32:01 --> 00:32:03 you have. This is how we're going to treat it.
00:32:03 --> 00:32:07 This is the prognosis and this is the timeline and that is because of medical research.
00:32:08 --> 00:32:13 And so I am grateful to be sitting here with my life cancer-free on the other
00:32:13 --> 00:32:15 side of this in less than one year.
00:32:15 --> 00:32:19 And that is my goal for, it should be the goal across the board.
00:32:20 --> 00:32:26 All right. Since you brought up politics, based on your experiences,
00:32:26 --> 00:32:33 what public policy changes would you like to see with adoption and health care?
00:32:33 --> 00:32:36 Because, you know, I'm trying to be sensitive on time.
00:32:36 --> 00:32:41 And I know that later on in the book, you become an adoptive parent.
00:32:42 --> 00:32:48 Yeah. And you talk about the, not so much the challenge,
00:32:48 --> 00:32:55 but the legal challenge, but the mental aspect and that scene where you got
00:32:55 --> 00:33:00 like the adults are at the top of the conference table discussing the terms
00:33:00 --> 00:33:02 and the kids are under the table playing.
00:33:02 --> 00:33:08 And I was like, wow, that sounds straight out of a movie, you know,
00:33:08 --> 00:33:11 but it's like, but that's a reality that people face.
00:33:11 --> 00:33:17 So, and I kind of have a soft spot with adoption because I served on a board
00:33:17 --> 00:33:21 dealing with adoption in Mississippi for almost a decade.
00:33:21 --> 00:33:26 I actually got to be chair for a minute. So that's an issue that's very, very sensitive to me.
00:33:26 --> 00:33:33 So if you, if, you know, what would you advocate for as far as policy changes
00:33:33 --> 00:33:34 with adoption and health care?
00:33:36 --> 00:33:40 I in regards to adoption I I
00:33:40 --> 00:33:45 think it's just so misunderstood I think that there needs to be a whole um,
00:33:46 --> 00:33:50 public awareness campaign almost to understand
00:33:50 --> 00:33:53 that adoption is like
00:33:53 --> 00:33:56 it is a beautiful thing there is no
00:33:56 --> 00:34:00 question about it that it can be this beautiful thing but that beautiful thing
00:34:00 --> 00:34:09 is born out of a family that has broken apart and i we have to understand that
00:34:09 --> 00:34:13 there is zero adoption that doesn't contain trauma.
00:34:14 --> 00:34:23 Even if it is from infancy, there is still trauma that is going to be associated with that.
00:34:23 --> 00:34:32 And I look at my daughter's case, and I am so grateful that I get to be her mother.
00:34:32 --> 00:34:35 I love her immensely, but
00:34:35 --> 00:34:39 it is impossible for me not to see
00:34:39 --> 00:34:42 that had her mother had the resources that
00:34:42 --> 00:34:46 she needed that she that
00:34:46 --> 00:34:50 that family couldn't have been kept together and and
00:34:50 --> 00:35:00 it is i think that so much of adoption policy exists far way before adoption
00:35:00 --> 00:35:04 or child protective services ever become a part of the conversation but far
00:35:04 --> 00:35:06 before foster care is involved,
00:35:06 --> 00:35:11 far before the courts are involved, if we can support young mothers.
00:35:12 --> 00:35:18 Mothers who are falling below the poverty line, if we can support these women
00:35:18 --> 00:35:21 in the way with child care,
00:35:21 --> 00:35:28 with proper health care, then there will be less need for foster care services for adoption.
00:35:28 --> 00:35:31 We can support those families and keep them together.
00:35:31 --> 00:35:39 And that is where I would love to see so much more energy be placed than in
00:35:39 --> 00:35:42 the family court systems.
00:35:42 --> 00:35:46 And, you know, not to say that children shouldn't be adopted,
00:35:47 --> 00:35:49 but the system is broken.
00:35:50 --> 00:35:53 Yeah. So talk a little bit about health care, because there's a scene.
00:35:57 --> 00:36:02 But there is this one particular moment where you're trying to get medication
00:36:02 --> 00:36:09 for Adelaide and you got to go through all of these hoops and all that, you know,
00:36:10 --> 00:36:15 and the way that you talk about it as far as like, you know,
00:36:15 --> 00:36:18 you were feeling guilty because you had some privilege.
00:36:18 --> 00:36:22 So you wanted to take advantage of it, but it's like you were cognizant of the fact.
00:36:23 --> 00:36:28 I don't know if it was afterthought or during when you talk about people don't
00:36:28 --> 00:36:31 have that privilege to even take this first step that I'm doing.
00:36:31 --> 00:36:33 And then you find out you've got another hope.
00:36:34 --> 00:36:38 So how would you deal with that at a health care standpoint?
00:36:38 --> 00:36:41 I mean, our entire health care system needs to be overhauled,
00:36:41 --> 00:36:46 in my opinion. I do not think that any aspect of our health care system should
00:36:46 --> 00:36:48 be a publicly traded commodity.
00:36:48 --> 00:36:54 Everything should, like that piece of it alone is like shocking to me that there
00:36:54 --> 00:37:01 are shareholders involved in people's health and like it is bonkers to me.
00:37:03 --> 00:37:09 In this particular scenario, and I think it, my daughter needed a medication,
00:37:10 --> 00:37:16 and the health insurance company decided that, who is not a doctor,
00:37:17 --> 00:37:20 her health insurance company decided that she did not need the medication.
00:37:20 --> 00:37:29 Her seizures had gotten so bad at this point i mean they were excruciating to watch,
00:37:29 --> 00:37:34 her life was in danger she would she had no quality of life they were terrible
00:37:34 --> 00:37:38 but the health insurance the one we had gone through all of these different
00:37:38 --> 00:37:42 medications and the health insurance company said no we're not going to pay
00:37:42 --> 00:37:45 for this medication why don't you try one of these other medications that we had already tried.
00:37:46 --> 00:37:49 The health insurance company didn't want to pay for that medication because
00:37:49 --> 00:37:54 it was, the treatment was going to be several hundred thousand dollars.
00:37:54 --> 00:37:58 I get why they didn't want to pay for it. It was ludicrously expensive for a
00:37:58 --> 00:38:03 medicine that has been around for nearly a hundred years. Like, it's stupid.
00:38:04 --> 00:38:07 But the pharmaceutical companies are allowed to charge that.
00:38:07 --> 00:38:12 And so, because they have, because they have shareholders that they have to
00:38:12 --> 00:38:17 report to. The health insurance companies have shareholders that they have to report to.
00:38:17 --> 00:38:24 And so we're in a battle between the health insurance company and the pharmaceutical
00:38:24 --> 00:38:28 company. And I happen to have a connection to the pharmaceutical company because
00:38:28 --> 00:38:30 of my work with Cure Epilepsy.
00:38:30 --> 00:38:33 Meanwhile, Adelaide's doctor is fighting with the health insurance company,
00:38:33 --> 00:38:36 and he has hundreds of other patients.
00:38:36 --> 00:38:44 Like, he doesn't have the time to be arguing as one of the top pediatric neurologists
00:38:44 --> 00:38:47 in the country, if not the world, with a health insurance company.
00:38:48 --> 00:38:56 And over and over again, I had to use our connections that we had through being
00:38:56 --> 00:38:59 advocates, which was only because my husband was Hamilton.
00:38:59 --> 00:39:04 Which, you know, we had, you know, in the end, I'm threatening the pharmaceutical
00:39:04 --> 00:39:07 company to take our story public if they don't give us this medication.
00:39:08 --> 00:39:13 And after we have already gone through all of these hoops, and it's been nearly
00:39:13 --> 00:39:16 a week now that we're fighting for this medication, she's been having these
00:39:16 --> 00:39:19 terrible seizures. And we're.
00:39:20 --> 00:39:27 It took everything, every piece of my consciousness and my soul, and I was aware,
00:39:27 --> 00:39:32 I was wildly aware through the whole thing, that not only were we at this distinct
00:39:32 --> 00:39:41 advantage because I had direct access to these people, but we had money.
00:39:41 --> 00:39:43 I spoke English as a first language.
00:39:44 --> 00:39:50 All of these things that allowed me an advantage. And it wasn't just getting
00:39:50 --> 00:39:52 medications. It was getting doctor's appointments.
00:39:52 --> 00:39:56 It wasn't even that. It was getting the respect from the doctors in the room
00:39:56 --> 00:40:04 because I didn't have to, because I knew English, because my skin is white.
00:40:04 --> 00:40:08 All of these things that just automatically, they're this cognitive bias that
00:40:08 --> 00:40:10 I'm going to be listened to.
00:40:10 --> 00:40:13 And then I learned quickly that if I spoke the doctor's language,
00:40:13 --> 00:40:16 if I said secretions instead of drool,
00:40:17 --> 00:40:23 these little changes in my vocabulary, if I talked the way that the doctors
00:40:23 --> 00:40:26 talked, then they respected me that much more and listened to me.
00:40:26 --> 00:40:31 And it just happened over and over and over again, these glaring,
00:40:31 --> 00:40:36 glaring signs of the privilege that I had.
00:40:37 --> 00:40:46 And it is, I feel and worry so much about all of these other families out there
00:40:46 --> 00:40:51 that can't get the appointment, who aren't listened to in the doctor's office.
00:40:51 --> 00:40:58 And I don't know how we fix that without a complete and total overhaul of our health care system.
00:40:59 --> 00:41:02 So a couple more questions I need to ask you.
00:41:03 --> 00:41:06 What does it mean to have the fight?
00:41:08 --> 00:41:13 So I'm incredibly lucky, I'll say it, to have a dear friend of mine from high school.
00:41:15 --> 00:41:19 She unfortunately has a rare disease, and her mother had it too,
00:41:19 --> 00:41:20 and her mother passed away from
00:41:20 --> 00:41:24 it the same week that Adelaide was hospitalized with her first seizure.
00:41:26 --> 00:41:28 And I was close with her mother.
00:41:31 --> 00:41:33 Courtney continues to be one of my best friends in the world.
00:41:33 --> 00:41:39 And I had no experience with the American health care system,
00:41:40 --> 00:41:43 really, outside of like giving birth and having to go to the doctor's office
00:41:43 --> 00:41:45 for flu shots or whatever.
00:41:46 --> 00:41:52 I was very inexperienced. And so when Adelaide is now in and out of the hospital,
00:41:52 --> 00:41:58 and I'm trying to navigate all of her different doctors with these different
00:41:58 --> 00:42:00 specialties, and I was so overwhelmed.
00:42:01 --> 00:42:06 And Courtney told me, that was actually her mother, in an email that she sent
00:42:06 --> 00:42:10 me, just days before she died. She was in the hospital. She was sick.
00:42:10 --> 00:42:14 Days before she died, Courtney's mother sent me an email. and she essentially
00:42:14 --> 00:42:20 said that you know your daughter best and if the doctors are saying something
00:42:20 --> 00:42:28 that you don't agree with have the fight and it means to me to trust your instinct,
00:42:29 --> 00:42:34 my aunt she told me she was like there's a reason that they say that doctors
00:42:34 --> 00:42:38 are practicing medicine medicine is a practice they are constantly learning
00:42:38 --> 00:42:40 they are constantly growing they do not know everything.
00:42:41 --> 00:42:48 And not to say that I know more than someone with an MD or a DO or a PhD, but.
00:42:49 --> 00:42:53 I know my body best. And out of anyone, I knew my daughter best.
00:42:54 --> 00:42:57 And so we have to have the fight. We have to advocate for them.
00:42:57 --> 00:43:02 And if something doesn't feel right, if it doesn't sit right, ask the questions.
00:43:03 --> 00:43:08 Stand up. And if that doctor isn't answering them, find another doctor.
00:43:08 --> 00:43:12 I am a huge proponent of second, third, fourth opinions.
00:43:12 --> 00:43:18 I am still friends with Adelaide's neurologist from Chicago.
00:43:18 --> 00:43:20 We're still dear friends.
00:43:20 --> 00:43:24 But even though I respected him and he was amazing, I still took her for second,
00:43:25 --> 00:43:28 third, fourth opinions to doctors across the country because maybe someone else
00:43:28 --> 00:43:31 had seen something that he hadn't.
00:43:31 --> 00:43:35 Maybe they had read something that he hadn't. And it wasn't out of disrespect for him.
00:43:35 --> 00:43:40 It was because I wanted what was best for my daughter.
00:43:40 --> 00:43:44 And the right doctors will understand that.
00:43:44 --> 00:43:50 And so have the fight means compile the best team. It means ask all of the questions.
00:43:51 --> 00:43:54 It means advocate for yourself and for others.
00:43:55 --> 00:44:00 Yeah, we don't have the time, but I went through a similar experience with my
00:44:00 --> 00:44:03 child where I grew up with asthma.
00:44:04 --> 00:44:08 And it was a weird kind of asthma, like a childhood asthma is like Once you
00:44:08 --> 00:44:10 get puberty, it's like it goes away.
00:44:11 --> 00:44:16 I still don't know much about that. My brother had the same.
00:44:17 --> 00:44:20 I have asthma and I'm still asthmatic, but my brothers went away.
00:44:21 --> 00:44:25 Yeah. And so, you know, my child was going through the same thing and the doctor
00:44:25 --> 00:44:29 kept trying to say, oh, well, it's just bronchitis and all that stuff.
00:44:29 --> 00:44:34 And I just, I guess I had to fight because I knew from the moment he was,
00:44:34 --> 00:44:37 you know, my child was born that it was like.
00:44:38 --> 00:44:43 I could hear the wheezing, right? Yeah. So I knew, and I just kept dealing with
00:44:43 --> 00:44:48 it, and finally I got a doctor, and, you know, the rest is history,
00:44:48 --> 00:44:52 and turned out to be an astounding young human being.
00:44:53 --> 00:44:58 So I can relate to that. But let me go ahead and close it out with these last two questions.
00:44:58 --> 00:45:04 What do you want readers to take away from this book? And I want them to take
00:45:04 --> 00:45:09 away that we are, that there is not one coming of age.
00:45:10 --> 00:45:16 That I think we so often we think of coming of age as like when we're teenagers
00:45:16 --> 00:45:19 and then we grow into our adult selves and then we are ourselves.
00:45:20 --> 00:45:23 And thank God I am not the same person that I was when I was 22. too.
00:45:23 --> 00:45:28 We are constantly growing. We are constantly coming of age.
00:45:28 --> 00:45:33 And how lucky are we to be able to do that, to continue to grow and change and
00:45:33 --> 00:45:37 acknowledge mistakes and to learn from them.
00:45:38 --> 00:45:43 Yeah. So this is a question I'm closing out with every guest this year.
00:45:43 --> 00:45:46 Finish this sentence, I have hope because.
00:45:48 --> 00:45:50 I have hope because.
00:45:51 --> 00:45:59 Because to not have hope is to admit defeat. To me, hope is an action.
00:45:59 --> 00:46:05 The act of having hope is in and of itself.
00:46:05 --> 00:46:08 It's so much more than wishing.
00:46:10 --> 00:46:15 We take the steps toward hope. We do the actions that create the hope.
00:46:15 --> 00:46:19 And even if whatever we are hoping for doesn't come to fruition,
00:46:19 --> 00:46:23 all of those steps along the way were part of it.
00:46:23 --> 00:46:25 And we can't give up. We can't give in.
00:46:26 --> 00:46:28 And that's hope. Hope is defiance.
00:46:29 --> 00:46:34 Yeah. All right. So Kelly Cervantes, how can people get this book, The Luckiest?
00:46:34 --> 00:46:38 The Luckiest is available everywhere. Books are sold.
00:46:38 --> 00:46:43 Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or you can go to your local bookstore
00:46:43 --> 00:46:48 and ask them to order it if they don't already have it. Support the local bookstores.
00:46:49 --> 00:46:56 So if people want to get more involved with Cure Epilepsy or just want to reach
00:46:56 --> 00:46:57 out to you, how can they do that?
00:46:58 --> 00:47:03 Yeah, cureepilepsy.org. And I am on Facebook and Instagram.
00:47:04 --> 00:47:10 You can just search up Kelly Cervantes and also my website, kellyservantes.com.
00:47:10 --> 00:47:20 And I am also on Substack where I do a weekly newsletter about all things grief, love, life, loss.
00:47:20 --> 00:47:25 And I delve into politics and current events currently on that theme,
00:47:25 --> 00:47:26 as I feel like many of us are.
00:47:29 --> 00:47:32 Well, Kelly, thank you so much for coming on. I greatly appreciate it.
00:47:33 --> 00:47:38 Like I said earlier, that the book moved me and it reassured me,
00:47:38 --> 00:47:45 you know, that no matter what challenges you face, you can fight through it.
00:47:45 --> 00:47:51 And that's why I really liked that email that your friend's mom sent you about having to fight.
00:47:51 --> 00:47:54 Cause I think now more than ever, we have to have that.
00:47:54 --> 00:48:00 So thank you for sharing and thank you again for coming on the podcast. Thank you.
00:48:01 --> 00:48:03 All right, guys. And we're going to catch y'all on the other side.
00:48:23 --> 00:48:30 All right, and we are back. And so now it is time for my next guest, Dr. Monica McLemore.
00:48:30 --> 00:48:36 Dr. Monica R. McLemore is a visiting professor at the Rory Myers College of
00:48:36 --> 00:48:38 Nursing at New York University.
00:48:38 --> 00:48:42 Prior to this, she was a tenured full professor in the Child,
00:48:42 --> 00:48:48 Family, and Population Health Department and the director for the Manning Price-Bratlin
00:48:48 --> 00:48:56 Center for Anti-Racism and Equity in Nursing at the University of Washington School of Nursing.
00:48:56 --> 00:49:01 She previously held the endowed professorship and lecture in health promotions.
00:49:01 --> 00:49:06 Throughout 2023, she served as the interim associate dean for equity,
00:49:07 --> 00:49:09 diversity, and inclusion in the School of Nursing.
00:49:09 --> 00:49:15 She retired from clinical practice as a public health and staff nurse after
00:49:15 --> 00:49:23 a 28-year clinical nursing career in 2019, however, continues to provide flu and COVID-19 vaccines.
00:49:24 --> 00:49:29 Her program of research is focused on understanding reproductive health and justice.
00:49:29 --> 00:49:35 To date, she has 145 peer-reviewed articles, op-eds, and commentaries,
00:49:35 --> 00:49:40 and her research has been cited in the Huffington Post, Lavender Health,
00:49:40 --> 00:49:44 eight amicus briefs to the Supreme Court of the United States,
00:49:44 --> 00:49:49 and four national academies of science, engineering, and medicine reports.
00:49:49 --> 00:49:56 And a data visualization project entitled How to Fix Maternal Mortality,
00:49:56 --> 00:50:01 the first step is to stop blaming women that was published in the 2019 Future
00:50:01 --> 00:50:04 Medicine edition of Scientific American.
00:50:05 --> 00:50:09 Her work has also appeared in publications such as Dane Magazine,
00:50:09 --> 00:50:19 Politico, ProPublica, NPR, and she's made a voice appearance in Terrence Nance's
00:50:19 --> 00:50:22 HBO series, Random Acts of Flyness.
00:50:22 --> 00:50:28 She is the recipient of numerous awards and is a past chair for sexual and reproductive
00:50:28 --> 00:50:32 health section of the American Public Health Association.
00:50:33 --> 00:50:38 She was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 2019.
00:50:39 --> 00:50:44 She became the editor-in-chief of Health Equity Journal in 2022.
00:50:45 --> 00:50:49 Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor and privilege to have as a guest
00:50:49 --> 00:50:54 on this podcast, Dr. Monica McLemore.
00:51:05 --> 00:51:09 All right. Dr. Monica McLemore. McLemore.
00:51:10 --> 00:51:13 McLemore. I'm good. I'm good. How are you? I'm doing good.
00:51:14 --> 00:51:18 Glad to have you on. I'm really, really honored that you accepted my invitation.
00:51:19 --> 00:51:23 And I want to get into a subject that, you know, has been really,
00:51:24 --> 00:51:29 really important to me and my background.
00:51:29 --> 00:51:33 You know, I was a state legislator in Mississippi.
00:51:34 --> 00:51:41 And one of our big issues was maternal mortality and just health in general.
00:51:42 --> 00:51:46 And so since I have this platform, I've been trying to highlight that and we'll
00:51:46 --> 00:51:51 get into that into the discussion. As a matter of fact, let's go ahead and do the icebreakers.
00:51:51 --> 00:51:55 So the first icebreaker is a quote I want you to respond to.
00:51:55 --> 00:52:02 If we continue to have a maternal health crisis, we continue to have an infant
00:52:02 --> 00:52:07 mortality crisis, then we're going to potentially see a situation or circumstance
00:52:07 --> 00:52:09 where black people can be extinct in the future.
00:52:10 --> 00:52:14 And as long as I am around and a whole lot of other people are,
00:52:14 --> 00:52:16 we're not going to allow that.
00:52:16 --> 00:52:22 What does that quote mean to you? That quote is from me at the STAT meeting the year before last.
00:52:22 --> 00:52:29 I was on a panel with Harlan Krumholz, who is a public health researcher physician
00:52:29 --> 00:52:34 colleague from Yale, and he has done some of the most preeminent studies,
00:52:34 --> 00:52:37 one was highlighted in the New York Times,
00:52:37 --> 00:52:39 about premature Black deaths.
00:52:40 --> 00:52:46 And looking at life expectancy over time to be able to appreciate and understand
00:52:46 --> 00:52:52 that there is preventable premature Black death from, you know,
00:52:52 --> 00:52:54 everything from diabetes, hypertension,
00:52:54 --> 00:52:56 maternal morbidity, mortality, infant mortality.
00:52:57 --> 00:53:02 And we were talking about what could and should be done about it.
00:53:02 --> 00:53:06 I mean, I have to tell you, I was a preemie. I was born in preemie in 1969.
00:53:06 --> 00:53:11 And our statistics around maternal and infant mortality have not changed in 100 years.
00:53:12 --> 00:53:16 And these are preventable deaths.
00:53:16 --> 00:53:25 And so, in my opinion, you know, I worry that with the few number of people
00:53:25 --> 00:53:27 who are having children, period,
00:53:28 --> 00:53:35 to the, you know, number of moms and babies we lose every year,
00:53:35 --> 00:53:39 that, you know, we have to do something,
00:53:40 --> 00:53:44 if we want to continue to see Black people in the future.
00:53:44 --> 00:53:51 And we have to do things to ensure that we can be successful and be able to
00:53:51 --> 00:53:55 have the longevity, in my opinion, that we deserve.
00:53:57 --> 00:54:06 So, you know, for me, I take very seriously this notion of having a dignified
00:54:06 --> 00:54:08 life and a dignified death.
00:54:08 --> 00:54:11 And it's not just because I'm a registered nurse. I should not be here.
00:54:13 --> 00:54:18 Prematurity is the number one killer, the number one cause of infant mortality around the world.
00:54:18 --> 00:54:22 One in nine babies will be born prematurely.
00:54:22 --> 00:54:26 And we know that prematurity is preventable.
00:54:27 --> 00:54:32 But clearly, we are making decisions to live in a country and a world that does
00:54:32 --> 00:54:34 not want to prioritize prevention.
00:54:35 --> 00:54:39 So as long as our public health infrastructure, which has been gutted by the
00:54:39 --> 00:54:40 current administration,
00:54:40 --> 00:54:44 and as long as our clinical enterprise continues to be starved of the essential
00:54:44 --> 00:54:49 resources that they need in order to be able to provide comprehensive preventative
00:54:49 --> 00:54:52 health care, the Medicaid cuts are just one version of that.
00:54:52 --> 00:54:59 Then we will continue to see premature death from all cause of mortality,
00:54:59 --> 00:55:05 but it will be particularly exacerbated and Black and brown and Native indigenous people.
00:55:05 --> 00:55:11 And that's a decision we can make now to change because people seem to have
00:55:11 --> 00:55:17 forgotten that every decision you make in the now changes the future.
00:55:17 --> 00:55:19 So that's how I think about it.
00:55:19 --> 00:55:24 All right. So now the next icebreaker is what we call 20 questions.
00:55:25 --> 00:55:29 So I need you to give me a number between 1 and 20. 15.
00:55:30 --> 00:55:38 When you think about the challenges our country faces, what gives you hope? What gives me hope?
00:55:38 --> 00:55:42 That the dark times that we are currently experiencing are temporary.
00:55:43 --> 00:55:46 I tell my students this all the time, right?
00:55:46 --> 00:55:54 That night is not forever and that decisions can't be made out of fear.
00:55:55 --> 00:56:02 Because you will be ill-prepared when that temporary darkness is over.
00:56:03 --> 00:56:08 So the way that I think about our current country, right? I mean, what was it last night?
00:56:09 --> 00:56:16 We had a sitting president post one of the most racist memes I've ever seen
00:56:16 --> 00:56:21 in my life about our former and first black president and his family.
00:56:22 --> 00:56:25 And nobody said anything like that. just okay.
00:56:26 --> 00:56:31 And when I think about that, you know, I decided not to share it across my multiple
00:56:31 --> 00:56:37 social media platforms, because I feel very strongly that weathering is real.
00:56:37 --> 00:56:45 And weathering is a construct that Dr. Arlene Geronimus conceptualized in the early 80s and the 90s.
00:56:45 --> 00:56:49 And yes, she is still alive. And yes, she is a University of Michigan professor.
00:56:50 --> 00:56:57 And yes, she is a white woman, but she conceptualized this notion that constant
00:56:57 --> 00:57:03 assaults really trigger your nervous system, and it contributes to premature aging.
00:57:04 --> 00:57:10 And she has shown that, you know, premature disposition for illness and death.
00:57:11 --> 00:57:19 And she has shown in Black people That when your, you know, axis of your autonomic
00:57:19 --> 00:57:24 nervous system is constantly being assaulted, you don't recoil as quickly.
00:57:24 --> 00:57:29 And for black and brown people, that includes everything from interpersonal and structural racism.
00:57:31 --> 00:57:34 As a factor that contributes to
00:57:34 --> 00:57:40 your premature aging, even at a cellular level, not just at a social one.
00:57:40 --> 00:57:46 So for me, what gives me joy, the notion of knowing that I want to be with incredible
00:57:46 --> 00:57:51 people who are envisioning around what our future could look like.
00:57:51 --> 00:57:54 There are a lot of scientists, there are a lot of clinicians,
00:57:54 --> 00:58:00 there are a lot of people who want to rebuild and restore what has been lost by executive order.
00:58:01 --> 00:58:06 And that work is really important, but it's insufficient and it's not good enough
00:58:06 --> 00:58:09 because I don't think we should build back better.
00:58:10 --> 00:58:11 I think we should build back different.
00:58:13 --> 00:58:16 And so for me, I am working with a lot of the early career people,
00:58:17 --> 00:58:22 the young folks, who really are thinking about this in a really different way
00:58:22 --> 00:58:28 and trying to support and guide them to be able to have the resources that they
00:58:28 --> 00:58:31 need in order to remake all of this,
00:58:31 --> 00:58:35 where more people are supported and can win.
00:58:36 --> 00:58:42 So the temporariness of all of this is what gives me joy, not wallowing in the
00:58:42 --> 00:58:46 sadness that a lot of people feel about what's been lost.
00:58:46 --> 00:58:49 People ask me all the time, are you mad about the equity, diversity,
00:58:49 --> 00:58:53 inclusion and all this other stuff? I was like, we made that.
00:58:53 --> 00:58:54 We can remake something else.
00:58:55 --> 00:58:59 The one thing that I need people to remember is racism can be outsmarted,
00:58:59 --> 00:59:05 even though it morphs to its time. And over time, it's changed and it's been,
00:59:05 --> 00:59:09 you know, institutionalized and structuralized in different ways. And we're still here.
00:59:10 --> 00:59:17 So as far as I'm concerned, am I frustrated and upset and sad and grumpy because
00:59:17 --> 00:59:19 I know it didn't have to be like this? Sure.
00:59:19 --> 00:59:27 But is that stopping me from putting things into place that will allow for people
00:59:27 --> 00:59:29 to do good work in the future? Hell no.
00:59:30 --> 00:59:35 Because I don't see that kind of ground. That's not really how I think about it.
00:59:35 --> 00:59:42 I'm not an inherently optimistic person, but I'm also a realist.
00:59:42 --> 00:59:46 And I'm going to do everything in my power to support folks who are thinking
00:59:46 --> 00:59:52 about this differently and who will reject the false premise that this is the
00:59:52 --> 00:59:55 status quo from now on. Not true. That's a lie.
00:59:56 --> 00:59:58 So that's how I think about it.
00:59:59 --> 01:00:07 All right. So why are reproductive health and health equity among the most urgent
01:00:07 --> 01:00:09 issues in the U.S. today?
01:00:10 --> 01:00:14 This is the way I explain it to people. So I'm a reproductive justice informed scientist.
01:00:14 --> 01:00:19 And reproductive justice was conceptualized by Black women, I don't know, 32 years ago.
01:00:19 --> 01:00:22 We just had our anniversary of 30 years of reproductive justice at a big party
01:00:22 --> 01:00:25 in Washington, D.C., like two years ago.
01:00:26 --> 01:00:30 And reproductive justice states simply that you have a human right to have children,
01:00:30 --> 01:00:35 to not have children, and to parent the children that you have in safe and healthy environments.
01:00:35 --> 01:00:39 And I like to add in the fourth tenet, which is you also have a human right
01:00:39 --> 01:00:44 to disassociate sex from reproduction, because that allows us to have adult
01:00:44 --> 01:00:49 conversations about healthy sexuality and consent as being part of a whole human life.
01:00:49 --> 01:00:54 So in my mind, the reason that reproductive health rights and justice are fundamental
01:00:54 --> 01:01:01 to everything we do is because if you can't safely propagate the human species,
01:01:01 --> 01:01:03 then all of us will be extinct.
01:01:04 --> 01:01:09 Reproductive justice is not just about organs right
01:01:09 --> 01:01:12 it's not just about uteruses and penises and ovaries and
01:01:12 --> 01:01:17 also it's actually the reproductive justice of ideas and opportunities it's
01:01:17 --> 01:01:24 not just about propagating humans so in my mind the word reproduction it draws
01:01:24 --> 01:01:30 everybody to like you know pregnancy and childbirth and all the things but that's
01:01:30 --> 01:01:32 the end result isn't always It's human.
01:01:32 --> 01:01:34 Sometimes it's an idea. Sometimes it's an opportunity.
01:01:35 --> 01:01:42 So we need to widen our aperture in terms of how we think about what we want the future to look like.
01:01:43 --> 01:01:49 But the future is inextricably tied to the people that's going to be there or not.
01:01:49 --> 01:01:52 So I always say I'm a childless by choice cat lady, right?
01:01:52 --> 01:01:58 But the way that I think about it is somebody else's children is going to build the tech that I will use.
01:01:58 --> 01:02:01 Some of their people's children are going to be the physicians and the nurses
01:02:01 --> 01:02:05 and the social worker and all the people that's going to take care of me when I'm an old girl.
01:02:05 --> 01:02:10 Somebody else's tech is going to allow for us, or somebody else's children is
01:02:10 --> 01:02:15 going to allow for us to have beautiful art and movies and all these other things.
01:02:15 --> 01:02:22 So I don't get to abdicate my responsibility to shape the future because I have
01:02:22 --> 01:02:25 no personal stake in it. That's where everybody gets confused.
01:02:26 --> 01:02:30 So they make it very much about this sort of very individualized familial unit.
01:02:30 --> 01:02:34 And I try to get students to public the people that we serve that investments
01:02:34 --> 01:02:39 in the future actually should benefit everybody, whether you're going to be there or not.
01:02:40 --> 01:02:46 So you can't do that without thinking about what are we going to reproduce from
01:02:46 --> 01:02:49 this current era outside of humans?
01:02:49 --> 01:02:53 I mean, yeah, the human piece is important, but that shapes everything.
01:02:53 --> 01:03:00 If people existentially cannot govern and have bodily autonomy and community
01:03:00 --> 01:03:06 autonomy and data autonomy, then you're limiting what's possible in the future.
01:03:07 --> 01:03:09 And I don't want to live in a world that's like that. This is one of the reasons
01:03:09 --> 01:03:14 why I'm one of the biggest AI haters on the planet, even though I'm an early adopter to technology.
01:03:15 --> 01:03:19 I don't want to live in a perfect world. I've learned a lot from my mistakes.
01:03:19 --> 01:03:24 I don't want to live in a world where the reproduction of some people is more
01:03:24 --> 01:03:26 important than the reproduction of other people.
01:03:27 --> 01:03:30 So from where I sit, we're talking about this all wrong.
01:03:31 --> 01:03:35 It's not just about manipulating and controlling people's bodies.
01:03:35 --> 01:03:43 It's about who gets to be the holder of human history in the future.
01:03:43 --> 01:03:48 And I don't want that to just be one narrative or one experience or one existence.
01:03:49 --> 01:03:53 And that's the tie to reproductive justice, to also climate change,
01:03:53 --> 01:03:59 and to making sure that the animals, the fauna, and the flora of the planet are not extinct either.
01:04:00 --> 01:04:05 You're supposed to be caretakers of this planet, right? So some people just
01:04:05 --> 01:04:07 don't take that seriously. And I do.
01:04:08 --> 01:04:12 So when I think about why reproductive health and reproductive rights and reproductive
01:04:12 --> 01:04:16 justice all have to be the cornerstone,
01:04:16 --> 01:04:22 the touchpiece of how we set our society up, it's not because I believe in some
01:04:22 --> 01:04:27 weird grand replacement theory or some white supremacist notion that,
01:04:27 --> 01:04:31 you know, only some people should be alive in the future.
01:04:32 --> 01:04:35 It is more about if we are lucky enough
01:04:35 --> 01:04:41 to be living things and to share this planet with other other species then care
01:04:41 --> 01:04:48 and love should be a part of that and then i'm a nurse right i'm a healer i'm
01:04:48 --> 01:04:53 a teacher i'm a guide and i take that very seriously i took an oath to have a life of service.
01:04:55 --> 01:05:00 So I see the world very differently than I think a lot of people do because
01:05:00 --> 01:05:08 reproduction, in my mind, represents potential, regardless of whatever is being created.
01:05:09 --> 01:05:15 While the global maternal mortality rate has declined, the U.S.
01:05:15 --> 01:05:17 Rate has increased. Why is that?
01:05:18 --> 01:05:23 Well, first of all, I'm going to give a complicated answer to that because there's three parts to it.
01:05:23 --> 01:05:27 The reason the maternal health and morbidity mortality rates in the United States
01:05:27 --> 01:05:30 have increased while worldwide they have decreased.
01:05:30 --> 01:05:32 Number one, we got better at data collection.
01:05:33 --> 01:05:37 A lot of people don't understand that there are multiple ways to classify a
01:05:37 --> 01:05:40 pregnancy-related death. Let me give you listeners an example.
01:05:41 --> 01:05:46 If I am in a car and I get shot and I die and I'm pregnant, in some places that's
01:05:46 --> 01:05:50 considered a pregnancy-related death, even though it has nothing to do with the pregnancy.
01:05:50 --> 01:05:55 So we clean that up, right? Because how, I mean, how do you define a pregnancy-related death?
01:05:55 --> 01:05:59 If I fall down the stairs and I'm pregnant, is that a pregnancy-related death?
01:05:59 --> 01:06:02 Or are you just counting my death and my pregnancy, right?
01:06:02 --> 01:06:05 So we cleaned up a lot of that.
01:06:05 --> 01:06:10 Or the World Health Organization classified any deaths from a pregnant person out to a year.
01:06:10 --> 01:06:15 Whereas in the United States, we were only counting up to 42 days after the birth.
01:06:16 --> 01:06:22 So data clarity showed that we were underestimating the number of pregnancy-related
01:06:22 --> 01:06:24 mortality in the United States.
01:06:24 --> 01:06:27 So we corrected that, started correcting it in about 2016.
01:06:28 --> 01:06:33 The second reason why maternal deaths are increasing in the United States is
01:06:33 --> 01:06:35 because some people want to blame their patients.
01:06:35 --> 01:06:39 I wrote a paper about this. Oh, the patient's coming to pregnancy older and
01:06:39 --> 01:06:40 sicker and fatter and it's their fault.
01:06:41 --> 01:06:46 And I'm like, yeah, actually, no, that's really not the reason.
01:06:46 --> 01:06:51 The reason that we see Black women in the United States three to four times
01:06:51 --> 01:06:55 more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than causes is because of structural racism.
01:06:56 --> 01:07:00 And when my students ask me, they're like, well, what do you mean? How does that show up?
01:07:00 --> 01:07:05 I said, well, first of all, we live in a country where the number one preventative
01:07:05 --> 01:07:14 health interventions that we can do is rate gatekept and rate limited by our capitalist system.
01:07:14 --> 01:07:20 A lot of people don't understand that having health insurance is the number
01:07:20 --> 01:07:25 one intervention to improve health outcomes because that gives you access to
01:07:25 --> 01:07:27 providers and it gives you access to care.
01:07:27 --> 01:07:32 And yet we tie our insurance to our employers.
01:07:32 --> 01:07:35 That's not true in other countries where they've been able to reduce maternal
01:07:35 --> 01:07:36 morbidity and mortality.
01:07:37 --> 01:07:41 They believe in this robust social safety net. So if you don't have access to
01:07:41 --> 01:07:46 insurance, at least in the United States, your health outcomes are going to be poor.
01:07:46 --> 01:07:52 The third reason, the other way that structural racism shows up is we have obstetrician deserts.
01:07:53 --> 01:07:57 People can't even access an obstetrician. I mean, you're from Mississippi, right?
01:07:57 --> 01:08:02 Eighty-eight percent of counties don't have an obstetrician or a birth worker
01:08:02 --> 01:08:03 or a birth care provider.
01:08:04 --> 01:08:08 I've been working with the midwives who have been trying to decriminalize midwifery
01:08:08 --> 01:08:11 in Mississippi. in Alabama, right?
01:08:12 --> 01:08:15 The fact that the grand midwives were discredited when they were caring for
01:08:15 --> 01:08:20 people on plantations and doing a relatively good job, not having access to
01:08:20 --> 01:08:24 midwifery care, not having access to doula care, that's a decision.
01:08:25 --> 01:08:29 Or when you go into a labor and delivery union, if you're lucky enough to get
01:08:29 --> 01:08:33 into one, structural racism shows up when the nurses don't listen to you,
01:08:33 --> 01:08:37 because then they miss the signs and symptoms of deterioration when they could
01:08:37 --> 01:08:39 have acted earlier or if they don't believe you.
01:08:40 --> 01:08:45 That's the Serena Williams telling Vogue in 2018 in January,
01:08:45 --> 01:08:48 telling her story, and then only to have Beyonce to turn around and tell her
01:08:48 --> 01:08:53 story in September around her toxemia pregnancy, or we call that pre-classion.
01:08:53 --> 01:09:00 But if you don't believe people, again, you're going to miss signs and symptoms of deterioration.
01:09:00 --> 01:09:04 And by the time you want to do something, pregnancy is a time-limited situation.
01:09:05 --> 01:09:09 And it goes from emergent to urgent very rapidly.
01:09:10 --> 01:09:14 So if you're missing all those potential touch points where you could have done
01:09:14 --> 01:09:19 something, and we learn this information from our maternal morbidity and mortality reviews.
01:09:19 --> 01:09:22 So every maternal death, well, not every, because some states,
01:09:22 --> 01:09:26 like Texas, canceled their maternal morbidity and mortality reviews.
01:09:27 --> 01:09:30 We have a committee that goes back and looks at all the medical records,
01:09:30 --> 01:09:36 all the cases, all the visits, all the labs, everything, to figure out what
01:09:36 --> 01:09:38 happened and what could have prevented it.
01:09:38 --> 01:09:43 And those are called MMRCs, Maternal Morbidity and Mortality Review Committees.
01:09:44 --> 01:09:46 That's how we know that maternal deaths are preventable or at
01:09:46 --> 01:09:49 least 80 to 90 percent of them are because we
01:09:49 --> 01:09:55 can look in hindsight at all the different places what was missed all the different
01:09:55 --> 01:09:59 visits all the different labs all the different increases in blood pressure
01:09:59 --> 01:10:06 all the signs and symptoms that could have saved that mom but in real time if
01:10:06 --> 01:10:09 you are afraid of black people and don't like them,
01:10:09 --> 01:10:14 and yet you're charged with our care, and you're not listening to me,
01:10:15 --> 01:10:16 you're going to miss something.
01:10:17 --> 01:10:24 So, in my mind, preventable maternal deaths would mean changes in nurse staffing ratios.
01:10:24 --> 01:10:32 It might mean changes in the racial, cultural concordance of the teens.
01:10:32 --> 01:10:37 It might mean having additional support. I think all pregnant people should
01:10:37 --> 01:10:41 have a doula just because it is a reverent act.
01:10:42 --> 01:10:47 And so we, as the village, should provide them with all the honor and the care
01:10:47 --> 01:10:48 and the love that they need.
01:10:49 --> 01:10:53 Not just because we want to prevent a harmful thing.
01:10:53 --> 01:10:57 So in my mind, we have over-medicalized pregnancy and childbirth.
01:10:57 --> 01:10:59 And for some people, there's too much intervention.
01:11:00 --> 01:11:04 I mean, the fact that the C-section, primary, first-time C-section rate in Black
01:11:04 --> 01:11:11 women is as high as it is, when that's associated with known morbidity and known mortality, right?
01:11:12 --> 01:11:18 So in my mind, our rates are so high because we've decided that we don't want
01:11:18 --> 01:11:22 to keep pregnant people alive or we only want to keep some pregnant people alive
01:11:22 --> 01:11:24 because otherwise we would make different decisions.
01:11:25 --> 01:11:30 Yeah. All right. So you kind of asked, I think you've kind of answered my next
01:11:30 --> 01:11:33 two questions, but I'm going to ask them anyway.
01:11:33 --> 01:11:36 Could you, could universal health care alleviate the problem?
01:11:37 --> 01:11:45 It depends. So I actually advocate for a single payer in terms of if we're going
01:11:45 --> 01:11:46 to maintain the shots, right?
01:11:46 --> 01:11:49 I actually don't think we should have insurance and have capitalism at all.
01:11:49 --> 01:11:54 I think health care is a public good and it should be offered as such and that
01:11:54 --> 01:11:55 people should have a living wage.
01:11:55 --> 01:12:01 Whatever language you want to use to state that, that's what I believe in.
01:12:01 --> 01:12:06 So if by universal healthcare, we mean people have universal access to a payer
01:12:06 --> 01:12:08 to be able to see a clinician.
01:12:09 --> 01:12:13 Yes, I think that that could really help. But again, if we don't change what
01:12:13 --> 01:12:18 the workforce looks like, because I mean, I say this all the time.
01:12:18 --> 01:12:23 When we did our Giving Voice to Mothers study, we saw that mistreatment was
01:12:23 --> 01:12:25 rampant in pregnancy-related care.
01:12:26 --> 01:12:29 We associated that. I didn't blame the clinicians.
01:12:30 --> 01:12:34 Our workplaces are inhumane. It don't work for the patients,
01:12:34 --> 01:12:36 and it don't work for us, right?
01:12:37 --> 01:12:42 Nobody should have to see 40, 50 patients a day in order to make ends meet,
01:12:42 --> 01:12:45 and it'd be spending five minutes with pregnant patients.
01:12:45 --> 01:12:47 That is inhumane.
01:12:48 --> 01:12:51 So in my mind, universal health care, if people had the time,
01:12:52 --> 01:12:57 the midwifery model of care where you can learn from each other and pregnant
01:12:57 --> 01:13:00 people, you could have your pregnancy-related care in groups.
01:13:00 --> 01:13:04 Everybody always asks me, why do people like centering and group prenatal care?
01:13:04 --> 01:13:08 I say, well, number one, you're never alone with a racist-ass clinician.
01:13:09 --> 01:13:13 Number two, you're learning from other pregnant people, which is how,
01:13:13 --> 01:13:17 in my mind, we want to shepherd new humans into the world.
01:13:18 --> 01:13:23 And number three, they're more eyes on you than just that one clinician.
01:13:23 --> 01:13:27 So that if they miss something, maybe the medical assistant,
01:13:27 --> 01:13:31 maybe the nurse, maybe the team will catch something.
01:13:32 --> 01:13:35 We have to think about the model of care, just not the payer of it.
01:13:36 --> 01:13:39 So if that's what you mean by universal health care, sure.
01:13:41 --> 01:13:44 How I think about it. Okay. So the next question,
01:13:44 --> 01:13:50 I have had as guests on this podcast, a doula here in the Atlanta area and a
01:13:50 --> 01:13:54 candidate running for the Georgia House of Representatives discuss the importance
01:13:54 --> 01:13:59 of addressing the maternal mortality crisis in America and Georgia specifically.
01:14:00 --> 01:14:03 So I have two questions.
01:14:03 --> 01:14:08 How important are doulas and midwives in preventing maternal mortality,
01:14:08 --> 01:14:14 and can you give some public policy examples to decrease maternal mortality rates?
01:14:14 --> 01:14:19 Absolutely. Well, number one, I don't think it's exclusively the responsibility
01:14:19 --> 01:14:22 of midwives and doulas to fix a problem they didn't create.
01:14:22 --> 01:14:27 So, maternal morbidity and mortality is a nurse physician. It's a healthcare problem.
01:14:27 --> 01:14:33 That said, one of the reasons why they are so vital if we want to improve health
01:14:33 --> 01:14:34 outcomes. It's twofold.
01:14:35 --> 01:14:41 My good friend, Dr. Karen Scott, who wrote the Secret Birth book and has created
01:14:41 --> 01:14:48 the only validated by Black women community patient reported experience measure
01:14:48 --> 01:14:50 to improve obstetric race syndrome,
01:14:51 --> 01:14:56 always says that doulas know how to move with people through time.
01:14:57 --> 01:15:05 Nurses and physicians and some Midwest to a certain extent, we try to manage time during a birth.
01:15:06 --> 01:15:12 So there is a unspoken clock that a lot of people don't know that starts the
01:15:12 --> 01:15:15 minute your water breaks if you're a pregnant person.
01:15:16 --> 01:15:20 And that clock is dictated by infection risk.
01:15:21 --> 01:15:25 Fetuses live in aqueous environments. They live in water. So the minute that
01:15:25 --> 01:15:29 water breaks, we got to get a baby out so they can take their first breath and be able to live on air.
01:15:30 --> 01:15:33 So that clock is about 12 to 24 hours.
01:15:34 --> 01:15:37 And so a lot of decisions, a lot of interventions, a lot of,
01:15:37 --> 01:15:46 so doulas know how to move with people through time to help the body do what it was designed to do.
01:15:47 --> 01:15:52 The rest of us on the team, we for a long time have been trying to manage time
01:15:52 --> 01:15:53 in Britain and Seamberg.
01:15:53 --> 01:15:57 The Mutual Free Model of Care, so the second full piece to your answer,
01:15:58 --> 01:16:03 they have a unique perspective. Number one, they have very long appointments.
01:16:04 --> 01:16:09 Their intake appointments can be two, three hours. I know midwives that go to
01:16:09 --> 01:16:14 people's houses to assess what their social needs are in addition to their clinical ones.
01:16:14 --> 01:16:21 I know midwives who, you know, don't even have a phone service because their
01:16:21 --> 01:16:24 patients have their cell phone numbers. They can text them.
01:16:24 --> 01:16:30 I know midwives who provide care in groups with all, it's a one-stop shop.
01:16:31 --> 01:16:32 The social workers are there.
01:16:32 --> 01:16:34 The psychologists are there.
01:16:35 --> 01:16:37 The nutritionists are there.
01:16:37 --> 01:16:41 When the people, they come in in a group, they can bring their other kids.
01:16:41 --> 01:16:43 They can bring their partners.
01:16:43 --> 01:16:49 They do their own vital signs. They are able to dip their own urines, right?
01:16:49 --> 01:16:54 They are curating a pregnancy experience, not an appointment.
01:16:55 --> 01:17:01 So it's a different model of being able to honor people who are brave enough
01:17:01 --> 01:17:05 to propagate our species and to revere them as such.
01:17:06 --> 01:17:10 So the reason that doulas and midwives are, and don't get me wrong,
01:17:10 --> 01:17:14 we need obstetricians who can do c-sections because sometimes they're really
01:17:14 --> 01:17:16 necessary to save a baby and a mom's life.
01:17:17 --> 01:17:25 But that should not be the first line of how we do pregnancy-related care.
01:17:25 --> 01:17:30 I also want to be very clear with your listeners, because I think this needs to be said as well.
01:17:31 --> 01:17:35 All pregnancies end, they all don't end in a birth.
01:17:35 --> 01:17:40 And I think we need to own that, right? All pregnancies end,
01:17:40 --> 01:17:44 but they all, and birth is not the only legitimate outcome of pregnancy.
01:17:45 --> 01:17:50 So we talk about the outcomes of pregnancy. We talk about miscarriage. We talk about abortion.
01:17:50 --> 01:17:53 We talk about infertility. We talk about birth. We talk about surgery.
01:17:53 --> 01:17:55 Those are outcomes of pregnancy.
01:17:56 --> 01:18:03 We don't talk about pregnancy. So to answer your second question,
01:18:03 --> 01:18:09 right, I mean, we don't understand normal parturition or normal pregnancy.
01:18:09 --> 01:18:13 What initiates labor? We have theories around that. But we spend a lot of time studying abnormal.
01:18:14 --> 01:18:18 Maybe we should study normal. I say this all the time, people get in their feelings,
01:18:18 --> 01:18:20 but I would love for us to go into
01:18:20 --> 01:18:26 affluent environments where pregnancy outcomes are really good, right?
01:18:26 --> 01:18:31 I'm a professor at New York University. And in New York, Black women are 12
01:18:31 --> 01:18:35 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than everybody else.
01:18:35 --> 01:18:40 I would love to go into the wealthy affluent areas and figure out what's the
01:18:40 --> 01:18:45 minimum constellation of things that you need to have in order to ensure those good outcomes.
01:18:45 --> 01:18:50 And then make sure everybody has those things. Because I bet you it will be
01:18:50 --> 01:18:55 clean water, clear night sky. I bet you it will be things like having a community
01:18:55 --> 01:18:59 center that has cooking classes and pottery and art and all these.
01:18:59 --> 01:19:02 It won't be any clinical thing.
01:19:03 --> 01:19:08 So for me, we don't take seriously enough if people say they really have family
01:19:08 --> 01:19:10 values, and if that's true.
01:19:11 --> 01:19:15 Pregnant people don't exist in environments. They don't exist in a bubble.
01:19:16 --> 01:19:20 My colleagues and I did a research study in the Central Valley in California,
01:19:20 --> 01:19:26 Fresno, where we get between 30 and 50 days where the temperature is over 100 degrees.
01:19:27 --> 01:19:31 Heat exposure is associated with prematurity.
01:19:31 --> 01:19:34 It makes sense right so if you're a farm worker
01:19:34 --> 01:19:37 you don't get adequate hydration and you
01:19:37 --> 01:19:41 live in a place that doesn't have air conditioning heat exposure i mean we're
01:19:41 --> 01:19:45 all going to find this out on climate change there are things that impact clinical
01:19:45 --> 01:19:51 outcomes that are not clinical and we have to decide as a society how much of
01:19:51 --> 01:19:55 that do we want to tolerate whether it's dirty polluted water,
01:19:55 --> 01:19:57 or dirty, polluted air.
01:19:58 --> 01:20:01 Pregnant people exist in that milieu.
01:20:02 --> 01:20:09 So in my mind, if we wanted to change policy, we would make sure that pregnant
01:20:09 --> 01:20:10 people... Okay, here's another one.
01:20:11 --> 01:20:14 How many people, how many of your listeners know that regardless of how your
01:20:14 --> 01:20:18 pregnancy ends, if you don't go home with a baby, in most states,
01:20:18 --> 01:20:21 you got to go back to work because your disability don't kick in because you
01:20:21 --> 01:20:24 don't go home with a baby. So if your baby dies.
01:20:25 --> 01:20:28 Lose your disability. How many people know that? It's cruel.
01:20:29 --> 01:20:35 That's a simple policy change we could make. We decided that all NICUs,
01:20:35 --> 01:20:38 neonatal intensive care unit, like no parent would go bankrupt,
01:20:38 --> 01:20:42 that Medicaid would cover a NICU stay regardless of how long it is.
01:20:42 --> 01:20:46 We decided there is two groups in the country that have universal cover,
01:20:46 --> 01:20:51 children and the elderly under Medicare, that's if they don't gut it.
01:20:51 --> 01:20:55 We can make those decisions for other people. So as far as I'm concern,
01:20:55 --> 01:20:59 the easiest policy decision, if we wanted to really do something about maternal
01:20:59 --> 01:21:01 mortality, there's one bill,
01:21:02 --> 01:21:05 actually it's 12, you know, Lauren Underwood and Alma Adams and the Black Maternal
01:21:05 --> 01:21:08 Caucus and Black Mamas Matter Alliance introduced a momnibus.
01:21:08 --> 01:21:10 That was nine bills before COVID and then it became 12.
01:21:11 --> 01:21:16 But if we wanted to do one thing, one policy change to reduce maternal mortality
01:21:16 --> 01:21:22 in the United States, we would extend all postpartum insurance, Medicaid,
01:21:23 --> 01:21:26 Obamacare, on-exchange, employer-sponsored health insurance,
01:21:26 --> 01:21:32 we would extend that to a year because we know that 50 to 60 percent of maternal
01:21:32 --> 01:21:38 deaths happen in the postpartum period when people are not seeking care because
01:21:38 --> 01:21:39 their insurance runs out.
01:21:40 --> 01:21:44 So that'd be the one thing, extending, I wrote a piece about this in Scientific
01:21:44 --> 01:21:50 American, this open source, why we should extend postpartum Medicaid across the country.
01:21:52 --> 01:21:56 We're not that serious about this. I mean, in 2027, in H.R. 1,
01:21:56 --> 01:22:00 which some people, you know, sarcastically refer to as the big, beautiful bill.
01:22:00 --> 01:22:05 In 2027, we are looking at $800 million in cuts from the Medicaid program.
01:22:06 --> 01:22:10 Well, how many of your listeners know that almost over half the births in the
01:22:10 --> 01:22:12 United States are covered by Medicaid?
01:22:13 --> 01:22:17 So when I say that structural racism informs health outcomes in the United States,
01:22:17 --> 01:22:22 you are basically going to deprive half the births. we have 4 million births
01:22:22 --> 01:22:23 in the United States every year.
01:22:24 --> 01:22:27 You're going to say that those people don't deserve coverage,
01:22:28 --> 01:22:32 which we know is the number one intervention to improve health outcomes for
01:22:32 --> 01:22:34 people. That's what that means.
01:22:35 --> 01:22:38 So the language of entitlement and all this, that's like not a thing.
01:22:39 --> 01:22:43 So extending postpartum healthcare coverage for people.
01:22:43 --> 01:22:49 I know moms who have C-sections that eight days afterwards are driving for Lyft
01:22:49 --> 01:22:50 and Uber because they don't have health insurance.
01:22:51 --> 01:22:55 The last thing you should be doing after major abdominal surgery is sitting
01:22:55 --> 01:22:56 in a car driving for eight hours.
01:22:57 --> 01:23:01 That's the kind of language we need to be using when we're trying to shape public policy.
01:23:02 --> 01:23:08 About pregnancy-related care and healthcare and not buy into the false binary,
01:23:08 --> 01:23:12 of entitlement programs or other things that are just not true.
01:23:13 --> 01:23:17 That's how I think about it. All right, so I got a couple more questions.
01:23:17 --> 01:23:24 How much of a challenge is it for you to do your health care advocacy with the
01:23:24 --> 01:23:26 current leadership of the U.S.
01:23:27 --> 01:23:31 Department of Health and Human Services? I have dealt with active and credible
01:23:31 --> 01:23:36 death threats because I've only worked in reproductive health rights and justice my entire career.
01:23:37 --> 01:23:42 I have had to deal with active and credible death threats since 2010.
01:23:43 --> 01:23:49 We need to raise better humans. That said, I also help to support many of the
01:23:49 --> 01:23:55 law firms around the country who are suing the administration.
01:23:55 --> 01:24:00 And I'm very lucky that the Washington State Nurses Association,
01:24:00 --> 01:24:04 along with Academy Health and a whole lot of other professional organizations
01:24:04 --> 01:24:13 that I belong to, were willing to sue, summarize science, and be able to provide amicus briefs.
01:24:13 --> 01:24:16 In many of the cases I have been doing advocacy work my entire career,
01:24:17 --> 01:24:22 we were able to restore the 49 disappeared federal databases,
01:24:23 --> 01:24:25 many of which are pregnancy-related, right?
01:24:26 --> 01:24:29 PRAMS, the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring Surveillance Survey.
01:24:30 --> 01:24:34 BRIFIS, the Behavioral Risk Factor Survey.
01:24:34 --> 01:24:40 These are surveys that the taxpayers and Congress have fielded for over 50 years.
01:24:40 --> 01:24:44 Data that we collect that go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
01:24:44 --> 01:24:47 so we can design interventions based on those data.
01:24:47 --> 01:24:50 Of course, we were going to sue to get those databases back.
01:24:51 --> 01:24:55 So my life has been disrupted by the current Department of Health and Human
01:24:55 --> 01:24:59 Services because not only do I have to do my job as a full-tenured professor
01:24:59 --> 01:25:05 and provide teaching for 300 undergrads every semester and all the service work that I do,
01:25:05 --> 01:25:09 I also have to do my full-time job of suing the administration,
01:25:10 --> 01:25:17 being deposed, writing up expert witness testimony, and being able to get data for my PhD students.
01:25:17 --> 01:25:22 I have 29 MPH, master's prepared, people working on master's in public health
01:25:22 --> 01:25:25 and or PhD students around the country who are expecting to use those databases
01:25:25 --> 01:25:27 to complete their degrees.
01:25:28 --> 01:25:33 I have one student, five, seven years of work, and they can't get the most recent
01:25:33 --> 01:25:36 data because those disappeared, those databases.
01:25:37 --> 01:25:41 So yeah, I've been doing two full-time jobs since January 20th of last year.
01:25:41 --> 01:25:43 So it's been very difficult for me to do my work.
01:25:44 --> 01:25:47 Also in the context of having to deal with active and credible death threats,
01:25:47 --> 01:25:49 because I believe in reproductive justice.
01:25:50 --> 01:25:53 And I think it's very, very important that we not lose sight of the fact that
01:25:53 --> 01:25:56 regardless of why Black people are seeking care. They deserve very good care.
01:25:57 --> 01:26:00 So it's been very difficult for me to do my work, and I'm doing it anyway.
01:26:01 --> 01:26:03 I come from a long line of badass Black people.
01:26:04 --> 01:26:08 Father's a Superior Court judge. Started the Black Law Student Association at
01:26:08 --> 01:26:10 Penn with his classmates. I'm good.
01:26:11 --> 01:26:18 All right. A year ago, you said DEI is the easy thing to blame everything on.
01:26:18 --> 01:26:23 Number one, you don't have to define it. Number two, it's a buzzword that means
01:26:23 --> 01:26:24 different things to different people.
01:26:25 --> 01:26:30 And three, some people don't want to do that work. So it's an easy scapegoat.
01:26:31 --> 01:26:36 How do institutions of higher learning, especially those with medical schools,
01:26:36 --> 01:26:39 avoid, as you put it, cowardly acquiescence?
01:26:40 --> 01:26:42 Yeah, I said that.
01:26:43 --> 01:26:50 I say it again. In fact, I said this to some students yesterday because the Super Bowl is Sunday.
01:26:51 --> 01:26:58 If every academic medical center for the Pac-12 football team decided last year
01:26:58 --> 01:27:03 that they were not going to be able to field any games, no Friday night lights
01:27:03 --> 01:27:05 for y'all, because we can't function.
01:27:08 --> 01:27:12 A sports entity without our sports medicine and academic medicine colleagues,
01:27:12 --> 01:27:16 we would be having a whole different conversation right now.
01:27:16 --> 01:27:19 But we don't have any collective solidarity amongst our institutions.
01:27:20 --> 01:27:22 You got some people that want to fly under the radar.
01:27:22 --> 01:27:25 You got some people that's going to go along to get along.
01:27:25 --> 01:27:29 If every university, academic, medical center, I mean, that's the reason we
01:27:29 --> 01:27:32 haven't heard from the American Hospital Association or the American Medical Association.
01:27:33 --> 01:27:37 I'm in a situation right now where my entire discipline might be deprofessionalized
01:27:37 --> 01:27:38 by the Department of Education.
01:27:39 --> 01:27:43 The open comment period around that goes until March 2nd.
01:27:44 --> 01:27:49 Social work, nursing, public health, there's 13 health professions on the list
01:27:49 --> 01:27:52 to be deprofessionalized by the Department of Education,
01:27:52 --> 01:27:57 meaning that they will cap our capacity to have student loans at $25,
01:27:57 --> 01:28:02 which will mean the nursing shortage will be exacerbated and or only rich people can become nurses.
01:28:04 --> 01:28:08 So would I say that people are being cowardly again? Yes, absolutely.
01:28:09 --> 01:28:11 I don't even use the acronym DEI.
01:28:11 --> 01:28:13 I make people say the words.
01:28:14 --> 01:28:18 I make people clarify. What do you mean when you say diversity,
01:28:18 --> 01:28:21 equity, inclusion, justice, belonging?
01:28:21 --> 01:28:27 What do you mean when you say that? Because clearly, right, DEI became a buzzword like woke.
01:28:27 --> 01:28:31 And it means different things to different people. And I was like,
01:28:31 --> 01:28:37 I need you to tell me what your action is going to be that's associated with
01:28:37 --> 01:28:39 executive orders and compliance.
01:28:40 --> 01:28:48 I have people who I went to events sponsored by offices of DE&I that I can't
01:28:48 --> 01:28:54 prove that they were there because people took down websites. They closed offices.
01:28:55 --> 01:29:01 I mean luckily I'm an obsessive scientist and I download pdfs for every invite
01:29:01 --> 01:29:08 I get I youtube everything and I ask the press to be at my events when people like oh Dr.
01:29:08 --> 01:29:11 Methamore can we record this hell yeah you got
01:29:11 --> 01:29:14 people who can't even prove their entire career happened because the
01:29:14 --> 01:29:22 website upon which their work lived no longer exists so as far as I'm concerned
01:29:22 --> 01:29:28 I try to use my platform to remind people that there are things that we can
01:29:28 --> 01:29:31 do to combat misinformation and disinformation,
01:29:31 --> 01:29:37 and particularly around our efforts to diversify the workforce,
01:29:37 --> 01:29:41 to include as many people as possible,
01:29:41 --> 01:29:47 and to really get to a point where perspectives matter.
01:29:49 --> 01:29:55 And so I knew people who were working on reparations and calling that DE&I work.
01:29:56 --> 01:30:03 I knew people who were working on retrofitting structures and calling that DE&I work.
01:30:03 --> 01:30:10 I had affinity groups and a whole variety of activities that,
01:30:10 --> 01:30:13 in my mind, a just society should be doing.
01:30:13 --> 01:30:19 But when you put something under an umbrella, it makes it easily neutralized and targeted.
01:30:20 --> 01:30:24 And a lot of people did not take Kimberly Crenshaw seriously when she did a
01:30:24 --> 01:30:31 whole redux at the Congressional Black Caucus annual legislative meeting on Project 2025.
01:30:32 --> 01:30:35 We knew this was coming. And as somebody who works in reproductive health rights
01:30:35 --> 01:30:39 and justice, they practice all of these activities on us.
01:30:39 --> 01:30:44 And the rest of health care stood by and watched. If you go back in timeline,
01:30:45 --> 01:30:50 anti-abortion rhetoric, when you go back in timeline, everything that's happening
01:30:50 --> 01:30:54 right now was practiced on those of us who work in abortion,
01:30:54 --> 01:30:56 family planning, and contraception.
01:30:56 --> 01:31:01 That's why Repro is grounded in everything that's happening right now.
01:31:01 --> 01:31:05 The intimidation tactics, the arm twisting of our institutions,
01:31:06 --> 01:31:10 the discrediting, the misinformation, the disinformation, getting people to
01:31:10 --> 01:31:14 buy into false binaries. That was all practice on repro, and that's been a 40-year plan.
01:31:15 --> 01:31:21 So when I think about the collective solidarity that's needed to get out of
01:31:21 --> 01:31:24 all of this, people are not learning the right lesson from what we're dealing
01:31:24 --> 01:31:29 with, which is why I stay so busy trying to get people to understand that.
01:31:30 --> 01:31:33 So, yeah, I said those words a year ago. I'd say them again now.
01:31:33 --> 01:31:37 And actually, I would probably say even more strong language in hindsight.
01:31:38 --> 01:31:42 Because being a coward in the now makes you irrelevant in the future.
01:31:42 --> 01:31:46 And therefore your opinion doesn't matter and I'm not listening to you.
01:31:46 --> 01:31:53 Yeah. Well, I normally close out the interviews with a question.
01:31:53 --> 01:31:58 This year I've been doing it, but you already, thanks to the 20 questions segment,
01:31:58 --> 01:32:02 you already answered that question. So I'm going to flip it a little bit and
01:32:02 --> 01:32:06 I want you to tell the listeners why they should have hope.
01:32:08 --> 01:32:14 Regardless of whatever spiritual, existential, philosophical orientation you
01:32:14 --> 01:32:22 have to life, most human beings want a dignified life and a dignified death.
01:32:22 --> 01:32:28 And so in order to have that be true, in order to have meaningful work,
01:32:28 --> 01:32:36 in order to have purposive existence, you don't live on an island by yourself.
01:32:37 --> 01:32:46 So the hope is that collectively, I think we can create the kind of world that we want to live in.
01:32:46 --> 01:32:52 It's going to be very difficult to do because there's some hard truths that we need to confront.
01:32:53 --> 01:33:01 So we should have hope because there's always been justice and joy in the midst
01:33:01 --> 01:33:06 of tragedy, even during enslavement. I've met, right?
01:33:06 --> 01:33:12 There has always been justice and joy and art and pleasure and things worth fighting for.
01:33:13 --> 01:33:16 So in my view, this is temporary.
01:33:16 --> 01:33:24 And so how are we going to put fundamentally things in place to make sure that
01:33:24 --> 01:33:32 future versions of ourselves will be proud but also dignified,
01:33:33 --> 01:33:38 where we find ourselves. That's the question I ask myself every morning when I'm at the gym.
01:33:38 --> 01:33:47 I spend a lot of time thinking about what action can I do now that will unburden some people.
01:33:47 --> 01:33:51 I mean, I'm lucky. I'm a teacher. I work with undergrads. I work with graduate
01:33:51 --> 01:33:53 students. I work with our future brain trust.
01:33:53 --> 01:33:59 What do they need to hear from me in this moment that will allow them to bring
01:33:59 --> 01:34:04 their gifts and talents forward to help us think very differently about how
01:34:04 --> 01:34:11 to restructure our society and how can I help them to do that work.
01:34:13 --> 01:34:21 Yeah. So, Dr. Monica McLemore, I really, really am honored that you came on.
01:34:21 --> 01:34:27 And if people want to reach out to you, how can they do that?
01:34:27 --> 01:34:32 Yeah, so I'm myself on all social media platforms except for Twitter because
01:34:32 --> 01:34:36 I left after I got a month of death threats because I wrote a piece on E.O.
01:34:36 --> 01:34:37 Wilson for Scientific American.
01:34:38 --> 01:34:45 My handle is MacklemoreMR and that's on Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, LinkedIn.
01:34:46 --> 01:34:50 I left TikTok because I don't really like their new surveillance situation and
01:34:50 --> 01:34:52 new terms and conditions.
01:34:52 --> 01:34:56 So I left there because I can't be bothered. But I'm myself everywhere.
01:34:56 --> 01:35:04 I also am a professor at New York University. I have a web page there where I can be contacted.
01:35:04 --> 01:35:08 And I very much appreciate, you know,
01:35:08 --> 01:35:12 podcasters and people like you who allow for us to be able to talk directly
01:35:12 --> 01:35:18 to the public and the people that we serve, to be able to remind folks that
01:35:18 --> 01:35:20 this does not have to be like this.
01:35:21 --> 01:35:26 We can all make a different decision to change our future, and I hope people decide to do that.
01:35:27 --> 01:35:33 Yeah, well, you know, I was trying to come up with a title for this episode,
01:35:33 --> 01:35:38 and so my previous guest kind of laid it out there for me,
01:35:38 --> 01:35:43 and you have solidified that, and that was to have the fight.
01:35:44 --> 01:35:48 In order for us to see the changes we need, we've got to fight for them.
01:35:49 --> 01:35:58 And it is clear to me, after talking to you, that you are a warrior of exemplar courage and dignity.
01:35:59 --> 01:36:01 And so again, it's been a honor to have you on.
01:36:02 --> 01:36:06 I'm grateful that you let me have this conversation.
01:36:06 --> 01:36:12 And I'm grateful for you and your listeners. And I'm grateful for people who
01:36:12 --> 01:36:19 are unapologetically willing to reject the hatefulness of this current moment
01:36:19 --> 01:36:25 and the false binary that we all have to be separated in the future. Because that's a lie.
01:36:25 --> 01:36:29 And as long as I'm alive, that's not going to be a thing.
01:36:31 --> 01:36:37 So that's how i think about it all right guys on that note and we're gonna catch y'all on the other.
01:36:50 --> 01:36:57 All right, we are back. So I want to thank Kelly Cervantes and Dr.
01:36:57 --> 01:37:00 Monica McLemore for coming on the podcast.
01:37:00 --> 01:37:02 Kelly's book is called The Luckiest.
01:37:03 --> 01:37:07 Please get that. It's been out for a minute, but it is really, really powerful.
01:37:08 --> 01:37:13 And you can tell even in the interview that she really put her heart into it.
01:37:15 --> 01:37:19 And I think it's a book that all of us can relate to.
01:37:20 --> 01:37:28 In dealing with triumphs and tragedies in our lives and how they juxtaposition each other, right?
01:37:29 --> 01:37:32 At one moment, you could be having the greatest moment in your life and then,
01:37:32 --> 01:37:36 bam, tragedy hits or vice versa, right?
01:37:37 --> 01:37:45 And, you know, Kelly really captures telling her story some feelings that a
01:37:45 --> 01:37:47 lot of us may have experienced.
01:37:47 --> 01:37:50 And it's very encouraging to
01:37:50 --> 01:37:57 press forward and understanding that that's how our life is going to go.
01:37:58 --> 01:38:07 Somebody posted on an interesting statistic said that the fact that we are here
01:38:07 --> 01:38:11 is that we have defied odds.
01:38:11 --> 01:38:14 And what she meant was that.
01:38:15 --> 01:38:23 There was a one in four trillion chance that we would be born.
01:38:23 --> 01:38:27 One in four trillion, right?
01:38:27 --> 01:38:36 So that's like, I think like eight zeros point 25% chance, right?
01:38:36 --> 01:38:41 I'm not good at math, but something like that, that we would even be born.
01:38:42 --> 01:38:48 And the point of her bringing that out was that we should look at life as a
01:38:48 --> 01:38:54 blessing as a whole because the fact that we exist, no matter how long we live,
01:38:55 --> 01:38:59 just the fact that we exist is a miracle in itself.
01:39:00 --> 01:39:03 And it's something that should be celebrated. Right.
01:39:04 --> 01:39:10 So I think Kelly conveys that very well. There was another commercial I saw
01:39:10 --> 01:39:18 that said something about we should measure our years on Earth by our life.
01:39:20 --> 01:39:24 It's something to the effect that we should measure the years that we're on
01:39:24 --> 01:39:27 Earth by the life that we live, right?
01:39:28 --> 01:39:32 And then there's the old classic thing that you hear a lot of funerals,
01:39:33 --> 01:39:38 especially black funerals, where on a tombstone, it'll have the year that you were born.
01:39:38 --> 01:39:43 And then they have the year that you died. And then in between, there's a dash.
01:39:44 --> 01:39:49 And the challenge is, what did you do in the dash, right?
01:39:50 --> 01:39:54 So go get that book, The Luckiest. And then Dr.
01:39:55 --> 01:40:00 Monica McLemore, what a joy it was to talk to that sister.
01:40:00 --> 01:40:07 The power and the confidence in fighting for what she believes in is amazing.
01:40:07 --> 01:40:11 And she's dealing with stuff. We didn't get into that in the interview.
01:40:11 --> 01:40:13 We kind of talked beforehand.
01:40:13 --> 01:40:19 But she's dealing with the same things that a lot of us are dealing with at a certain age.
01:40:20 --> 01:40:25 And, you know, some of the things she did mention in the interview was about
01:40:25 --> 01:40:33 doing the work that she's been doing. She's been getting death threats since for the last 16 years.
01:40:33 --> 01:40:39 Can you imagine getting death threats for the last 16 years just doing what you do for a living?
01:40:40 --> 01:40:44 Speaking out on things that you believe in, right?
01:40:44 --> 01:40:49 Doesn't seem to have deterred her in any way, shape or form.
01:40:49 --> 01:40:54 Which is the whole point of having the fight, right?
01:40:54 --> 01:41:05 And I got that theme from Kelly's book, but it applies to everything that we're dealing with, right?
01:41:05 --> 01:41:13 Especially during this time in our lives as Americans, the 250th year of our existence, right?
01:41:14 --> 01:41:17 Having the fight is more important than ever.
01:41:18 --> 01:41:23 And so I don't know how long I'm going to talk today, but I do want to read something.
01:41:24 --> 01:41:28 And this was mentioned during Dr. McLemore's interview, but,
01:41:28 --> 01:41:33 you know, we just kind of glossed over that because she was trying to paint
01:41:33 --> 01:41:35 a big picture where we were.
01:41:35 --> 01:41:42 But this lady named Claire Cook Collin, she is the executive director of a nonprofit
01:41:42 --> 01:41:45 in Missouri called Progress, Missouri.
01:41:46 --> 01:41:49 And she wrote an editorial column.
01:41:51 --> 01:41:56 And so when y'all listen to this, you know, it'll be out of the news cycle and all that.
01:41:57 --> 01:42:01 But I wanted to have a permanent record. She wrote this in the Kansas City Star.
01:42:02 --> 01:42:09 And I think it encapsulizes a lot of what normal human beings should feel.
01:42:11 --> 01:42:15 Normal Americans should feel at this particular point. Like I said,
01:42:15 --> 01:42:21 by the time that this airs, it'll be, you know, 72 hours old or whatever.
01:42:22 --> 01:42:30 But, you know, it is something that I think that we should be cognizant of.
01:42:31 --> 01:42:40 So let me see if I can do this without dealing with some other technical stuff.
01:42:40 --> 01:42:41 I'll just hold on for a second.
01:42:41 --> 01:42:44 All right, let's see if I can do it now.
01:42:44 --> 01:42:48 All right. So she said,
01:42:48 --> 01:42:53 in the first week of Black History Month, the president of the United States
01:42:53 --> 01:42:59 chose to amplify a post that inserted an apparently AI generated video depicting
01:42:59 --> 01:43:02 Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes.
01:43:02 --> 01:43:06 Let's call this what it is. It isn't edgy.
01:43:06 --> 01:43:12 It isn't political humor. And as White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt
01:43:12 --> 01:43:16 confirmed, it wasn't an accident. It's racism.
01:43:17 --> 01:43:23 Blatant, dehumanizing textbook racism coming from the highest office in the country.
01:43:24 --> 01:43:29 While most Americans had no trouble recognizing that, every Republican member
01:43:29 --> 01:43:35 of Missouri's congressional delegation has had trouble saying a single word about it so far.
01:43:36 --> 01:43:41 Representatives, Missouri Representative Emanuel Cleaver immediately condemned
01:43:41 --> 01:43:48 the post as vile and urged Americans to refuse to be the worst version of themselves.
01:43:48 --> 01:43:53 His Republican colleagues, silent as of this writing.
01:43:53 --> 01:43:57 Let's be honest about what that means.
01:43:57 --> 01:44:02 Silence from elected officials isn't neutrality, it's a decision.
01:44:02 --> 01:44:08 And there are only two explanations. They either agree with it or they're too cowardly to speak.
01:44:09 --> 01:44:11 Neither one is leadership.
01:44:12 --> 01:44:16 This shouldn't be complicated. You shouldn't need a communication strategy or
01:44:16 --> 01:44:21 a pollster to decide whether comparing Black Americans to animals is wrong.
01:44:21 --> 01:44:25 You shouldn't need party permission to say racism is racism.
01:44:25 --> 01:44:30 In fact, other Republicans in the Senate are saying it out loud.
01:44:31 --> 01:44:35 Tim Scott, the only black Republican in the U.S. Senate, called this the most
01:44:35 --> 01:44:38 racist thing he has seen come out of the White House.
01:44:38 --> 01:44:44 If he can say it plainly, what exactly is stopping Missouri's delegation?
01:44:44 --> 01:44:48 What's stopping Josh Howley? What's stopping Eric Schmidt?
01:44:50 --> 01:44:54 Are politicians who rarely miss a chance to get on camera. They issue statements
01:44:54 --> 01:44:57 about just about everything.
01:44:57 --> 01:45:01 They can fire off outrage tweets in seconds.
01:45:01 --> 01:45:05 But when the president spreads racist propaganda about the Obamas,
01:45:05 --> 01:45:07 suddenly they have nothing to say.
01:45:08 --> 01:45:13 That is not restraint. That's cowardice. Or worse, complicity.
01:45:14 --> 01:45:19 Because silence from people in power sends a message. It tells black Missourians
01:45:19 --> 01:45:21 that their dignity isn't worth defending.
01:45:22 --> 01:45:25 It tells kids watching that this behavior is normal.
01:45:26 --> 01:45:30 It tells the country that Missouri's leaders will tolerate anything,
01:45:30 --> 01:45:35 anything, as long as it keeps them in good standing with their party.
01:45:35 --> 01:45:38 Public service is supposed to require a spine.
01:45:39 --> 01:45:43 If our elected officials can't muster the basic moral clarity to condemn open
01:45:43 --> 01:45:48 racism, what exactly are they fighting for on our behalf?
01:45:48 --> 01:45:53 You don't have to be a Democrat to draw this line. You just have to have a conscience.
01:45:54 --> 01:46:00 Missourians deserve leaders who will say this is wrong without checking first to see how it polls.
01:46:01 --> 01:46:06 Right now, too many of our representatives look less like leaders and more like careerists.
01:46:07 --> 01:46:13 People so focused on protecting their jobs, that they'll swallow their alleged values to do it.
01:46:13 --> 01:46:17 History is very clear about how this plays out.
01:46:17 --> 01:46:23 It rarely judges the loud racists kindly, and it judges the people who stayed
01:46:23 --> 01:46:26 silent right alongside them.
01:46:26 --> 01:46:28 This moment shouldn't be hard.
01:46:29 --> 01:46:34 Condemn the racism, say it's unacceptable. The fact that Missouri Republicans
01:46:34 --> 01:46:38 can't even do that tells us everything we need to know, Right?
01:46:39 --> 01:46:41 So that was...
01:46:43 --> 01:46:50 Again, that was Claire Cook-Collin, and she is the executive director of the
01:46:50 --> 01:46:53 nonprofit Progress Missouri.
01:46:54 --> 01:47:01 So basically what she said, you know, you can interchange Missouri for Mississippi.
01:47:04 --> 01:47:07 You can change Missouri to Georgia.
01:47:07 --> 01:47:13 You can change Missouri to any
01:47:13 --> 01:47:21 other state that has Republican members of Congress, Louisiana, Alabama,
01:47:22 --> 01:47:26 Florida, you know, just flip it around.
01:47:26 --> 01:47:34 Just insert here, right? Now, there have been reports that some members did
01:47:34 --> 01:47:38 not go public with their criticism, but they literally called the White House.
01:47:39 --> 01:47:45 And the spin from that was, you know, after they finally deleted it,
01:47:45 --> 01:47:48 I think it took them several hours to finally take it down.
01:47:50 --> 01:47:55 A staffer did it, right? It's, you know, like in a game of Clue,
01:47:56 --> 01:47:58 you know, the big joke is the butler did it, right?
01:47:58 --> 01:48:02 In Washington, when something goes down, the staffer did it.
01:48:02 --> 01:48:05 That's usually how that works, right?
01:48:06 --> 01:48:16 And, you know, but the time of day that it was released, it had an indication
01:48:16 --> 01:48:20 that the staffer was the president himself, right?
01:48:20 --> 01:48:26 Because the president has been known to stay up all night, get on his true social
01:48:26 --> 01:48:31 platform and message away. Right.
01:48:32 --> 01:48:39 So it is what it is. And this is not the first time that this administration,
01:48:40 --> 01:48:45 this individual has disrespected black people in February.
01:48:46 --> 01:48:54 It's almost like this is what he does, and I guess there is a base that he appeals to by doing that.
01:48:55 --> 01:48:58 I just, you know, I've gotten to the point now,
01:48:58 --> 01:49:07 and I get that there are people who identify as Republican, who believes in
01:49:07 --> 01:49:11 principles of the Republican Party pre-Trump.
01:49:11 --> 01:49:16 And they, you know, so when he does things or they support people other than
01:49:16 --> 01:49:22 him, you know, they feel justified in that because they, you know,
01:49:22 --> 01:49:24 they have those core beliefs.
01:49:25 --> 01:49:31 And, you know, we as Democrats, when Democrats grew up, we deal with the individual
01:49:31 --> 01:49:34 that screws up, but we still stay loyal to the party.
01:49:36 --> 01:49:38 So I get that. But.
01:49:39 --> 01:49:44 But the difference is, if this was a Democrat in this day and age,
01:49:45 --> 01:49:48 because there were a time when the Democrats were just as racist,
01:49:48 --> 01:49:52 if not more so, right? Woodrow Wilson was a Democrat.
01:49:52 --> 01:49:57 And he had the Birth of the Nation show. You thought Melania was something.
01:49:59 --> 01:50:02 He had the Birth of the Nation premiere at the White House.
01:50:03 --> 01:50:09 He filmed. He watched the film. And for those of y'all who don't know, of a certain time,
01:50:10 --> 01:50:15 The Birth of the Nation was the movie that basically made the Ku Klux Klan like
01:50:15 --> 01:50:18 heroes, American heroes, right?
01:50:19 --> 01:50:24 It was taken from a book called The Klansman, right?
01:50:25 --> 01:50:34 And so, you know, so I get it. If this was happening now, in our lifetime,
01:50:34 --> 01:50:37 we probably would have ran Woodrow Wilson out of office.
01:50:37 --> 01:50:42 He wouldn't have got a second term, at least not on the Democratic ticket, you know.
01:50:43 --> 01:50:47 But, you know, so I, and then the other thing is I'm not really surprised.
01:50:49 --> 01:50:54 It, but, you know, the point I'm trying to make with these folks,
01:50:54 --> 01:51:00 it's like, but just don't try to, I guess, don't try to defend it to me, right?
01:51:01 --> 01:51:05 Either you condemn it or you don't. And if you don't condemn it,
01:51:05 --> 01:51:09 then that tells me what side you're on.
01:51:10 --> 01:51:16 And we'll deal with that, you know? While you're in office, we'll still try
01:51:16 --> 01:51:21 to work around you or even try to convince you for certain issues to vote for,
01:51:22 --> 01:51:26 whether that's in Congress or the state legislature where you live, whatever.
01:51:26 --> 01:51:30 But come election time, we're going to vote you out.
01:51:30 --> 01:51:33 So just understand that that's part of the deal.
01:51:33 --> 01:51:38 When you decide that you don't want black people or you don't respect black
01:51:38 --> 01:51:43 people, then black people are going to vote that way.
01:51:43 --> 01:51:48 And people still say, well, why do black people just constantly vote for the
01:51:48 --> 01:51:54 Democrats, because apparently the Democrats haven't been as stupid as to be
01:51:54 --> 01:51:55 totally disrespectful.
01:51:55 --> 01:51:59 There are Black people that have been elected as Democrats, right?
01:52:00 --> 01:52:05 And, you know, I've had people on the show that have made the argument that we shouldn't.
01:52:06 --> 01:52:08 Doesn't matter if they're Republican, Independent, whatever,
01:52:09 --> 01:52:16 political scientists, or, you know, we shouldn't just vote for Democrats.
01:52:16 --> 01:52:20 But if the Democratic Party is the only party that gives a damn about us,
01:52:20 --> 01:52:25 or at least acts like they do, what choice do we have, right?
01:52:25 --> 01:52:29 Because the Republican Party, even though there are Republicans elected in the
01:52:29 --> 01:52:32 Republican Party at a federal level.
01:52:33 --> 01:52:39 Those representatives brag on the fact that they represent districts that aren't majority black.
01:52:40 --> 01:52:45 So they don't carry an agenda that helps black people. They carry an agenda
01:52:45 --> 01:52:47 that helps Donald Trump and the Republicans.
01:52:48 --> 01:52:53 Now, they'll try to make the argument that it will help black people.
01:52:53 --> 01:52:57 But even Tim Scott said, yeah, not so much.
01:52:59 --> 01:53:06 Switching parties, but at least his reflexes kicked in and said,
01:53:06 --> 01:53:08 that's racist. Stop that.
01:53:09 --> 01:53:16 Right? And if Byron Donalds or Wesley Hunt or I guess that brother out of California or whoever.
01:53:17 --> 01:53:21 Brother Jones out of Michigan, whatever, if y'all just said that's racist,
01:53:22 --> 01:53:24 okay, at least we know the reflexes are still there.
01:53:25 --> 01:53:29 Byron Donalds won't say that because he wants to be governor of Florida.
01:53:30 --> 01:53:36 And he thinks that'll turn off the Republicans, which is an indictment about
01:53:36 --> 01:53:40 the base that he's trying to court and him.
01:53:40 --> 01:53:44 But, you know, that's the game of politics.
01:53:44 --> 01:53:49 You're trying to build support. So if you say anything that alienates that support,
01:53:49 --> 01:53:51 well, that diminishes your chances of winning.
01:53:52 --> 01:53:56 Now, what that means down the road, what that means in the afterlife,
01:53:57 --> 01:53:58 a whole different discussion.
01:53:58 --> 01:54:03 But in his mindset, now Byron might have been one of the ones to call.
01:54:03 --> 01:54:06 They didn't say which Republicans called. They wouldn't reveal those names.
01:54:07 --> 01:54:11 Maybe he was one of the ones to call. He definitely has the right to,
01:54:11 --> 01:54:16 considering how much he put himself out there to get the president reelected.
01:54:17 --> 01:54:23 Wesley Hunt could make that call. But Wesley Hunt said he didn't have a problem
01:54:23 --> 01:54:24 sleeping in the Robert E.
01:54:24 --> 01:54:27 Lee barracks because he said, I'm at West Point.
01:54:27 --> 01:54:30 What am I going to do? All the freshmen have to stay there.
01:54:31 --> 01:54:35 But, you know, now that you're a member of Congress and you're an alumnus at
01:54:35 --> 01:54:39 West Point, you could probably say, change the name.
01:54:41 --> 01:54:46 Now with, you know, the historical, the sentimental historical value that P-Hex
01:54:46 --> 01:54:51 staff has toward these people, he would not honor it, I guess.
01:54:53 --> 01:54:58 Or maybe they couldn't find another person named Lee that went to West Point
01:54:58 --> 01:55:04 and did well and they could rename it for and just still keep it as the Lee barracks. I don't know.
01:55:05 --> 01:55:09 That's what he did with Fort Bragg. So, you know, I've been,
01:55:09 --> 01:55:13 I noticed that a lot of folks that I interacted with in Mississippi,
01:55:13 --> 01:55:21 former colleagues of mine who have been really getting on Facebook or anything
01:55:21 --> 01:55:27 else, trying to defend this current age of republicanism.
01:55:28 --> 01:55:36 And, you know, one went as far as to say a tone doesn't symbolize fascism.
01:55:37 --> 01:55:42 And, you know, they're trying to defend people getting shot in the face or shot
01:55:42 --> 01:55:45 in the back of the head in Minnesota. Right?
01:55:45 --> 01:55:50 You know. And then when they come at me, it's like, well, Eric,
01:55:50 --> 01:55:51 you don't know what you're talking about.
01:55:51 --> 01:55:57 I was like, so you went to the law enforcement academy at some time in your life? Because I did.
01:55:57 --> 01:56:02 Have you filled out a use of force report? I have.
01:56:02 --> 01:56:05 So what are we talking about?
01:56:05 --> 01:56:12 All right. But even off of that minutia, it's like just the whole concept that
01:56:12 --> 01:56:19 they want to make our argument against this administration more about our emotions.
01:56:19 --> 01:56:25 And I guess that's because their politics is based on emotion.
01:56:26 --> 01:56:31 There are people in this country that feel as though that they are being ignored.
01:56:33 --> 01:56:41 Neglected. Their feelings are hurt. And most of them have less melanin in their skin than I do.
01:56:42 --> 01:56:45 They have more recessive biological genes than I do.
01:56:45 --> 01:56:53 And so they think because America is becoming a country where African-Americans
01:56:53 --> 01:56:58 and Latino-Americans and Asian-Americans are becoming the majority collectively,
01:56:59 --> 01:57:02 that they're feeling some kind of way.
01:57:02 --> 01:57:09 And the reality is that all people want to do is live their life and not be
01:57:09 --> 01:57:15 restricted because of their ethnic background or their physical features.
01:57:16 --> 01:57:21 They want to be given the same opportunity to go to school, to go to church.
01:57:23 --> 01:57:27 To get a job, to live in a crime-free neighborhood.
01:57:28 --> 01:57:32 You know, those are just basic things that we want. We want to be able to go
01:57:32 --> 01:57:36 to the grocery store and be able to afford the groceries that we need.
01:57:37 --> 01:57:42 We want to be able to buy a house, be able to afford a house mortgage, right?
01:57:42 --> 01:57:44 Or a car even, right?
01:57:46 --> 01:57:51 Some of us would like to take vacations. You know, you shouldn't have to wait
01:57:51 --> 01:57:58 till you're old and gray like me to decide, yeah, I might want to use this passport that I got.
01:57:58 --> 01:58:06 You know, life is tricky that way. But, you know, and some people have, can do that.
01:58:06 --> 01:58:12 But the hustle that they have to do in order to achieve the lifestyle they want,
01:58:13 --> 01:58:14 it doesn't make any sense.
01:58:15 --> 01:58:19 That people have to have two or three jobs just to live a lifestyle that they
01:58:19 --> 01:58:24 want to live or to take care of basic necessities that they need.
01:58:25 --> 01:58:27 Eric, what does that have to do with racism? Everything.
01:58:28 --> 01:58:33 Because most of these folks, especially black folks, are the ones that have
01:58:33 --> 01:58:36 to do all this hustling, all this work.
01:58:36 --> 01:58:41 I wrote a terrible, terrible blog. It was probably the worst blog I ever wrote.
01:58:42 --> 01:58:45 And it was about hustling hard, right?
01:58:46 --> 01:58:52 And, you know, it was kind of like trying to encourage people to do what they
01:58:52 --> 01:58:57 need to do and at the same time, like critiquing the fact that we have to do that.
01:58:58 --> 01:59:03 But it was, I mean, when I looked at it after I put it out there, I said, this is awful.
01:59:03 --> 01:59:08 But it was a song I heard and it kind of prompted me to write it.
01:59:08 --> 01:59:16 But I guess it was terrible in the sense that I really didn't know what I wanted to say.
01:59:17 --> 01:59:22 Because on the one hand, you want people to do what they need to do.
01:59:22 --> 01:59:26 But as somebody that has been in public service, it's hard for me to see people
01:59:26 --> 01:59:31 going from one job to the next and barely having time for their family,
01:59:31 --> 01:59:33 barely having time for themselves.
01:59:35 --> 01:59:38 Just to make ends meet. Thank you.
01:59:39 --> 01:59:45 You know, people that defend the president, either verbally or silently,
01:59:46 --> 01:59:50 think that's okay for y'all, right?
01:59:50 --> 01:59:56 They think that's okay for us, especially black people, to do that.
01:59:57 --> 02:00:01 Now, they'll turn around and call us lazy on the flip side, right?
02:00:02 --> 02:00:07 They'll call Latinos lazy. or, but, and that's the other thing,
02:00:07 --> 02:00:09 the Latinos are lazy, but they're taking our jobs.
02:00:11 --> 02:00:15 So, you know, when you have to navigate through all this hypocrisy,
02:00:15 --> 02:00:20 you have to navigate through all of this, these feelings these people have,
02:00:20 --> 02:00:25 it makes it really, really unbearable for the rest of us to try to exist because
02:00:25 --> 02:00:30 everything they're doing is based off of their feelings and their pent-up anger.
02:00:30 --> 02:00:36 They're mad because Billie Eilish said at an awards show a historical fact.
02:00:37 --> 02:00:41 She expressed it in an opinion saying that nobody is illegal on stolen land,
02:00:41 --> 02:00:46 which is something that Native Americans have been saying forever, right?
02:00:46 --> 02:00:49 But there's nobody Native American that's in this administration.
02:00:50 --> 02:00:54 There's never been a Native American elected president of the United States.
02:00:55 --> 02:00:58 So you've never heard that on a national front.
02:00:59 --> 02:01:04 But if you have friends who are Native American or if you follow people like
02:01:04 --> 02:01:06 Billie Eilish, you will hear that.
02:01:06 --> 02:01:12 And then some goofball, I don't even know if he's from the United States, showed up at her house.
02:01:13 --> 02:01:17 And, you know, I've heard some people say her house is worth $12 million or whatever.
02:01:17 --> 02:01:24 If you've paid attention to this young woman, first of all, she lives with her brother. Thank you.
02:01:25 --> 02:01:30 The rest of her family, too. I don't know. I remember something at one point,
02:01:30 --> 02:01:32 all of her family was living together.
02:01:32 --> 02:01:34 And I think her and her brother finally got their own place.
02:01:35 --> 02:01:41 And all they do is just produce music, which is why she's one of the best out there.
02:01:42 --> 02:01:46 If you're into that kind of music she's in, she's one of the best to ever do
02:01:46 --> 02:01:50 it. And she's young. I mean, I don't think she's even 30.
02:01:50 --> 02:01:54 And she's one like, by the time her career is over, she'll probably have won
02:01:54 --> 02:01:57 more awards than any other artist in the history of the business.
02:01:58 --> 02:02:02 That's how good she is. And she's dedicated her life to doing it.
02:02:02 --> 02:02:07 But she's not naive to what's going on in the world. And if James Woods,
02:02:08 --> 02:02:10 the guy who played Byron Day-Lebeck with Finnegan, Mississippi,
02:02:10 --> 02:02:12 can have an opinion, then why can't she?
02:02:13 --> 02:02:19 Because based on what James Woods says and what Billie Eilish says, she's more informed.
02:02:21 --> 02:02:25 So I want to inform people. It doesn't matter if they are musicians or actors
02:02:25 --> 02:02:28 or athletes or bus drivers.
02:02:29 --> 02:02:35 Right. I don't care what profession you're in. If you have an informed opinion, let's hear it.
02:02:35 --> 02:02:38 Kind of that First Amendment thing, right? Yeah.
02:02:40 --> 02:02:48 So, but this guy shows up at her house and, you know, and he quotes it at $3 million and,
02:02:49 --> 02:02:53 more accurate than what Jesse Waters, anybody else on Fox says,
02:02:54 --> 02:02:58 because they're saying her house is like worth 12 million or whatever the case may be.
02:02:59 --> 02:03:04 What I know about this young lady, if her house was worth $12 million at this
02:03:04 --> 02:03:05 point, she'd probably sell it.
02:03:08 --> 02:03:13 Just easy money. If it went from three to 12, let's make that happen.
02:03:14 --> 02:03:18 Then she'll find another two, $3 million crib to crash it with her brother.
02:03:19 --> 02:03:24 But this guy shows up at her house and then he knocks on the door and,
02:03:24 --> 02:03:30 you know, which considering that she's a celebrity, that was a pretty impressive feat.
02:03:31 --> 02:03:34 You got that close to knock on the door. Right.
02:03:35 --> 02:03:39 And, you know, and then it's just kind of like, well, you know,
02:03:39 --> 02:03:44 if this is stolen land and why does she have a three million dollar house?
02:03:44 --> 02:03:49 So you want her to be homeless on historically stolen land.
02:03:49 --> 02:03:51 For your feelings.
02:03:54 --> 02:03:59 When you get caught up in your feelings, you lose logic.
02:04:00 --> 02:04:05 And that's why one minute you're saying everybody has a right to carry a gun,
02:04:05 --> 02:04:10 and then the next day you're saying, well, you can't carry a gun if you protest
02:04:10 --> 02:04:15 ICE or the police, or if you protest anything that we believe in,
02:04:15 --> 02:04:17 you can't carry a gun, right?
02:04:18 --> 02:04:24 Need I remind you that the NRA pushed for gun control in the 1960s,
02:04:25 --> 02:04:31 late 1960s, early 1970s in California because the Black Panthers were walking
02:04:31 --> 02:04:37 around with guns to protect people from police brutality, Black people.
02:04:39 --> 02:04:42 California was the first state to have gun control.
02:04:43 --> 02:04:49 And it was a Republican named Ronald Reagan that pushed it. And the NRA supported it.
02:04:51 --> 02:04:54 Because, you know, the Republicans always like to twist the history and say,
02:04:54 --> 02:04:59 oh, well, the Democrats were, you know, they were the slave owners, which is true.
02:05:00 --> 02:05:06 But what is also true is that the Republicans in California and the NRA got
02:05:06 --> 02:05:13 the first gun control passed in the United States in California because of the Black Panthers.
02:05:14 --> 02:05:22 So the hypocrisy has always been out there, always, especially with this particular group of people.
02:05:22 --> 02:05:29 And over these 60 years plus, you know, they've switched parties because all
02:05:29 --> 02:05:34 those people that the Republicans talk about being slave owners, their descendants,
02:05:34 --> 02:05:39 and those who wanted the South to rise again, they switched parties and became
02:05:39 --> 02:05:41 y'all, the Republicans.
02:05:41 --> 02:05:46 And this was all in my lifetime, right? 1968.
02:05:48 --> 02:05:53 So, you know, so we've been dealing with the hypocrisy for a long time. So none of this is new.
02:05:53 --> 02:06:00 The racism, the hypocrisy, the lies, we've been dealing with that.
02:06:00 --> 02:06:04 It just seems as though now, because we have all of this media,
02:06:05 --> 02:06:07 we're just more exposed to it.
02:06:07 --> 02:06:12 Whether it's on the internet, on your phone, social media feeds,
02:06:12 --> 02:06:18 or, you know, on your television, we got access to it all the time.
02:06:19 --> 02:06:26 And we've got more people feeling emboldened to express that, right?
02:06:26 --> 02:06:33 Because, you know, depicting the Obamas as apes, there's nothing new.
02:06:33 --> 02:06:41 I mean, they've accused Michelle Obama of being trans, right?
02:06:41 --> 02:06:48 Which offends a lot of trans people, by the way. Just so you understand, that terrible.
02:06:48 --> 02:06:51 They hold Michelle Obama up as a female icon.
02:06:53 --> 02:07:01 And, you know, that's totally disrespectful to their community as well as the Obamas, right?
02:07:01 --> 02:07:03 And that's the way you intended that to be.
02:07:04 --> 02:07:08 But, you know, they've said terrible things about it.
02:07:08 --> 02:07:15 I mean, a man built his political careers and his wife, the one that's got the movie out.
02:07:15 --> 02:07:19 They built their political career saying that Obama wasn't even a citizen.
02:07:20 --> 02:07:24 The audacity of somebody who is an immigrant to try to talk about somebody else's
02:07:24 --> 02:07:28 birthright who illegally got here, right?
02:07:29 --> 02:07:36 An Einstein visa, Elon Musk, undocumented immigrant, right?
02:07:36 --> 02:07:40 See, all these people that are trying to say all these bad things,
02:07:40 --> 02:07:46 because they're the classic human beings that once they get in the door, they shut it.
02:07:46 --> 02:07:51 Once they get on the other side of the gate, they close the gate and become
02:07:51 --> 02:07:53 the gatekeeper and say, you can't come in.
02:07:54 --> 02:07:58 They made it. They maneuvered their way through the system and got in.
02:07:58 --> 02:08:02 But don't let, don't let a Latino do it.
02:08:02 --> 02:08:04 Don't let a black Nigerian do it.
02:08:06 --> 02:08:08 Value from Haiti in at all, right?
02:08:11 --> 02:08:15 So this is all nothing new. And like I said, by the time you hear this,
02:08:16 --> 02:08:18 it'll be out of the main news cycle.
02:08:18 --> 02:08:23 But just because it's out of the news cycle doesn't mean that it's not still
02:08:23 --> 02:08:25 being dealt with, right?
02:08:26 --> 02:08:31 They just sentenced the guy to life that tried to take out President Trump at the golf course.
02:08:31 --> 02:08:36 I don't even think they, you know, still trying to figure out the Pennsylvania
02:08:36 --> 02:08:40 thing, but, you know, but they, they just send that guy to life.
02:08:41 --> 02:08:45 Things are going on. The Mangione case, a young man who was accused of killing
02:08:45 --> 02:08:49 the insurance executive, health insurance executive, you know,
02:08:49 --> 02:08:52 he's going through his legal proceedings, right?
02:08:53 --> 02:08:57 You know, Don Lemon and Georgia Fort and Nakema Armstrong and her friends,
02:08:58 --> 02:09:05 Chantel, I believe, and one other guy, Ted, I believe, they still have to deal with their court case.
02:09:05 --> 02:09:09 The congresswoman from New Jersey is still dealing with her court case, right?
02:09:11 --> 02:09:16 Department is still trying to put Letitia James in jail. None of this stuff
02:09:16 --> 02:09:19 has stopped just because the news is not covering it.
02:09:19 --> 02:09:26 These people are having the fight to challenge these things.
02:09:27 --> 02:09:34 So, you know, what we have to be disciplined in is even though it's not coming
02:09:34 --> 02:09:39 up on your news screen every day, your news feed doesn't mean it's not happening.
02:09:39 --> 02:09:42 We have to be disciplined to remember.
02:09:43 --> 02:09:46 We have to be disciplined never to forget.
02:09:47 --> 02:09:50 And we have to be disciplined to hold these people accountable.
02:09:51 --> 02:09:56 Those voting records in Georgia have not come back, despite the motions and
02:09:56 --> 02:09:58 whatever the judge says or not.
02:09:58 --> 02:10:01 They still haven't given those records back to the state of Georgia,
02:10:02 --> 02:10:03 primarily Fulton County.
02:10:03 --> 02:10:11 We still don't know if all of the documents that were stolen and at Mar-a-Lago were ever returned.
02:10:11 --> 02:10:13 We know a majority of them were because the FBI went and got them.
02:10:14 --> 02:10:15 But did they get all of them?
02:10:16 --> 02:10:22 See, all of this stuff, man, and he bombards you with all of this stuff, deliberately.
02:10:22 --> 02:10:25 That's what Steve Batten told them. That's what Ray Cohn told them,
02:10:25 --> 02:10:27 and Cohen and all these other folks.
02:10:29 --> 02:10:33 Just bombard them. Roger Stone, all these people. This is part of the strategy,
02:10:33 --> 02:10:35 just to hit you with all this stuff.
02:10:35 --> 02:10:44 Our job is to remember and to hold them accountable, whether that's personal
02:10:44 --> 02:10:49 boycotts on products, whether it's voting,
02:10:50 --> 02:10:55 writing letters to your members of Congress, to your state legislators.
02:10:55 --> 02:10:58 Got to hold these people accountable.
02:10:58 --> 02:11:00 Can't forget what they're doing.
02:11:01 --> 02:11:03 If you want to protest, protest.
02:11:05 --> 02:11:11 Remember who these people are and vote and act accordingly.
02:11:12 --> 02:11:16 All right, that's all I got. Thank y'all for listening. Until next time.