How Racism – And Silence – Could Hurt Your Health

Racism is often covered as a political, cultural, or news story. But how is it affecting people's health? That's the question Cara Anthony https://www.kff.org/person/cara-anthony/, a KFF News reporter, wanted to answer: not just on an individual scale, but on a community-wide one. So for the past few years, she's been reporting on a small town in the Midwest that illustrates that health issue: Sikeston, Missouri. Today on the show, Cara walks host Emily Kwong https://www.npr.org/people/767284140/emily-kwong through Sikeston's history — and what locals and medical experts have to say about how that history continues to shape the present. For more of Cara's reporting, you can check out KFF Health News' documentary and four-part podcast series, Silence in Sikeston https://kffhealthnews.org/silence-in-sikeston/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Emily Kwong?

  This message comes from Avalara Aviator. Aviator is the agent hub for tax and compliance. Purpose-built AI agents work around the clock and across business systems to help execute the work. Visit avalara.com/aviator. One quick note before we begin, short waivers. This episode talks about racial violence and references a lynching.

• 0:22Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:28Emily Kwong?

  Hey, short waivers. It's Emily Kwong, and today I am joined by one of KFF Health News's Midwest correspondents, Cara Anthony. Cara, it is really good to have you here.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Great to be here.

• 0:37Emily Kwong?

  For a few years now, you've been reporting on how racism can make a person sick. And I think it often surprises people when we focus on racism as a health story, right?

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Definitely, for sure. I mean, I'm a health reporter, and I'm also a Black woman. So when I look at an issue, those are two of the lenses I'm looking through.

• 0:55Emily Kwong?

  Totally, yeah.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  I started reporting for KFF Health News in 2019. That same year, a group of researchers found that Black men in the United States are about two and a half times more likely to be killed by police than white men. On average, they found that a young Black man had a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by police, making it one of the top six causes of death for them. It ranked just behind heart disease and cancer.

• 1:24Emily Kwong?

  Gosh, that's really devastating. Okay.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  And the immediate impact of that number is clear for young Black men. But what's maybe less clear is the impact it can have on their loved ones, right? The community around them, the people who are dealing with the after effects of racism and violence.

• 1:41Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  And this has been going on for a long time. Think about what Black communities went through during the lynching era. So I wanted to dig into all of that and find out, what's the health impact of this kind of trauma?

• 1:57Speaker 01

  I talked to Ayesha Lee about this. She's an assistant professor at Penn State

• 2:01Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  and a licensed mental health provider.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  For me, as a mental health professional, I get really cautious when using, even using the word trauma. No one actually comes in and says, hey, I'm dealing with intergenerational trauma. Can you help me? Right? You know, they don't have the language. People don't have the language for it. And so part of the generational legacy of Black families is we don't talk about our problems. We just kind of roll through them. We deal with them. We're strong and we just keep it moving forward.

• 2:30Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, that message within families to just keep it moving. I mean, did you experience this in your own family?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. And I'm not faulting my ancestors for that. Times were different then, you know? Sometimes that's what they felt they had to do to survive and to stay safe. But over time, Ayesha told me that holding hurt in hurts us.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  That silence, like it eats at our bodies. It really does. It's almost like every time we're silent, it's like a little pinprick that we do to our bodies internally. And after so long, those little pinpricks turn up as heart disease, as cancer, as, you know, all these other ailments.

• 3:15Emily Kwong?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  So Emily, for the past few years, I've been reporting on a small town that's been deeply shaped by this silence, Sykesville, Missouri. That reporting was the basis for a documentary and a podcast, both called Silence in Sykesville. I think Sykesville illustrates this intersection of racism and history and secret keeping, and how all those things combine to affect the health of an individual and of a community.

• 3:45Emily Kwong?

  Today on the show, we are headed to Sykesville with Kara Anthony as she explores how racism and violence shapes health, how that echoes throughout generations, and how to break the silence within our own family, too. You are listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 4:05Speaker 03

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• 4:11Speaker 04

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• 4:54Speaker 04

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• 5:26Emily Kwong?

  Okay, Kara, so these are hard stories to tell, but you have put so much thought and care into this reporting. You've been working on this series for four years, and it's set in Sykesville, a town in the southeast corner of Missouri. Where do you want to start?

• 5:39Speaker 01

  I want to take you back to 1942, because that year, a black man named Cleo Wright was lynched in Sykesville, Missouri.

• 5:48Speaker 05

  I just never had seen anything like it. I had heard people talking about it, but I had never seen anything like that.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  This is Mabel Cook, or Ms. Mabel, as she was introduced to me. She was a teenager in Sykesville in the 1940s, and she witnessed Cleo Wright's lynching.

• 6:03Speaker 05

  We didn't talk about it. My dad told us not to have enough to be sad. He said, "Not to worry about it, not to talk about it. Uh-huh." He said, "Here, go away. You should not talk about it." You know, "Uh-huh." He said, "Let's forget it."

• 6:17Speaker 01

  A lot of Black families went through that same thing. At the time, lynchings were a regular part of life in many parts of this country. What was surprising is that this case captured national, even international, attention. It was the first time a lynching ever led to a federal investigation, meaning the FBI investigated it as a crime for the first time.

• 6:42Emily Kwong?

  Wow, okay.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  But Emily, ultimately, it came to nothing. The all-white grand jury was sympathetic to the mob. And with time, the story was buried, like nothing had ever happened.

• 6:55Emily Kwong?

  Wow. Okay, so that was the state of things when you got to Sykeson?

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, young people don't learn about him in Sykeson schools. Older people didn't want to talk about him much either. And fast forward about 80 years, Sykeson is still dealing with racism, violence, and silence.

• 7:13Emily Kwong?

  What do you mean by that?

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Well, in 2020, Sykeson Police killed a young Black man named Denzel Taylor. Even though he was unarmed, the city's chief of public safety told me that officers believed Denzel had a gun and feared for their lives. The officers themselves declined to comment. Denzel's family later sued the city of Sykeson. The city and the family reached a wrongful death settlement for $2 million. Close to half of it went to legal fees. And in the wake of these events, there was a lot of silence. Emily, multiple people asked me why I was examining the deaths of Cleo Wright and Denzel Taylor side by side.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  As a health reporter, I wanted to focus on the trauma that remains after the violence against these men, the possible health effects for their families and their communities.

• 8:10Speaker 06

  Oftentimes, people who experience racial trauma are forced to not acknowledge it as such, or they're forced to question whether or not it happened in the first place.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Keisha Bentley Edwards is an associate professor in internal medicine at Duke University. She studies structural racism and chronic health conditions. And she knows a lot about what happens to a community after a lynching.

• 8:37Speaker 06

  When you're in a smaller city, there is no way to turn away from the people who were the perpetrators of a race-based crime. And that in and of itself is a trauma, to know that someone has victimized your family member, and you still have to say hello. You still have to say, "Good morning, ma'am." And you have to just swallow your trauma in order to make the person who committed that trauma comfortable, so that you don't put your own family members at risk.

• 9:11Emily Kwong?

  It literally requires you to silence yourself constantly as you're living your life.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Exactly. And Keisha says, "Part of the stress comes from being Black. Being aware that you may be perceived as a threat just by being alive, just by going through your everyday life, which is a factor in Black people's health." Here's Ayesha Lee again.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Imagine, every time you walk out of the door, your body, you're tightening your body, you're tensing up your body. And you're holding on to it for the entire day until you come home at night. What do we think would happen to our bodies as a result?

• 9:53Speaker 01

  That accumulated stress from both institutional racism and the racism in everyday interactions, it has documented effects. Black people age faster, get sicker, and die sooner than our white peers. And chronic stress is a proven factor.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  And that ongoing reality of structural racism and violence is making it even harder for our brains to deal with stress.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  That's what that hypervigilance does. That hypervigilance causes our bodies to tense up so that we can't fully breathe.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  That's exhausting. And as you were talking about it, like, I even feel my body just being tight as you are speaking about these things.

• 10:39Emily Kwong?

  I mean, Cara, you're really connecting the dots here between like the felt experiences and the biological health realities of being a Black person in America.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and check this out, Emily. There's a growing body of research that also suggests that living under racism could actually change how our genes work.

• 10:59Emily Kwong?

  Oh, yes, I'm familiar with this concept. I mean, this field of research came up in my reporting covering racial trauma among Asian Americans. You're talking about epigenetics.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. Researchers are still trying to figure out how stress, trauma, and genetics fit together, but it's possible that stress can change how our genes are expressed. Now, that may sound like a small thing, but it can have huge impacts, like making you more prone to certain diseases.

• 11:31Emily Kwong?

  Like cancer, diabetes, heart failure.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Exactly. And on top of how dealing with that in the present could be hurting your health, recent epigenetic research has also shown that things experienced by your ancestors in the past, your parents, or grandparents, or even great-grandparents, could also affect you.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  You know, we're not at the point yet where we can, you know, make these definitive connections that, yes, this specific gene expression has been passed down, but, you know, we are passing down this idea of hush, right? Stay silent, don't fight because you don't have power.

• 12:10Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, I mean, given that, how do people move forward? What can be done to resolve this and stop these cycles?

• 12:18Speaker 01

  There's no easy answer. I mean, short of ending anti-Black racism.

• 12:22Emily Kwong?

  That is the thing. That's fixing the problem at its source, yes.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a huge thing that's going to take all of us. But there's still a lot that can happen on a smaller scale in the meantime. There are hospitals that are trying to fix medical discrimination against patients of color, and doctors who are trying to practice what they call culturally competent care, meaning taking into consideration how something like racism could impact their patient's health. And then there's our own families. We can try to stop passing down those scars and start to heal by talking to our parents, our elders, the generation who came before us.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  This pain has...

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Compounded over generations. And so we're going to have to deconstruct it or heal it over generations, right? You know, our generation and the generations that come behind us will have little pieces of the work to do. As we put mental health more so at the forefront and as we start to communicate more and more within our families, that's how we engage in in this healing.

• 13:36Emily Kwong?

  And it sounds like, in some ways, your reporting in Sykesville has helped to catalyze some of those conversations.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  I hope so. I reported this story for months before I learned new details about a police killing in my own family. And that's part of this series as well. I ended up learning about the silences in my own family history and dealing with the intergenerational harm that's been passed down. And I think about this all the time with my own kid, Lily, because since I started reporting this project, we've been having a lot of conversations. I want you to know that we can talk about things. Because when we talk about things, we often feel better, right?

• 14:20Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Can we keep talking to each other while you grow up in life about stuff? Even hard stuff?

• 14:28Speaker 07

  Like doing 100 math facts?

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Sure. That's the biggest thing in your life right now. But yes, all of that. We're just going to keep talking to each other. So can we make a promise?

• 14:40Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  All right, cool.

• 14:43Emily Kwong?

  She's so cute.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  She's the cutest. And I really want Lily to know about her history. And part of that history is painful and sad. But I also want her to stay thoughtful and curious and encourage her to keep asking questions.

• 14:58Emily Kwong?

  You're teaching many people, like the people who listen to your show, how to do it too. Thanks so much for coming on Short Wave.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 15:08Emily Kwong?

  If you want to listen to Cara's excellent reporting, the podcast is called Silence in Sykesville. It's got four parts with some bonus features. There's also an hour-long documentary that's available now. Links to all of that are available in our show notes. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Cara, Hannah, and Tyler Jones checked the vax. Patrick Murray was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. Cara is our partner at KFF Health News. We would like to say a huge thank you to the KFF Health News team behind Silence in Sykesville, including but not limited to Cara Anthony, Simone

• 15:49Emily Kwong?

  Popper, Taylor Cook, Tanya English, and Zach Dyer. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 15:58Speaker 03

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