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Insight News
March 14, 2022 - March 20, 2022
Vol. 49 No. 11• The Journal For Community News, Business & The Arts • insightnews.com
BLACKFACE
Hennepin Comissioner Irene Fernando demands:
Fire employees, supervisors
Pattern of racism among management and employees at Hennepin Healthcare
Multiple photos have surfaced of two Hennepin Healthcare employees, including the current EMS Deputy Chief and a paramedic, in blackface. One of these photos may have been taken at an event hosted or sanctioned by Hennepin EMS, said Hennepin County Commissioner, Irene Fernando, who represents North Minneapolis and Northwest suburbs. She called the employees’ conduct abhorrent. “Dressing in blackface and treating race, ethnicity, or culture as a costume is degrading, extremely racist, and cannot be tolerated. The employees in the photos should be fired, and supervisors who were aware of this misconduct should be disciplined and removed from leadership positions.” Fernando said in a March 2 statement. Fernando also said a “Hennepin Healthcare doctor continued to train law enforcement on Excited Delirium after explicit instructions to end training on the topic. This is unacceptable and a direct violation of an organizational directive. Excited Delirium is a controversial diagnosis that is not recognized by the American Medical Association. It is clear that this diagnosis is rooted in systemic racism and has been used to
justify the assault and murder of victims of police violence, particularly Black, Indigenous, and people of color. The doctor who conducted this training should be fired for his actions, and supervisors who were aware of his misconduct should be disciplined and removed from leadership positions.” Fernando said Hennepin County has declared racism a public health crisis, and that it is against Hennepin’s mission to engage in or encourage racist behavior. “We cannot tolerate conduct, especially from employees in leadership, that is in direct violation of those ideas and goals, she said. “Hennepin Healthcare management received information on this misconduct weeks ago — it is appalling that no one has faced consequences to date.” Fernando joined the Hennepin Healthcare Board in 2020. Hennepin Healthcare Board adoped Health Equity as an organizational value and told staff leadership to actively address systemic racism. The lack of or slow management reaction to the incident represent a harmful pattern that damages community trust, Fernando said. She said the incidents are part of a long series of racist incidents and practices by Hennepin Healthcare employees and leadership. “It is clear that racism is deeply rooted within the organization and must be addressed directly through systemic changes in both the policy and leadership of Hennepin Healthcare,” Fernando said.
Courageous Whistle blower: The photos, featuring EMS Deputy Chief Amber Brown with a current and former paramedic, arrived in the inboxes of Hennepin Healthcare leadership officials Feb. 15. The e-mail said one of the images was taken at a Hennepin EMS event. “These are the kind of people on your payroll,” said the e-mail. “Now imagine the conversations happening around the time clock.” The e-mail said EMS management was aware of the photos, noting another EMS deputy chief, Mike LeVake, had “liked” one of the images on Facebook. And Brown is in a leadership role “for God’s sake,” the message said. The photos would “not help Hennepin’s already stained image,” the e-mail concluded. Brown, LeVake and the paramedic did not respond to requests for comments. The hospital system was already managing a crisis. The morning they received the e-mail, Hennepin’s leadership members appeared in a Star Tribune article apologizing for another employee and promising to address internal racism.
Black Feminist work finds a home at UMass By Saliha Bayrak, Assistant News Editor March 1, 2022 This article was originally published in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian (https:// dailycollegian.com/2022/03/ black-feminist-work-finds-ahome-at-umass/) and republished with permission from the author. Saliha Bayrak is an assistant news editor at the Massachusetts Daily Collegian. Editor’s Note: Irma McClaurin is a long-time columnist for Insight News, 2015 winner of Black Press in America award for column writing, and currently the Culture and Education Editor. “I don’t want to see any more books about ‘Hidden Figures,’ I want us to be visible and heard” Irma McClaurin does not consider herself an archivist, but she understands the power in preserving Black history, especially after the decades-long efforts to erase it. Initially moved by a desire to preserve her own personal documents and academic work, McClaurin sought to create the Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive (BFA), which now reside in the University of Massachusetts W.E.B. Dubois Library with the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center (SCUA). The legacy project then became a mission to document the presence of other Black women. “History is told through archives, if we’re not in the archives, then our history doesn’t become part of that American narrative,” McClaurin said. “So having a dedicated archive means we will not be forgotten.” The collection stands as a dedicated archival space for the contributions of Black women and includes McClaurin’s own work and items, as well as that of other
Black feminist anthropologists like Carolyn Martin Shaw. The boxes with McClaurin’s work are a compilation of her academic and personal life and include anything from personal letters, grant approvals, magazines on Black art, copies of poems, papers, books, and flyers collected through time, to a binder labeled “global Black feminism” and a course syllabus with “pizza party” scribbled into the class schedule. “The materiality of our lives, and our whole lives, not just me as an academic, but as a mother, as a poet, you know, as a community contributor, all of that gets preserved in a way,” said McClaurin on her vision for the archive. McClaurin is an anthropologist who looks at inequality at the intersections of gender, race, class and ethnicity. She is also a poet and has had a robust career in academia, having served as the first female president of Shaw University among many other roles. “Many Black women of my generation, we were some of the first to go into predominantly white institutions. And I think about the fact that if something happened to me, my family would come in and look around this room that’s got folders and files and boxes. And they’d say, we just need to clean up this stuff,” McClaurin said. Before McClaurin was recognized as a “Distinguished Alumni” and the collection was announced in 2016, McClaurin spoke with the late Robert Cox, who was the head of the SCUA at the time, to present her vision in the early steps of its actualization. “I had someone at the library who understood the importance of it, and who supported me in sort of developing that vision,” said McClaurin on Cox. Along with the “Irma McClaurin Papers” and the “Carolyn Martin Shaw Papers,” the archives also include hundreds
Photo courtesy of Irma McClaurin
Irma McClaurin, PhD of rich photos that McClaurin has taken over the years, featuring trailblazers like Toni Cade Bambara and James Baldwin. McClaurin is continuing to collect work and hopes for the BFA to be an expansive yet concentrated resource for those who are looking to tell the “fuller” story of the United States and the world. She also sees is it as an antidote to the burying or often too late unearthing of the contributions of Black women. “I don’t want to see any more books about ‘Hidden Figures,’ I want us to be visible and heard,” McClaurin said. Carolyn Martin Shaw also sees the documentation of her career as a reflection of social change, explaining that you get to “see a person engaging in ideas, how those have changed over time, and how that may or may not have been reflected in their lives,” through the archives. Shaw is an anthropologist whose academic work focuses on African women in Zimbabwe and Kenya, often looking at the social values around virginity, purity and the impacts of colonialism on race, gender and class. When McClaurin began seeking individuals who were interested in preserving their
work in the BFA, Shaw reached out to McClaurin, and together they began going through Shaw’s materials. Through 10 boxes, the archives include her unpublished and published works, coursework from her time as a teacher, and personal items such as photographs. For Shaw, the personal items included capture “what it means to live and work as a Black feminist in the United States.” “So the archives, personally, for me, was a wonderful moment for me to reflect on what I’ve done, and to be able to figure out what it is I’d like to share,” Shaw said. She also spoke to the general importance of the archives to “get a sense of what was the range and diversity of Black feminism” and to fill the hole that its absence would have created in our understanding of history. Shaw’s time in graduate school and career as an academic began in the 1960s, a time when “studying women wasn’t something you wanted to do if you wanted to be taken seriously as a scholar,” Shaw said. However, the great expanse of her work covers the powerful contributions of women, their notions of themselves, and their efforts to push back against social and cultural norms. Their
dreams, aspirations, desires and their display of power that are often viewed as “illegitimate” and may often be overlooked by anthropologists. It was the experience of observing the women’s experiences in towns and villages in Zimbabwe and Kenya that made Shaw a feminist as the movement gained momentum, she explains, and made her realize that “women’s powers are so often unrecognized in anthropology, and unrecognized in their own societies.” Shaw often aims to look at what is lost and gained in the interaction of colonialism and feminism. Through her field work in Zimbabwe, she observed in what was once a heavily family bounded society, women began to make greater contact with other women in their region through the means of new institutions such as school, churches and women groups after colonialism, and began understanding themselves as a class of women. “Colonialism in itself is an oppressive system, but we are human beings and we have resilience…[we have to] ask the question about what under awful circumstances, what can people make of it?” McClaurin’s work in anthropology began with her researching the suicide of the Black journalist Leanita McClain, looking at identity formation and the factors that shaped her death. Her work has also focused on the women of Belize, attempting to understand “What are all the components that go into shaping us to become women in a society? How are we complicit in our own subordination? How do we challenge it?” McClaurin has an MFA in English as well as a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts and has served in various administrative roles. McClaurin’s roots at the University, the activist atmosphere and the existing archives at the school all
shaped her decision in considering UMass as a home for the BFA. Danielle Kovacs, the curator of collections at the SCUA, spoke on the value of having documents of social change present at the University. “UMass as a university itself has a long history of protests and demonstrations of students engaging in social change. And so, it feels very fitting to us that those collections which, even if they’re not specifically related to the history of UMass, would be part of our archives,” Kovacs said. Kovacs also spoke on the wide audience that the SCUA has the hopes of reaching with their different collections of archives. “Our hope is that we’re not just appealing to academics and scholars, but that we’re appealing to our undergraduate students, we’re appealing to community members who want to engage with these stories, we’re appealing to young students in elementary school, middle school and high school who only know about history in history books without ever really interacting with the primary sources of those original documents,” she said. The BFA is still in its early stages of development, and McClaurin is in the process of working with other’s interested in preserving their work. She ultimately hopes to have a BFA center in the future. “I see my archive, as very much being on the forefront of making sure that that material is preserved, and then presented and made available to anyone, not just academics, but community people,” McClaurin said. “My goal is to make this the largest archive of its kind in the world, where people will want to come, and they will want to put their stuff in it. But they will also want to use it as a resource to tell a story.” Saliha Bayrak can be reached at sbayrak@umass. edu and followed on Twitter @ salihabayrak_.