How Racism – And Silence – Could Hurt Your Health
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Hey, short wavers, it's Emily Kwong. And today I am joined by one of KFF Health News' Midwest correspondents, Cara Anthony. Cara, it is really good to have you here. Great to be here. 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? 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. Totally, yeah.

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 one 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. Gosh, that's really devastating. Okay. 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. 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?

I talked to Aisha Lee about this. She's an assistant professor at Penn State and a licensed mental health provider. 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 trauma

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. Yeah, that message within families to just keep it moving. I mean, did you experience this in your own family? 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, Aisha told me that holding her in hurts us. 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. Mm-hmm.

So Emily, for the past few years, I've been reporting on a small town that's been deeply shaped by this silence, Sykeston, Missouri. That reporting was the basis for a documentary and a podcast, both called Silence in Sykeston. I think Sykeston 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.

Today on the show, we are headed to Sykeston 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 Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR.

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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 Sykeston, a town in the southeast corner of Missouri. Where do you want to start? I want to take you back to 1942, because that year, a Black man named Cleo Wright was

was lynched in Sykeston, Missouri. I just never had seen anything like it. I had heard people talking about it, but I had never seen anything like that. This is Mabel Cook, or Miss Mabel as she was introduced to me. She was a teenager in Sykeston in the 1940s, and she witnessed Cleo Wright's lynching. We didn't talk about it. My dad told us not to have nothing to be saying. He told us not to worry about it, not to talk about it.

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. Wow. OK. 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.

Okay, so that was the state of things when you got to Sykeston? Yeah, young people don't learn about him in Sykeston schools. Older people didn't want to talk about him much either. And fast forward about 80 years, Sykeston is still dealing with racism, violence, and silence. What do you mean by that? Well, in 2020, Sykeston 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 Sykeston. 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. 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. Oftentimes, people who experience racial trauma are forced to not acknowledge it as such because

or they're forced to question whether or not it happened in the first place. 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.

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. It literally requires you to silence yourself constantly as you're living your life. 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. 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 onto it for the entire day until you come home at night. What do we think would happen to our bodies today

Okay.

And that ongoing reality of structural racism and violence is making it even harder for our brains to deal with stress. That's what that hypervigilance does. That hypervigilance causes our bodies to tense up so that we can't fully breathe. Yeah, 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.

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. 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. Oh, yes. I'm familiar with this concept. I mean, yeah.

This field of research came up in my reporting covering racial trauma among Asian Americans. You're talking about epigenetics. 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 make you more prone to certain diseases. Like cancer, diabetes, heart failure. 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. You know, we're not at the point yet where we can 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. I mean, given that, how do people move forward? What can be done to resolve this and stop these cycles? There's no easy answer. I mean, short of ending anti-Black racism. That is the thing. That's fixing the problem at its source. Yes. 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 patients' 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. This pain has...

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 this healing process.

And it sounds like in some ways your reporting in Sykeston has helped to catalyze some of those conversations. 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? Yes. Can we keep talking to each other while you grow up in life about stuff, even hard stuff? Like doing 100 math facts? 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? Yes.

Yeah. All right, cool. So cute. 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. You are teaching many people, like the people who listen to your show, how to do it too. Thanks so much for coming on Shortwave. Thanks for having me.

If you want to listen to Kara's excellent reporting, the podcast is called Silence in Sykeston. 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. Kara, Hannah, and Tyler Jones checked the VACs. Patrick Murray was the audio engineer.

Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. Kara 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 Sykeston, including but not limited to Kara Anthony, Simone Popperill, Taylor Cook, Tanya English and Zach Dyer. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.

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