To Health and Back

• Amazon: Check out Pat Thomas’ book, “Big Shot: Passion, Politics, and the Struggle for an AIDS Vaccine.”
• American Journal of Public Health: Learn about the politics surrounding the public response to AIDS.
• History.com: Read about how U.S. leaders and politicians stayed largely silent for 4 years, even as AIDS and HIV became a full-blown epidemic.
• HIV.gov: Read about HIV and AIDS, and the difference between the two.
• HIV.gov: Check out this timeline that covers the AIDS and HIV epidemic.
• National Institutes of Health: Read about the process behind the first COVID-19 vaccine.
• Ronald Reagan Presidential Library: Listen to former President Ronald Reagan answer questions during the Sept. 17, 1985 press conference.
• Scott Calonico: Read about Scott Calonico and his work.
• Scott Calonico/Ronald Reagan Presidential Library: Listen to audio from former President Ronald Reagan’s press conference on Oct. 15, 1982.
• Vanity Fair: Watch Scott Calonico’s documentary, “When AIDS Was Funny.”
• The Washington Post: Read about the course of the epidemic in 1985.

MUSIC CREDIT

Track: Floating Effortlessly — Artificial.Music & From Ashes [Audio Library Release]
Music provided by Audio Library Plus
Watch: https://youtu.be/iQIZZzwCuMM
Free Download/Stream: https://alplus.io/floating-effortlessly 

SOUNDBITE CREDIT

Courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
Courtesy Scott Calonico

• Amazon: Check out Pat Thomas’ book, “Big Shot: Passion, Politics, and the Struggle for an AIDS Vaccine.”
• American Journal of Public Health: Learn about the politics surrounding the public response to AIDS.
• History.com: Read about how U.S. leaders and politicians stayed largely silent for 4 years, even as AIDS and HIV became a full-blown epidemic.
• HIV.gov: Read about HIV and AIDS, and the difference between the two.
• HIV.gov: Check out this timeline that covers the AIDS and HIV epidemic.
• National Institutes of Health: Read about the process behind the first COVID-19 vaccine.
• Ronald Reagan Presidential Library: Listen to former President Ronald Reagan answer questions during the Sept. 17, 1985 press conference.
• Scott Calonico: Read about Scott Calonico and his work.
• Scott Calonico/Ronald Reagan Presidential Library: Listen to audio from former President Ronald Reagan’s press conference on Oct. 15, 1982.
• Vanity Fair: Watch Scott Calonico’s documentary, “When AIDS Was Funny.”
• The Washington Post: Read about the course of the epidemic in 1985.

MUSIC CREDIT

Track: Floating Effortlessly — Artificial.Music & From Ashes [Audio Library Release]
Music provided by Audio Library Plus
Watch: https://youtu.be/iQIZZzwCuMM
Free Download/Stream: https://alplus.io/floating-effortlessly 

SOUNDBITE CREDIT

Courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
Courtesy Scott Calonico

In this episode of “To Health and Back,” we’ll hear from Pat Thomas — a journalist and the author of “Big Shot: Passion, Politics, and the Struggle for an AIDS Vaccine” — to evaluate the politicization of the HIV epidemic and the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has been similarly politicized.

Check out the show notes here.

0:13, Madeline Laguaite: Hello, and welcome to “To Health and Back,” a podcast about how health, medicine, and wellness decisions from the past help inform us today. I’m your host, Madeline Laguaite.

Laguaite: In this episode, I’m sitting down with journalist Patricia Thomas to talk about her experience reporting on the AIDS crisis, and how HIV and AIDS was politicized similarly to the way in which COVID was politicized.

Laguaite: Before we dive in, I wanted to explain the difference between AIDS and HIV because I’ve often seen them used interchangeably. HIV is a virus that attacks the cells in your body that help you fight off infection. That means you’re much more vulnerable to other diseases and infections. If HIV isn’t treated, it can lead to the disease AIDS. HIV is spread by contact with certain bodily fluids of an infected individual. So most commonly, that’s going to be during unprotected sex or through sharing needles. Once you have HIV, your body can’t get rid of it, and there’s not an effective cure. Once you’re infected with HIV, you have it for life.

Laguaite: Today, however, we have HIV medicine, called antiretroviral therapy, or ART that lets people living with HIV live long, healthy lives. It also prevents the spread of HIV to their partners. People can also use other effective methods like PREP — which stands for pre-exposure prophylaxis — to prevent themselves from getting HIV through drug use or sex.

Laguaite: Scientists think HIV was in the U.S. as early as 1960. But doctors first noticed something was wrong in the early ’80s when they noticed clusters of pneumocystis pneumonia and a rare cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma in gay men living in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. The resulting AIDS epidemic was very politicized for a few reasons.

Laguaite: People were very, very uncomfortable learning about how HIV is spread, and that was certainly a catalyst for the disease to be politicized. The AIDS epidemic is also fueled by inequality because the disease exposes and intensifies both economic and social injustices. In fact, even though AIDS was first identified in 1981, then-President Ronald Reagan didn’t even mention it publicly until years later in 1985. By that time, around 16,000 people had died. Here’s a clip I found from Sept. 17, 1985, when Reagan was asked if he’d support a massive government research program against AIDS, similar to the one that Nixon launched against cancer.

2:55, Ronald Reagan: I have been supporting it for more than 4 years now. It’s been one of the top priorities with us and over the last 4 years and including what we have in a budget for ’86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS, in addition to what I’m sure other medical groups are doing. And we are $100 billion or $100 million in the budget this year. It’ll be $126 million next year. So this is a top priority with us. Yes, there’s no question about the seriousness of this and the need to find an answer.

3:33, Laguaite: Even before Reagan addressed it, AIDS wasn’t taken seriously. In 2015, Scott Calonico created a short documentary called “When AIDS Was Funny,” and it included audio of press conferences that show Reagan’s deputy press secretary, Larry Speakes, and journalists cracking jokes about the AIDS epidemic. The journalist interviewing Speakes is Lester Kinsolving. The full audio is available on Calonico’s website but I’ve included a clip of it here.

4:01, Lester Kinsolving: Does the President have any reaction to the announcement by the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta that A-I-D-S is now an epidemic in over 600 cases?

Larry Speakes: A-I-D-S? I haven’t got anything on it.

4:13, Kinsolving: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.”

[Press pool laughter]

Kinsolving: No, it is. It’s a pretty serious thing. And 1 in every 3 people that get this have died, and I wonder if the President is aware of this?

4:23, Speakes: I don’t have it. Are you? Do you?

Kinsolving: You don’t have it. Well, I’m relieved to hear that, Larry.

Speakes: Do you?

Kinsolving: No, I don’t.

Speakes: You didn’t answer my question. How do you know?

Kinsolving: Does the President... in other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?

Speakes: No, I don’t know a thing about it, Lester.

Kinsolving: Does the President— does anybody in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?

Speakes: I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s been any—

Kinsolving: Nobody knows?

Speakes: There’s been no personal experience here, Lester.

Kinsolving: No, I mean, I thought you were keeping—

4:50, Speakes: Doctor— I checked thoroughly with Dr. Ruge this morning and he’s had no—

[Press pool laughter]

[Speakes laughing]

Speakes: —No patients suffering from A-I-D-S or whatever it is.

Kinsolving: The President doesn’t have gay plague? Is that what you’re saying? Or what?

Speakes: Nope, didn’t say that.

Kinsolving: Didn’t say that?

Speakes: I thought I heard you in the State Department over there. Why didn’t you stay over there?

[Press pool laughter]

Kinsolving: Because I love you, Larry!

Speakes: Oh, I see. Well, I don’t... let’s don't put it in those terms, Lester.

[Press pool laughter]

Kinsolving: Oh, I retract that!

Speakes: I hope so.

5:05, Laguaite: Another journalist refers to it as a “fairy tale,” referencing a derogatory term for gay people that was common in the 20th century.

Journalist: A leading environmentalist has described the President's speech on Saturday as a fairy tale. Is there any reaction to that?

5:21, Speakes: Not true. 

[Press pool laughter] 

Speakes: Fairy tales are not true and this one’s true. Lester’s ears perked up when you said fairies.

[Press pool laughter] 

Speakes: He has an abiding interest in that.

5:38, Laguaite: All that being said, I have Pat here with me now to talk more about the crisis. Hi, Pat, and welcome to the show.

Pat Thomas: Hello!

Laguaite: How are you?

Thomas: Good. How about you Madeline?

Laguaite: Pretty good, pretty good.

Thomas: My name is Patricia Thomas. Most people call me Pat. I’m a professor emerita and the former Knight Chair in Health and Medical Journalism at the University of Georgia. But before that, before the past 15 years of my life, I was a working journalist. I wrote for many publications for physicians and scientists. And I also was the editor of a large consumer health newsletter, the Harvard Health Letter, based at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, but I spent my wild youth in the San Francisco area, which is how I got interested in the AIDS epidemic in its very earliest days, because I knew people who were in the medical arena and I knew people in the gay community there. So my radar picked this up pretty early, even though I was living in Atlanta during the early ’80s. And so I have a lot of experience in this arena.

6:43, Laguaite: Although scientists believe HIV existed prior to the ’80s, Pat said she remembers the exact moment she really became aware of AIDS.

6:52, Thomas: I became aware of AIDS in San Francisco in 1981, while having dinner with a friend who I knew from Stanford. I went to graduate school at Stanford. He went to medical school there. He was a resident in hematology and oncology at San Francisco General and UC San Francisco, and he was horrified to see Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare cancer which typically is seen in elderly Jewish men and men of Mediterranean descent. But in this instance, these cancers, these horrible disfiguring blotches, which then, you know, kill you in the long run, he was seeing these cases in young men who looked just like him: white, affluent, gay, urban, San Francisco-ites, and they had this cancer.

Thomas: So when he told me about that, which was right about the same time the first publication came out in CDC’s weekly morbidity and mortality weekly report. That report was of pneumocystis pneumonia among a small coterie of gay men in L.A. So here’s my friend in San Francisco saying weird cancer among young white gay men, and meanwhile, in L.A., weird pneumonia, and guess what? They’re all dying. In 1983, I wrote my first stories about AIDS. 

8:14, L

In this episode of “To Health and Back,” we’ll hear from Pat Thomas — a journalist and the author of “Big Shot: Passion, Politics, and the Struggle for an AIDS Vaccine” — to evaluate the politicization of the HIV epidemic and the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has been similarly politicized.

• CDC: Read about how to find a COVID-19 vaccination site near you.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): Read more about the CDC’s decision to resume the use of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen COVID-19 vaccine.
• C-SPAN: Listen and watch as Dr. Richard Besser speaks on the implications of pausing the use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine.
• EpidemioLogical: Read more of Dr. René F. Najera’s writing. 
• The History of Vaccines: Read about Dr. Najera and his role as editor of The History of Vaccines site.
• The History of Vaccines: Read about the history of smallpox.
• The Indian Journal of Psychiatry: Read about the MMR vaccine and autism, including the retraction and fraud.
• Johns Hopkins Medicine: Read about COVID-19 vaccines and people of color.
• Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine: Read about the origins of inoculation.
• Medium: Read Dr. Najera's writing on Medium.com.
• Our World in Data: Read about and examine coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccinations data.
• U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA): Read more about the FDA issuing an emergency use authorization for the first COVID-19 vaccine.

MUSIC CREDIT

Track: Floating Effortlessly — Artificial.Music & From Ashes [Audio Library Release]
Music provided by Audio Library Plus
Watch: https://youtu.be/iQIZZzwCuMM
Free Download/Stream: https://alplus.io/floating-effortlessly 

In this episode of ”To Health and Back,” we’ll hear from Dr. René F. Najera — an epidemiologist and editor of the History of Vaccines site, an online project by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia — to see explore the history of vaccines and vaccine skepticism, and how that same skepticism exists today.

Check out the show notes here.

NOTE TO LISTENERS: This conversation was recorded before the U.S. resumed Johnson & Johnson vaccinations. 

0:13, Madeline Laguaite: Hello, and welcome to “To Health and Back,” a podcast about how health, medicine, and wellness decisions from the past help inform us today. I’m your host, Madeline Laguaite.

Laguaite: In this episode, I’m sitting down with Dr. Najera to talk about the history of vaccine skepticism and how those past instances reflect what we’re seeing today with the COVID-19 vaccines.

0:36, René F. Najera: You know, there was vaccine skepticism before there were vaccines and that’s something that always kind of befuddled people like, “What do you...? What do you mean?”

0:44, Laguaite: Vaccines skepticism today comes in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. On December 11, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued the first emergency use authorization for a vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19 and people 16 years and older, which allowed the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to be distributed in the U.S. Later, the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines were approved as well.

Laguaite: However, on April 13, 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the FDA recommended a pause in the use of Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Of the almost 7 million doses administered so far in the U.S., a small number of reports of a rare and serious type of blood clot had been reported and people after receiving it. All reports happened among women from the ages of 18-48, and symptoms occurred 6-13 days after vaccination. Dr. Richard Besser, who was the acting CDC director in 2009, spoke about the implications of the Johnson pause on C-SPAN on April 18, 2021.

1:53, Richard Besser on C-SPAN: First, I do think taking a pause was the right response. We have a number of systems to report what are called vaccine adverse events. And then they’re investigated to see is this something that was just occurring in a timeframe related to vaccination, like someone that had a heart attack and they had a vaccine last week, but it wasn’t caused by the vaccine? Or is it something that the vaccine actually could have caused? And so, in these systems of reporting, they detected six cases of a very rare type of blood clot in women who were all younger than 50 within 2 weeks of having received the J & J vaccine.

2:36, Laguaite: Although the Johnson & Johnson vaccine use resumed on April 23 at the recommendation of both the CDC and the FDA, public health experts were worried and still worry about how that pause could impact vaccine hesitancy and skepticism in the U.S. Still, vaccine hesitancy isn’t new. Here with me to talk more about vaccines and the history behind them is Dr. Najera. Hi, Dr. Najera, and welcome to the show.

Najera: Hi, how are you?

Laguaite: Hi, I’m good. How are you?

Najera: I’m doing well.

Laguaite: Could you state your name and sort of tell the audience who you are?

3:11, Najera: Yeah, so my name is René Najera. I am an epidemiologist, Dr. Public Health. I’m a senior epidemiologist at a local health department that shall go unnamed. But my reason for being here is that I’m the editor/project director of the History of Vaccines project by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

3:30, Laguaite: Although public mistrust of vaccines is currently an issue, it’s been a problem in the world of public health for some time now. We could look to the case series published in The Lancet in 1998, by Andrew Wakefield and 12 of his colleagues that suggested the measles, mumps, and rubella — the MMR vaccine — could cause autism in children.

Laguaite: Like I mentioned, vaccine skepticism begins way before that study. And like Dr. Najera said earlier, vaccine skepticism precedes vaccines themselves. He pointed to waves of smallpox in the 18th century and gave me an idea of what it was like.

4:05, Najera: So, back in the early 1700s — smallpox a disease that was terrible, horrible, horrible disease, 30% death rate. If you survive that, you were scarred. A lot of people would actually commit suicide from the scarring because they just couldn’t bear looking at themselves. And almost everybody got it, you know? It would go around in waves, not pandemics, which is like, it happens worldwide at the same time, right? It would go around in waves every 15-20 years. So every generation, you build up enough people who are susceptible, and then boom, it would hit you. Everybody who knew something about medicine had to find a way to stop it. And at the time, we scientists didn’t know what a virus was. There was no such thing as a microscope. There were hints that there was something infectious going on. There were hints that your body that’s something to protect you after infection because once you got it, you know, you were immune afterward. So there were these little hints here and there.

4:58, Laguaite: But inoculation techniques didn’t originate in Europe. Researchers and historians say that the two most likely origins were either China or India, and Dr. Najera spoke about the former.

5:10, Najera: But if you go back 1,000 years, the Chinese would...  they realized that if you took some of the scabs from the smallpox and you dried it out in the sun, and then you ground it up into dust, and if you inhale that you got some sort of immunity from it, again, probably a lot of trial and error, probably a lot of observational studies, nothing really scientific. And so they did it. And it worked. And it was called variation or inoculation. And this practice then leaves China through the Silk Road, heads to West India, they pick it up. Middle East, they pick it up. North Africa, they pick it up, but it doesn’t make any inroads into Europe; It just kind of, you know, “It’s one of those things, those people over there do. They’re kind of weird. You know, they’re not like us, sophisticated Western people.”

5:57, Najera: This practice didn’t make it to America until much later, in the early 1700s. This enslaved man is picked up in Africa and taken into Boston and he is sold to a congregation at a church and the congregation gives him as a gift to their Reverend Cotton Mather. Cotton Mather was involved in the Salem witch trials. But he basically notices that the slave, Onesimus, is immune to smallpox; he doesn’t have any scarring. He’s fairly older. And he says, “What is protecting you and why do you have this scar? And what is that?” And he said, “Well, they gave us smallpox without actually giving it to us.” And Cotton Mather got kind of curious and says, “Tell me more.” And so Onesimus describes a procedure where they would take somebody with smallpox and take a little lancet and lance the pox and get the tissue or the fluid and then put it in their arms. And they were sold at a higher price because they were now immune from smallpox, and that would make them profitable.

Najera: And so Cotton Mather goes to a friend who’s a physician last name of Boylston, and says, “Hey, is there anything to this?” And so most write some letters to some friends and colleagues in Europe, and they say, “There’s this woman who is married to the British ambassador, her name is Lady Mary Montague.” And they traveled to Turkey — a British ambassador to Turkey went there. And it wasn’t called Turkey. At the time, it was the Ottoman Empire. And she had written back saying that there’s this practice of doing that in the Ottoman Empire, and people are immune. And there’s this whole process to it. It’s very controlled, you know, you don’t want to get too much of the smallpox; you want to get just enough to give immunity. You want to do it under the supervision of somebody who knows what they’re doing. And they didn’t know this at the time ... a major variola and a minor variola, and they said, “You don’t want to get the bad one, major. You want to get the minor and give that to people.” It wasn’t that minor. It was like 5% death rate. So she writes letters to her friends and colleagues again, and my colleagues, I mean, people in the higher echelons of society in Britain, say, “Look, I just had my child inoculated. And he had a fever for a little bit, but he got over it, and he didn’t develop smallpox. You guys should look into this.”

Najera: But her letters, Boylston’s letters, other people’s letters start traveling the world and there’s confirmation that it works. So then a ship arrives in Boston in the early 1700s, 1710s or so. And the sailors have smallpox and it had been a while since the last smallpox outbreak. So here we are. We are beginning with smallpox outbreak, and Cotton Mathers immediately tells Boylston, “Hey, this inoculation thing — Let’s try it. It’s worth doing. Let’s just go for it.” So they inoculate themselves. They inoculate their families. They inoculate of the slaves working for them. And it seems to work. If you look at the death rates of people who got smallpox the natural way, it was about 10 times worse than the people who were inoculated, because you then inoculate everybody on time, some of

In this episode of “To Health and Back,” we’ll hear from Dr. René F. Najera — an epidemiologist and editor of the History of Vaccines site, an online project by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia — to see explore the history of vaccines and vaccine skepticism, and how that same skepticism exists today.

In this episode of “To Health and Back,” we’ll hear from Rachel Priest, the content editor at The Bitter Southerner, to hear about her personal experiences with xenophobia as a transracial adoptee. 

Check out the show notes here.

NOTE TO LISTENERS: This conversation was recorded 2 days before the Atlanta spa shootings on March 16, 2021. 

0:13, Madeline Laguaite: Hello, and welcome to “To Health and Back,” a podcast about how health, medicine, and wellness decisions from the past help inform us today. I’m your host, Madeline Laguaite.

0:23, Laguaite: And in this bonus episode, I’m sitting down with my best friend and former college roommate of 4 years, Rachel Priest, to talk about xenophobia and some of her personal experiences this past year and during the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Laguaite: The COVD-19 pandemic has fueled xenophobia, specifically anti-Asian sentiment across the globe, and Rachel has experienced that firsthand. So Rachel, welcome to the show. Do you want to introduce yourself and tell us who you are?

0:53, Rachel Priest: Yeah! Hey, Mads, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. Yeah, I’m Rachel and the content editor at The Bitter Southerner, which is this incredible publication where we basically just tell stories of the South, you know, both the good — there’s a lot to celebrate of the South, obviously — And also, you know, we aren’t afraid to talk about the bad as well. So I’m really loving that. And I’ve been there for about 7 months now. So it’s been really great. And I am excited to be here with my best friend and roommate. We’ve had, you know, similar... I feel like, you know, we’re sitting down and talking about this for the podcast, but we’ve also had conversations throughout the past year about these things, as they have happened, and you know, even before this, too, so.

1:34, Laguaite: Yeah, I think it I think it kind of says a lot, just the fact that we’ve had this exact conversation so many times, especially just the past year.

1:44, Priest: I know. I mean, it’s crazy to think that recently it’s been the 1-year anniversary since America has shut down and since it was declared a pandemic, but I feel like even a year ago, we were, again, like having similar conversations. And yeah, it’s crazy how much time has passed, but how little has changed in regards to xenophobia. And actually, it seems like it’s gotten worse in some ways, and I don’t know if that’s because of more national media attention, but yeah. So I’m so glad that we’re able to talk about this and bring some light to it because I feel like in some of the conversations I’ve had with family members or other friends or co-workers that or other people, I feel like some of them have been like, “I had no idea this is going on,” which yeah, you know, I think that for them, it’s always easy to ignore things that don’t impact you directly. And so I think for them, it’s obviously not impacting them because most of them have been white and so if they don’t have to pay attention, or if this is not something that they’ve seen, then they wouldn’t know, but most Asian people have been really aware of this the past year, especially, so.

2:52, Laguaite: Yeah. Can you just give us a little background? So you were born in China, right?

2:56, Priest: Yeah. So I was born in China, and I was adopted a couple days before I was 1 year old. And I grew up in Minnesota, and then I moved to Georgia when I was in high school. So that’s kind of background. So my adoptive family is, yeah, white, Caucasian. 

3:11, Laguaite: Yeah, OK. I know that we just mentioned that COVID has added even more instances of racism, but have you faced anti-Asian rhetoric or attitudes in the past when you were growing up?

3:23, Priest: Yeah. So it’s a really interesting question. I mean, I think as a whole, not really, just because I think that their white privilege often protected me. I think that whenever I was seen with them, people understood that I was, “one of them,” like I was not seen as Chinese or Asian, I was just seen, as, my mom’s adopted daughter, and I think that there has been that umbrella of privilege that I was able to enjoy. I’m trying to think like, there was a couple instances in elementary school, and people would make fun of my eyes and stuff like that, and, you know, pull them back at the corners, which is interesting, too, because I remember seeing recently that there’s some sort of maybe makeup trend that was going on that would make it look like your eyes are a little more like curved at the end and the Asian community, people were like, “That’s not right.” It’s kind of not an appropriation but I think it’s turning into something that has been often seen as setting people apart and making it you know, “stylish” for white people to do, which is interesting. And that’s not just happened to the Asian-American community or the Asian community, but also happened to Black hair, or you know, nails and stuff like that, that have often been seen as these things that set them apart from their white counterparts, but once kind of white people move into that space and take it over, then it’s seen as trendy.

Priest: And so, kind of going back to your original question. I didn’t experience it too much. Because again, like I said, I lived under my parents and my family’s white privilege, but it’s something I’ve definitely noticed. Post-college is kind of when I really really experienced a lot of racism against me or I guess was more aware of it just because again, I was no longer associated with my white family. I was kind of on my own, and people didn’t see me as part of this white family, and they just saw me as an individual. And so I think then they were able to take their own preconceived notions or their stereotypes or their fear, or stereotypes, all those things, and really channel them at me. And yeah, so I think it’s only been within the past couple of years that I’ve really experienced a lot of it.

Priest: And I think we’ll get to talking about this later too but I think it’s interesting because I think that for a lot of younger Asian Americans, a lot of them are scared, not necessarily for them, but for their parents. Because there’s been a lot of instances of violence, especially against elderly Asian people, in like New York and California, where there’s large concentrations of Asian populations. And so luckily, that’s something I don’t have to worry about because my family is white. And so that is... luckily for me, I don’t have to carry that burden or that stress being like, “Are my parents going to be OK, like walking outside or doing just everyday life things?” I think that’s my experience and other Asian or Chinese adoptees who are adopted by white parents, again, I think that their experience is different than other— like, my experience is different in a lot of ways, but also similar in a lot of ways to other Asian Americans right now.

6:27, Laguaite: Yeah. OK. So maybe in the past, you’ve faced some microaggressions like being called other people’s names at work...

6:37, Priest: Yeah, yes.

6:38, Laguaite: So that sort of thing. Um, and I’m laughing because I know you. Of course, it’s not, it’s definitely not funny. But it’s—

6:45, Priest: No, yeah, yeah.

6:45, Laguaite: I do think it is kind of funny how often this happens to you, though, you know, how often these little like microaggressions happen.

6:52, Priest: Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

6:54, Laguaite: But if you’re comfortable, can you tell me a little bit about some recent examples of racism or xenophobia that you faced, in the past year or? Yeah, I guess a year, it’s been?

7:04, Priest: Yeah. So I mean, I would say that some of them weren’t necessarily COVID-related, but just ignorance or racism in general. But I think that in the context of this last year, I think that things that I would have kind of been able to just brush off and be like, “They didn’t mean any harm by that,” I think has carried a lot,  more weight, because you’re never sure, like, “Is this person saying this because they’re ignorant, and obviously their intentions aren’t bad?” but again, within the context of this past year, when you’re seeing all these headlines, and you’re reading about all these people have been attacked, like questions as ignorant as like, “Where are you from?” which usually for people that don’t look American — and American, in this context, being white American — people being like, “Oh, where are you from?” Usually, they’re trying to ask about your ethnicity. I mean, that’s happened to me twice in the last year. And both times, I don’t think that it was necessarily from a point of malice, but again, at the same time, it does carry this like, much heavier weight of, “Are they asking me because they’re scared of me, or because they want to like distance themselves from me, or because they want to do any of the things that have happened to other Asian people?” Like I’ve seen people are like— they’ve been punched, they’ve been spit on, they’ve been pushed, all these things. So I think that that’s kind of been the main, you know, some of the bigger things have happened to me personally.

Priest: So last year, I moved back home with my parents for a couple months, kind of as things were happening, and now my parents live in a suburb of Dallas. And the neighborhood they

In this episode of “To Health and Back,” we’ll hear from Rachel Priest, the content editor at The Bitter Southerner, to hear about her personal experiences with xenophobia as a transracial adoptee. 

Check out the transcript here.

SHOW NOTES: 

• American Journal of Public Health, 2021: Check out this recent study that explores the extent to which phrases like “Chinese virus” were associated with anti-Asian sentiment.
• Anti-Asian Violence Resources: Check out this resource directory that includes how to report incidents, places to donate, educational resources, statistics, news articles and resources for allies.
• Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy: Check out this resource directory to combat increased anti-Asian violence in the wake of COVID-19.
• BBC: Read Sam Cabral’s article about hate crimes toward Asian Americans in the U.S. during the pandemic.
• The Bitter Southerner: Read Rachel Priest’s personal essay following the aftermath of the Atlanta spa shootings in March 2021.
• Grady Newsource: Read Priest’s article about the rise in racism against the Asian and Asian-American communities.
• Human Rights Watch: Learn about how COVID has fueled anti-Asian racism and xenophobia across the globe.
• The New England Journal of Medicine, 2021: Check out this clinician’s guide to combating anti-Asian sentiment.
• NPR: Read about (or listen to) the rise in anti-Asian attacks during COVID-19.
• Rachel Priest: Read more about Priest via her website.
• Twitter: Follow and read more of Priest’s work via Twitter. 

MUSIC CREDIT:

Track: Floating Effortlessly — Artificial.Music & From Ashes [Audio Library Release]
Music provided by Audio Library Plus
Watch: https://youtu.be/iQIZZzwCuMM
Free Download/Stream: https://alplus.io/floating-effortlessly

In this episode of “To Health and Back,” we’ll hear from Rachel Priest, the content editor at The Bitter Southerner, to hear about her personal experiences with xenophobia as a transracial adoptee. 

NOTE TO LISTENERS: This conversation was recorded 2 days before the Atlanta spa shootings on March 16, 2021.