Events & CalendarsSpotlight Series

- Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. I know you're in for a treat with the two guests we have tonight. And I'm delighted to introduce them both first, Sarah Bloom Raskin class of '83. Sarah, as so many of you know, served from 2014 to 2017 as the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, making her the highest ranking woman in history to serve in the Treasury Department. Sarah provided innovative policy solutions to some extraordinarily vexing problems, but also in an effort to advance prosperity, fairness and resiliency throughout the American economy. After years of public service as a financial regulator, Sarah is currently a visiting professor of the Practice of Law at the Duke University School of Law, where she's also a distinguished fellow at the Duke Law's Global Financial Markets Center, and a senior fellow at the Duke Center on Risk. I've already told you that Sarah is a graduate of the class of '83. She is the parent of two Amherst graduates and is now a trustee of the College and a very, very helpful and supportive one. At Amherst she majored in Economics was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude. She's also a graduate of Harvard Law. Sara, welcome, and thank you so much for being here. Ron Lieber is a member of Amherst College's class of 1993. He majored in American Studies at Amherst and was first published in the New York Times, Op-Ed page as an undergraduate, which is amazing, and which seems to have launched a flourishing career in financial journalism with a dedicated focus, as you will probably know from his writing on practicality and also on kindness. Ron now writes the, "Your Money" column for the New York Times, featuring personal finance stories and personal finance advice. He's the author of several books, including the 2015 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, "The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money." His newest book, "The Price You Pay for College: An Entirely New Roadmap for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make" It will be out in January, 2021, so very soon. Ron welcome, I appreciate both of you taking the time to be here and look forward to the wisdom you're going to share with us on financial resiliency at many different levels. Over to you.

- Thank you, President Martin. This is a thrill, thanks to all of you out there in Zoom land, who are here to join us. I can't see your faces right now and neither can Sarah, but I can imagine them. I can imagine them 30 years ago, and I can imagine them today from some of our Zoom reunion calls and it's so nice to have you here. I just wanna remind you that we'll be recording this event so other people can see it later. And with that, we will jump right into it, and there will be time for questions and answers around 40 minutes past the hour. But with that, I would like to turn it over to Sarah and let's start here. I think we're gonna start macro and go micro and since you've had your hands on the levers of power and also policy, we wanted to start with you. And let's begin, I think for clarifying, for the folks who are watching, what do we mean when we talk about resiliency? Resiliency of what or resiliency of who?

- Right, okay, so first of all, let me thank President Martin for that wonderful introduction. And of course, the chance to talk to Ron Lieber now this of course has been a kind of, sort of secret wish of mine because I am this avid reader of the Ron Lieber, "Your Money" columns. But what I really have always seen in Ron's columns is this kind of secret sneer, right? So he takes us through the step-by-step that you need to get answers to some of these really vexing consumer financial issues. And of course this isn't an easy time and it's never been an easy time for consumers to navigate our financial system. And so you turn to Ron Lieber because Ron will explain it and he'll explain it in with great detail. And in that kind of Amherst clear communication style that we all learned so well, but there is this secret sneer to what he's saying, because it is absolutely frustrating in so many instances to maneuver and choreograph and get through this system. It's really often innavigable and so I've always been struck by how Ron approaches these questions. And that really leads us to this discussion tonight, which goes to the question of resilience and what I mean by that, and what I think we're gonna look at is this idea that there are particular contextual features that permit people to experience more or less resiliency from financial shocks. Now we know that we have had two financial shocks in our lifetimes. I really never thought after the financial crisis, that there would be one quite so soon on the heels of the last, and of course this is extraordinarily painful for our country. And it has dimensions that are of course, related to health and wellbeing. But from my perspective, I look at it from the perspective of the economy and how essential it is to understand how people are thriving. So we've now had two, we've had two crises and it's given us a chance to see really, what is at stake when there is a shock and how people in particular, how households recover from it. And so, I can't imagine really a better guide to this than talking to Ron Lieber, because of course he knows how you navigate this system. But I thought what we would do is we would start with a couple of, kind of a couple of big points on what this looks like from the perspective of resiliency. And again, it's the idea of how do you bounce back? How do you cope with a shock, particularly, of a financial nature and how do you get through it? And we've seen again a lot because we've experienced the financial crisis and now we're experiencing this pandemic crisis. So I think I'll start with one, Ron, that I think is one generality that I would draw from now having seen two crises. And it's this, it's that it's cheaper to prepare for risks than to pay for them once they happen. Now, again, I'm talking about this from the government perspective. I think we have entered now, a set of circumstances that is in part due to a lack of preparation. And we have spent a lot of money responding to this crisis. The government has pushed out an unprecedented amount of fiscal support, upwards of $2 trillion. Okay, that was pretty huge. And on the monetary policy side, you've seen the Feds spending upwards of $7 trillion already. So this has been expensive, very expensive to deal with. And it's going to have consequences, not directly because of maybe the amount, but because of the ways in which this fiscal and monetary support has been delivered. So I think it's a legitimate question to ask ourselves what would have happened had there been a better preparation by the fiscal authorities that would have essentially helped mitigate the depth and duration of what we are dealing with right now? So, this turned out to be a theme that essentially came into play during the financial crisis as well, where a financial crisis hit. And you could also argue that there was in essence, a lack of good preparation in a different form than what we're dealing with now, but still a lack of good preparation on the part of government to actually help mitigate, not just the onset and the fact that the risk happened, but the ability to help households bounce back, help them navigate it. And so that it wasn't quite, it wouldn't be quite as long and deep and painful as it was. And what this one is turning out to look, it looks similar.

- Sure, so the second

- Does that make sense, Ron?

- Makes sense to me. The second biggest idea you wanted to share was that this notion that that actions that are taken during any given crisis depend on the ideas that are laying around. Now, I'm basically just dying to hear what ideas were lying around in 2008, 2009 that you know about, or that you heard about, or that you participated in tossing into the pile, that actually were used. And were there any that should've been used that were not and ditto, right now? Right, I mean, there are probably some ideas of yours that are still lying around that did or did not get used. So can you take us on the inside and tell us about those which piles are access in that crisis?

- Sure, so, yeah, now, it's a great question and it turns out that, when you, and this is fixed into this idea of not being super prepared, right. So when you're not prepared or optimally prepared, you're going to have to rely on mechanisms that have existed before. Okay, so let's look for example at the pandemic okay, so at on the monetary policy side, and this is gonna get like kind of weedy, but, it's interesting because during the financial crisis, the Fed engaged in something called quantitative easing, which was this new technique and it was new then. It was a new set of tools, in which the Fed actually goes into markets and purchases in massive amounts of quantity, treasury bonds, treasury securities, and mortgage-backed securities. And it was new, it was a new technique used in the financial crisis, right? And by the way, it has consequences, which we can talk about, but then you've got like the onset of the pandemic. And while this use of quantitative easing during the financial crisis was considered kind of new and unorthodox, the pandemic comes around, the Fed finds itself kind of limited in terms of different tools and decides at that moment to go big and to essentially pick up one of the tools that was lying around, which was this quantitative easing set of tools, and immediately very early in the pandemic. And you'll remember this, Ron, I mean, the Fed engages in this massive amount of stimulus buying, essentially, doing something during the course of the financial crisis took really years to unfold. But essentially, when it came to the pandemic, did it right away. That's an example of a tool that was lying around, but here's one that's closer to home, I think, and this has to do with the notion of those direct stimulus payments. So we'll all remember that when the pandemic hit Congress in the CARES Act, indicated that there would be these $1,200 checks that would get written to everybody. And so these checks got written and sure enough, it was going to be clear that for a huge amount of people would not be enough that it would get you through a certain amount, a certain period of time, but it wouldn't get you kind of over a certain, some utility bills that would come due, some rent, some mortgage payments, it would get you, you know, kind of far, but then it would stop. There were discussions of ideas at the time that that $1,200 stimulus payment was discussed which would have been a more efficient way of getting that $1,200 payment delivered. So it turns out that the $1,200 payment went out and it went out with all kinds of conditions so that people who have a lot of debts would have that check partially what's called garnished, right there would be amount set off against it. Okay, well, if you know about this, if you know that the garnishment is possible, you think, wouldn't there be a better way to get this out the door besides writing a check isn't there another technique, but that's what was lying around, the technique of sending, writing a check and sending it out the door. You can imagine that there could have been better tools, faster tools, more expeditious tools. So, you pick, when you're dealing with a crisis, you see what's there, you have to act quickly and you use what's there, even if it's not great. The unemployment insurance is another example, right? I mean, query as to whether our unemployment insurance system is really that robust right now, a lot of states have not kept it up, it's become really difficult to maneuver. And yet that's the system that got deployed, it was the system that was there. So there's a lot of these examples of things that are just there and get used, but they might not be the best.

- Right, now, the third point you had wanted to make was this notion that Main Street gets served I'm sorry, the Wall Street gets served before Main Street. I really liked this one because from my perspective, my job in part is to sort of write the explainers when Main Street does finally get served. And last time around, there wasn't actually that much to say, there were these sort of trickles of mortgage relief programs that were nearly impossible to navigate and the mortgage servicers made it all exponentially worse by losing all sorts of documentation and driving people bananas. This time, at least, right away, or with the passage of the CARES Act, there were three or four pretty decent sized elements that were going to affect a lot of middle income Americans and help them at least for a period of time. So it did feel to me like Main Street did get served a lot more quickly this time. But did you feel like Wall Street still got served first this time around?

- Well, it's really, it is a great observation, Ron, of course you remember those days in the financial crisis where it was an explicit theory, right? Like if you save the financial sector, you'll save the household. So deal with the financial sector and then the household, you'll in essence deal with the foreclosures and the local household effects. And as you point out, there were problems and real flaws in that kind of approach. So I think you're right, during the financial crisis, you had a sense, certainly, that the financial sector was being helped before households were being helped so next comes to pandemic, right? So now we have another crisis and I think you're right, that there's a sense, like, wait a minute, we're gonna, let's move these both, let's move pieces together. Let's take care of households, small businesses and at the same time that we deal essentially, with what's happening in terms of market dysfunction. And so, in essence, I think the attitude going in was that there could be a simultaneous set of recoveries underway if these tools were used. What happened in fact was, and this is, I think in waves inevitable, but the Fed came in much quicker than Congress did. So the monetary policy piece got addressed quite quickly while the CARES Act, which did come out quickly was slower and then implementation on the CARES Act was slower. So the Fed was able to be,

- Very nimble.

- Yeah, very nimble and actually get assistance out the door to markets. Now, the Fed works through financial markets and because it works through financial markets, it meant that market stability was going to be obtained prior to say business and household stability. And we did set in place and maybe this is just inevitable, and there's no way to correct this, but we did have, in essence, what is now looking like the stages for a two-speed recovery, right? Where asset holders, people who participate in institutions that participate in markets get their assistance quite quickly, because the Fed has been able to move in a more nimble way and households and small businesses, and even medium-sized businesses or firms that don't have deep capital markets portfolios struggle a little longer. And of course, we know that the Fed has been able to keep its assistance going while the fiscal side has expired. We're in a situation where the stimulus hasn't been followed by another package. So in essence, now we're starting to see people really up against their rent deadlines and their mortgage deadlines and we see lines at food banks. I mean, we're seeing much greater levels of insecurity and challenge now at the household level, because there hasn't been that concomitant match of fiscal policy to what has continued to be a Fed monetary policy response. So you do have, I think now, even this potential to speed recovery.

- Right, so I'm gonna talk about a couple of things that fall out of that, right? So when we talk about, who are we talking about when we talk about resilience, on the more troubled side, I wanna talk about women, and I wanna talk about children. This recession hasn't been like other recessions in that women in the labor market have suffered disproportionately. The jobs that were lost in April when 20.5 million went poof, right, 55% of those were women, women of color were faring worse. And then we flash forward, a couple of months you start to see permanent reductions in the labor force, so that's not just layoffs. Those are also people who have stopped looking for work altogether. So who are those people? 1.2 million people, ages 20, and over who left the work force between August and September, 800,000 of them were women, which is just incredible, right? Now, some of has to do with long-standing factors like the gender wage gap. If you're in a two income household, that's heterosexual more often than not particularly if you're older, the men are gonna be earning more than the women. So it's easier to justify, the female partner dropping out, it's also, women were disproportionately represented in industries that took a really big hit, like hospitality and leisure. But the other thing that happened here that was completely unique, right, is that all of the sudden all of these children were home and many of them needed supervising. And our nations ragged at best childcare infrastructure, on its best days, came off the rails almost altogether. So there's an explanation for it. But when you think about medium and long-term resiliency, for women in particular, and also the kids who are out of school, you have to wonder. When the economy recovers and those women want to get back into the workplace, will they be able to step back in right where they were before? What's gonna happen to their retirement savings? If they've been out of 401 for a year? none of this feels very good to me, am I reading it right?

- You're reading it exactly right, I'm afraid Ron, some people have been able to go back to work. So there has been a return to jobs, but this return is not at all compensating for the people who can't go back. So this is what the economists, what we learned in our econ or intro econ course, this becomes long term unemployment, and this is actually a real drag on the economy. And it turns out that you're right, that it's women who are going to make up the ranks of that longterm unemployment, which is going to actually affect our ability as a country to prosper. I mean, it has personal dimensions too, in the sense that a lot of women who want to get back in the workplace are going to have a harder time when they eventually want to, because there will be that gap and there'll be a sense that they have been, that they've stepped out and that they don't have the skills necessary to come in at the level that they left at. So, there's that, and then there's also just this notion of what you lose when you, in terms of benefits. You talked about the 401 , but a lot of times, if you detach from the workplace in a long-term way, you're actually detaching from some of the benefits, like health insurance in particular, that is integral to a family's ability to prosper. So if in essence, you have lost your health insurance as well, because, the mom, say, has had to step back in terms of her work. You have a real hit to the entire family's welfare and the entire family's ability to actually move ahead. So you're exactly right and this is, you can even parse it further down than women, it's also women of color, there are complete, we went into this with racial disparities, I mean, there's clear racial wealth gaps. Those gaps are going to widen as we see them right now happening. So that's going to really affect the ability of our country to prosper, I think.

- Yeah, so why will those racial wealth gaps widen? Well it's because of who owns the assets and this was gonna be our fifth point, right? The people who own the assets own a lot of assets. And when you break that down and sort of stock market terms, you learn the following, 84% of stocks owned by U.S. households, so these are not the stocks that are owned by Amazon, Dauman and other institutions, but 84% of the stocks that are owned by us households are held by the wealthiest 10% of Americans. And the wealthiest 1% has roughly 40 or 50% of all equities. So, Sarah, you and I talked in our prep for this, about the K-shaped economy. Those folks, when markets go up are going to do quite well and somewhat mysteriously, the market has held up quite well. Now, Sarah, I don't know how many thousands of times you've heard the phrase, "don't fight the Fed," right? That's just a fancy way of saying when the government is throwing everything it possibly can at preserving the financial markets, there's at least a decent chance that stocks are not gonna go into the toilet and stay there. And so it goes this time, but the thing that's sort of shocking about what's happened most recently is this, if you look at the S&P 500, which is the collection of the 500 most valuable stocks in the United States of America, all of the gains in that index that have resulted this year, come from just five stocks, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet/Google and Facebook, which is incredible, right. And so, we pat ourselves on the back and the president wants to be rewarded for the fact that the stock market has held up. But you know, this market that we're talking about that has done reasonably well, or maybe very well, you could argue under the circumstance. What we're really talking about when we talk about the market are a handful of technology companies. And, if you wanna talk about K-shape recovery, here's another set of numbers to think about, Jeff Bezos, his stock holdings, he's got 876,000 people who work for him. With the amount that his stock holdings have risen just since the pandemic started, he could give $105,000 to every single one of those 876,000 employees. Now, I am happy for him, I'm happy for those employees, I am happy the stock market is down 50%. But is that really the way things ought to work, Sarah? Cause I haven't worked on the inside, I've only worked on the outside, but are you satisfied with that result when it comes to markets and resilience?

- So I think you put your finger right on it, Ron. I mean the markets have been, I think, resilient to use this phrase of resilience primarily, because they've gotten extraordinary assistance via the Fed. I mean, the Fed has come in, in a very big way and we talked about this at the beginning, right? Where the Fed used all the tools that it used in the financial crisis. It used them like on steroids when it came to the pandemic and the Fed continues to use them. So it's, still there is massive amounts of support and this support is, as you said, it's certainly, it's helping, I would argue is helping keep markets buoyed across the board. I mean, it essentially provides a floor beneath which prices aren't gonna drop. So asset prices are really holding strong, even though there's another economy out there where people are struggling, where we're in the midst of a pandemic where people are unemployed, where in essence, small businesses, one out of every four small businesses has had to shutter its doors, where we continue to have racial and wealth inequalities, where we have in essence recognition of structural racism that has emerged. And it's something now that we have to, that we should be reckoning with. So you see these issues out there that are completely disconnected from markets and people are astounded as to how we can be having these kinds of two sets of Americas here. And I think that you're exactly right, that the support given to markets is one that is I would argue due to the Fed. And the Fed being there, now, the Fed isn't even just doing quantitative easing, in terms of purchasing up, treasuries and mortgage backed securities, they're doing something new now, they're actually engaging in this same kind of guarantee, so to speak for corporate bonds. So you've got corporate bond issuance now that has this floor beneath which prices can't fall. Look, we want markets to be strong. That is, that is foundational, but we do have to think about the consequences. You think about the consequences for competition and you point out some of these mega, these giants of firms that essentially, are controlling a lot of the of market behavior, which is gonna have ramifications on prices and consumer protections and worker protections, and the structure of competition matters. And that structure is actually affected I would argue by what is happening here in terms of these massive monetary policy interventions and we have to look at that. I've always thought that income and wealth inequality too, is something that gets exacerbated through quantitative easing and we're doing it right now in a massive way. Again, with this massive amount of monetary policy support, there will be, and people are not, nothing empirically has been finalized yet, but people are lining up saying, "there's a consequence here." We are exacerbating income and wealth inequality with this level of support so there's quite a bit of consequence here and a lot that I think is gonna have to get thought through.

- And amidst all of this, the systems, the infrastructure undergirding the markets. have held up reasonably well. We haven't had any flash crashes or blackouts, Wall Street or on trading systems, have no during this crisis, but you and I promised that we were gonna sort of tip our cap to other infrastructure. And what you have said to me about that, was that underfunded public services will indeed crack when they are stressed by new demands. And so how do you think that manifested itself this time?

- So one place it manifested itself Ron was in the Paycheck Protection Program. So like go back in time and think about this mechanism, which was the mechanism by which Congress said, "let's, we have got to do something about holding on to this small businesses and keeping small businesses from failing and keeping them from having to lay off people." And so this so-called PPP was legislated and it was designed to work through the small business administration. Okay, so the small business administration, well we look at the small business administration and we say "people on the inside will, hey, I mean, now there's a website that crashes every 20 minutes. I mean, that website is like notorious, and this was pre-pandemic that was just a website. That was, it just would crash all the time it was almost, a tagline to a joke. So here comes the pandemic and here comes the design of a program, the PPP, and here comes a comes legislation saying, "and it will be implemented through the small business administration." What, I mean, think of the number of people who, as small business owners who have to work through, if everybody's doing this online, right? So if the system crashed, prior to huge demand, you put demands on a system that are unprecedented and they're gonna crack, that's what I'm talking about. I mean, you have to maintain your systems okay, because there are gonna be moments. And by the way, this is realistic, there've been two big moments in our own lives where we've seen crises and the need for government to deliver and the systems by which they deliver have to be maintained, you have to invest in them. And when I talk about that, I mean not just the IT Systems, but the people, the people who are working these systems, who you want to be devoted and completely focused on making these systems work. So there's a lot here that has to get invested in, in good times, I would say, and you're gonna get cut back, you cut back to the bone, some of these on some of these agencies, and it's times like this, that you pay the consequences.

- Yeah, and the thing that I wanna say about this is that where's the constituency for this? I can understand that, like poor people, or unemployed people, low-income people don't have much lobbying power. And so, I guess it makes a certain amount of sense that particularly in states where they're more likely to wanna shove people off the unemployment roles and get them back into the workforce, that they would purposefully underfund maintenance of their state unemployment sort of sign up websites. And I'm still getting emails from people who have to call hundreds and hundreds of times, but at least that's sort of explainable, even if it's not satisfying. But when you think about what went on and what goes on with the IRS and the underfunding, and the collection of our very revenues to fund the nation. You would think that that would be a bipartisan issue, particularly, because it's been proven again and again. If you invest in collections and I would argue overall infrastructure, you're more likely to get more money in those investments, pay off five fold, six fold, seven fold. And yet, I spent so much time after the passage of the CARES Act, answering questions for people who couldn't figure out where their check was, why they were getting a paper check, did they have to direct deposit? Why, the IRS's website wouldn't work and pity the poor people at the IRS, they had to call back 72-year-olds who were the only, among the only 312 people in America who knew how to program this or that system that was put together in the '60s and I mean that's not what an advanced nation does. Alright, we're getting towards Q&A here, but I wanna ask you quickly about this notion of yours, that some consumers don't spend those checks that they got. those $1,200 checks. At least they'll save them, or perhaps they'll share them and in any event that's all for the good. So there's no downside to those economic support payments at all?

- Yeah, well, it's interesting because I think speed was of the essence. So they had to get out the door. Now, optimally, what you would do is you would perhaps means test your checks so that you phase them into a situation where the amounts are greater for people who have greater need, and the amounts are smaller for people who have less need. Okay, but when you do that, you're adding a level of complexity. And what we've been talking about here is how this complexity actually can have costs associated with it because you don't get the payments out quickly and you could do a formula that has actually, that has to get implemented and it's very hard for people to figure out how to implement. So I think for the first check, I was fine with the first check, it's gonna probably be the last check, but it was fine that it was a $1,200 check and it was in essence too much for some people and not enough for others. Okay, speed was of the essence, if the checks had become more, targeted better, I think that would have been optimal. But I think that targeting would've taken time and if we put ourselves back into the frame of the CARES Act, remember the idea was in the early pandemic was to give people some kind of bridge payments so that when their rent came due and their utilities were due and they had to buy their masks and buy food and get their household in order, that they'd have something. And so, I'm not troubled by $1,200 being too much for some people it's fine, it was really fine. And yes, ideally we would have a federal government that could monitor exactly how much people need and send the right amount. We don't have that, we've never had that, we haven't invested in it. And so essentially, it's not gonna happen. So that's my very kind of pragmatic view and people will like to maybe talk about the waste inherent in that. I think that the amounts pale in comparison to some of the other very big amounts that were given out in, I would argue an unjustified way.

- Okay, I don't wanna end before we go to Q&A, without just saying a couple of words about the resiliency of our fundraising systems here in America, our charitable systems, since you mentioned that in point 8 Sarah, I've been amazed at the ingenuity that has emerged in terms of people using digital infrastructure to get money to needy people as quickly as possible. I wrote a column about it a couple of years ago, organizations like Modest Needs and GiveDirectly that have done really incredible work. And of course, we should tip our cap to the resiliency of the higher education industry, or at least our Alma mater. President Martin, a deep bow to you, as we all watch with amazement and hear reports from the children of our classmates, about how well things have gone there so far. Amherst has stayed out of the headlines except when it involves cornering the market on circus tents to put up on various quads so that people can have a class outside. The fact that you were the first college president or university president in the Wall Street Journal being quoted about tents, I think speaks well to our collective ingenuity and our overall resilience. So we're gonna go to the questions, it looks like we have a bunch up already. Sarah, do you see them on your screen in front of you?

- I don't, but that's okay, I can try them on the fly. Maybe here comes one.

- I'm just pulling up the screen now. Well, I pulled that up is there anything else that you wanted to ask me?

- Oh, well, Ron, I mean, we shouldn't be,

- I have questions about Fed

- I'd like to know I mean, kind of what, yeah. I mean, really your work on the resilience of higher education, what are you seeing is going to be one of the lasting effects of the ability of families to be able to afford a quality education? What are you seeing in that regard?

- Well, it depends on where you are in the market, right. There are a large handful of institutions, several dozen you could call it that have so much market power that they don't have to do any discounting, except for people who can't afford to pay. In other words through need-based financial aid, Amherst as a model. And then you sort of take a step down and even places like Ithaca College, which is an excellent undergraduate institution, announced three digit number of layoffs in the last couple of weeks. Ithaca had not been on my bingo card for massive layoffs, and then you go down maybe a step further to Ohio Wesleyan. One of the liberal arts colleges in Ohio that is constantly slugging it out for students, it's a very competitive market there. And they made an announcement a couple of weeks before Ithaca that they were gonna have to cut a bunch of departments. And then you see the public university systems that I would argue have not really been acting in good faith in terms of the promises that they made when they welcomed everybody back about their ability to keep people safe and keep track of who was getting sick and figure out what to do with them when they did. And I just wished there could have been more honesty about what was really going on, which was for most of these institutions, we need the money. If we don't get the money, we're gonna have to fire a bunch of faculty and a bunch of staff, that will change these places into different institutions than the ones that you went to and we're hoping to send your kids to. And so we're gonna take a calculated risk that when large handfuls of kids get sick, because they will party and they will get sick, but they're not going to infect and kill their professors. And that they're not gonna infect and kill people in their community. And I just wish we'd been honest about the fact that was going on, and the fact that we weren't means that there may be a sort of a growing crisis of faith in these institutions. The market may be mad, may no longer have as much trust in many of these higher education institutions. But on the other hand, people are dying to go back. People are, people, just, the undergraduates want nothing more to be back at the institution so much so that at schools that are not in session, people are paying for off-campus housing anyway, just so they can be close. So, I'm a long-term ball on the value of a residential undergraduate education. And the fact that we now see that as a rite of passage and have for decades now. And I don't expect it to be sort of radically disrupted, but I think the less selective you are, the more trouble you tend to run into. And I'm trying to pull our Q&A document up here, I'm gonna see if I can get it from our Zoom screen.

- I see them actually, the question is, yeah.

- Can you read them?

- Yeah, so we've got one here, which is, these are all great questions, like you would love. This is just so Amherst. "Who in society is bearing the brunt of these crises? How do we help those who have been affected most?" Thank you, Tom, class of '70. So I'll start with that, Ron. I mean, to me, the people who are bearing the brunt of these crises are working people and households. That's actually how I see it, that's how I saw it in the last financial crisis where it was homeowners and people who had lost jobs and how do we help them? What I think is we need to have a set of economic policies that puts working people really at the heart of these sets of responses. So that's how I would answer that, what do you think Ron?

- Well, I guess I'm hopeful that once we're out of an election year, regardless of who's in charge, regardless of who wins the election, I'm hopeful that we'll see more of a policy response and more action from our elected representatives. I mean, it pains me that it sure seems like the impact on election day had something to do maybe a little more than something to do with the negotiations around a second stimulus package. It doesn't seem to me like there's much doubt that we really needed one and probably needed another really big one. And I guess I'm sort of pinning my hopes there because I hope that that package too will be channeled towards the people who need it most, which are the people who have lower incomes and the people who are not in the stock market. Okay, I do see.

- Okay, you go for it.

- Sure, "What is your advice for a recent Amherst graduate who had their job delayed and then recently rescinded," their job offer I assume. that's an anonymous question,

- Yeah, have you been seeing that, Ron? I hadn't yet imagined that this was going to become a phenomenon, I'm really sorry to be getting that.

- Yeah, I mean, it is always the case in recessions, or it has been traditionally. It is this time too, that the college graduates do much better, their unemployment rates are lower, but that is no comfort for somebody who is in this spot. And it is also true that there are studies that have been done that show that people who do graduate into a recession, even if they do have a job, suffer in all sorts of personal finance, microeconomic measures that can sometimes last a lifetime, but I don't feel like anybody should feel consigned to that at the age of 22. And one of the things that you are purchasing when you attend a place like Amherst, I ran into somebody when I was reporting my book who was not an Amherst grad, but went someplace similar. And he said, the thing that was so amazing to me about my undergraduate experience is that I met the kinds of people that I never could have imagined existing in the world. And that is how I feel about my Amherst classmates. And so to the person who is in that spot, I would say, reach out to all of the people who you could not have imagined existing in the world. Those are the people in your class who are like that in the class above you, in the class above that. And there's a reason why Amherst Magazine exists and it's not just to get us all, to sort of remind ourselves of how great the place was and open our pocketbooks. It is a directory for awesomeness. And so you can go in there and find anybody and go on the Amherst website and just send them a note or call them up and say, "Hey, can I have 15 minutes of your time? Do you have a project that you're looking to assign on a freelance basis? Do you know anybody who is interested in the same things that I am, from your class, who you think I should talk to?" Right, so, use us, please, I'm actually somewhat surprised at how infrequently, I hear from Amherst graduates and so, the lines are open. The lines open for your side?

- Ooh, yeah, and I love, I actually, I love it when I hear from Amherst grads and students, particularly those that want to do something kind of bigger than themselves. I mean, I love, obviously I love public service and love having talented people want to devote their extraordinary education and set of experiences to doing something for the common good, I love that. And so, yeah, I welcome it as well. You gave a great answer, Ron. Do we have time for another one? Cause I like this question, there's a question about "what tail end financial risks are being overlooked or underestimated?" Great question, and gives me really a chance to talk about one that is way, way, way on my mind, which is of course climate risk. So essentially this idea that we are nearing a tipping point regarding, this is an existential risk that really goes to the heart of our ability to thrive as an economy and as a society. So I think that this, the way we grapple with climate actually has to also go to the, it has to be connected very closely to economic policy. That's a new idea I wanna say, certainly, in the U.S. you haven't seen climate really up until recently figure prominently in how we go about thinking about how to prosper, and you would think it's integrally related, but I have to say in the U.S. and part of this has to do with climate denial in the last several years, which I think has hurt us from the perspective of getting prepared and being able to start addressing what is really an imminent risk. And, I should go on to say that it's an imminent risk, but it also provides huge opportunity. It's actually a very exciting kind of way in which we can think about building an economy that is gonna be sustainable and stronger and create great jobs and have a sense of mission. And so I'm actually, I kind of see this as, it is a tail risk, I would say probably more than a tail risk at this moment, but it's gonna get addressed and it creates, I would say huge opportunity.

- Yeah, so my long tail risk concern is, it's become unfashionable to worry about at least at the Federal level, but I do worry about the sort of trillion with a 'T' trillions of dollars in underfunded pensions at the state level. And to a lesser extent, the sort of healthcare liabilities that are there, and it gets to a question that David Hewitt class of '83 asks, "whether we've got any comment on the resilience of the states that are finding themselves in financial stress because of their own decline in revenues and the dispute that's going on in Washington about how much money, which state should gather and under what circumstances. And I guess I'm sort of short to medium term bullish on the state situation. I feel like one way or another, there's going to be an agreement. I'll be at one after election day most likely, that will allow the state's to limp along, but I have no real vision for how these states, particularly my home state of Illinois, but there are others like it, dig out from their long-term pension obligations. Taxes can only go up so much and many of these state constitutions don't allow you to just, stiff pensionable and that's, doing so, would not be a particularly moral stance either. So I guess I worry more about the state's longterm Sarah have you looked at that?

- No, you're exactly right. And hello David Hewitt. David was in my class. Okay, it's so great to get your question. So interest rates too, are contributing to exactly the problem that Ron alludes to, because interest rates being so low and being so low for a long period of time actually adds to the stress of those pension liabilities 'cause of course, those pensions are confined to be earning income in a certain way, because they have to, in essence, have that money on hand for pension holders. It's, this is an issue that existed pre-pandemic. And it's one that we're gonna have to, we're gonna have to figure out how to navigate in a low interest rate environment. So, yeah, David you've hit on an important financial stressor here, and states of course, they have other stressors that have come through the pandemic, primarily a lot of think about, think about teachers and firefighters and police officers. All of these people are actually state employees and the amount of assistance that has gone to the states to help support those workers has been lacking for sure. So, yeah, that's another aspect of what is missing in this response?

- So the last question we are gonna take for tonight is from Arlene who's a parent in the class of '23. And I'm gonna use my license as a co-moderator, co-presenter here to add my own question to it. She wants to know "how we should prepare for financial resilience in the months to come" and I'm gonna redirect this to Sarah saying, "given that I think many people in the audience tonight are hoping that you will be downgrading to a government salary as of February or March. how are you personally preparing for financial resilience?"

- Careful Ron, no, that's not part of discussion. So, it's a great question Arlene, about how to prepare for financial resilience. And, in essence, we have such a heterogeneity in our country, so many different families with different situations, with different patterns, work with different child care responsibilities, elder care responsibilities. I mean, families I think are really struggling now. And I say that in, from the highest income levels to the lowest income levels, that there is just a sense that our quality of life is eroding and I would say creating quite a bit of anxiety. There is no simple answer for how to prepare for financial resilience and I'm not a kind of guru really on financial literacy or on exactly like what has to, how you best maneuver through these systems. I mean, that's what Ron can do and can do really well, which has helped us figure out how we navigate the system for our families and for ourselves and for our loved ones. It is very hard. I do have ideas for how government can actually, be prepared to help us be as strong as we can be as households and as business owners and as participants, even in the markets and how we create the conditions for an equitable economy and society and how we start to erase what I think are significant racial issues, how we begin to address major risks like climate and how we in essence, get the government apparatus in a place where it can really help us be more resilient. How it can actually help households be stronger and have better prospects for opportunity and prospects to actually, be better off. And so I think that there's a great role for government in terms of encouraging inclusive, prosperity. And that's, I look at it from the perspective of setting our policy apparatus correctly so that we can, induce the best results that are again, inclusive and sustainable. And in essence, reach every corner of our country so that's how I look at it. What do you think Ron?

- May there continue to be people in senior positions in government who can make it so. President Martin, I think on that note, we will send it back to you for the send-off.

- I cannot thank the two of you enough. What a fascinating conversation and set of responses by two remarkable people. Thank you so much. I wanna make sure that everyone who's attending, mark your calendar. The next event is November 17th, it's part of the provost series on Anti-Black Racism in the United States. And we will have Elizabeth Hinton who is an Associate Professor of history and African-American studies at Yale, also professor in the Law School at Yale. Speaking about, the title of her talk is 'From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime.' So please join us November 17th it's at 5:00 PM. And to let me thank Ron and Sarah again, I could listen to you for much longer and would like to, so maybe you would both agree to do this again at some point

- Happily.

- There's a lot of fun.

- And to the audience, thank you for joining and goodnight.

- Thank you everyone, good night.

- Thank you all.

Biddy Martin (00:10):
Good evening, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us tonight. I can't think of a more appropriate topic or better guests and a moderator. So thanks for being here. I think I may have already old information, but as of now, at least 15 million people have been infected with COVID-19 and 600,000 have died across the world. This pandemic has brought fear, grief, disruption, and extreme loneliness for many people. The pandemic has also laid bare, made visible in ways that cannot be unseen, the extreme social, economic, and racial inequalities in this country, and elsewhere. Tonight's guests have extraordinary expertise in how all of us and their family members could navigate the challenges that this moment poses to our physical and our emotional health. And we're extremely grateful to both of them for joining us. Kimberlyn Leary is senior vice president of the Urban Institute.

Biddy Martin (01:36):
She is also professor of psychology and associate professor of health policy and management at Harvard. She's a lecturer, as well in the public policy area at Harvard Kennedy School. Kim formerly served as an advisor to President Obama's White House council on girls and women, and she was the White House health division lead on the Flint water crisis. In her work, Kim has focused on improving physician community relations, on access to healthcare for underserved communities, and communities of color. She has done research and taught extensively on conflict resolution. She is a current trustee of Amherst College, which is fortunate for us all. She graduated from Amherst in 1982 with a major in psychology. Thank you for being here, Kim. I believe Kim also has a birthday on Friday. So an early happy birthday. Dr. Paula Rauch is a former trustee, a trustee emerita of Amherst College, and a graduate in 1977 with a double major in biology and psychology.

Biddy Martin (03:03):
All of us on the board of trustees miss Paula every time we have a meeting. She's the founding director of the Marjorie E. Korff Parenting At a Challenging Time Program at Massachusetts General Hospital. PACT provides individualized guidance to parents for supporting their children's emotional health during and beyond parental illness. She is board certified in adult, child and adolescent psychiatry. Paula Rauch is a consultation child psychiatrist who specializes in the impact of medical illness on families and on the emotional health and wellbeing of children. She has practiced at the Massachusetts General Hospital since 1982, and is an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Paula is also the inaugural incumbent of the Timothy Christopher Davidson Chair of Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Paula, thank you so much for making time for us. And tonight's moderator is Julia McQuade, associate professor of psychology right here at Amherst College and how fortunate we are to have Julia McQuade here.

Biddy Martin (04:23):
Her research focuses on the interplay of the cognitive, biological and environmental processes that influence the social and emotional functioning of children and adolescents. Her courses include abnormal psychology, child and adolescent clinical psychology, introduction to psychology, and others. And now I'm delighted to turn things over to Professor McQuade.

Julia McQuade (04:51):
Thank you so much, President Martin and welcome Paula and Kim. It's so nice to have you here. I'm thrilled to be moderating this. So I'm a clinical psychologist and much of my recent work is really been focused on the role of stress and how we see differential of vulnerability in the context of stress and the types of environmental factors that can either exacerbate it or help to mitigate it. And so tonight's topic, I think, is so timely. We'll be talking about mental health and emotional wellbeing in the summer of 2020. A couple housekeeping things. So we will be recording this talk tonight so that those who can't tune in live will have a chance to watch it. There's also an opportunity for audience members to submit questions. So there should be a box that appears to the right of your screen. Feel free to submit a question. We have a couple of things that we're going to chat about to start us off, and then we'll be eager to hear from what you all are interested in, in learning about. So as a place to start Kim and Paula, I thought we should start by having both of you tell us a little bit about your work experience.

Julia McQuade (05:58):
And in particular, what are you doing now? What's changed since March in the context of these multiple crises that we find ourselves in. Kim, can we start with you?

Kimberlyn Leary (06:10):
Sure. Thank you, Julia. And thank you, Betty. And hello, Paula. It's really great to be with all of you this evening, and it's really exciting to have three mental health professionals that we'll have a conversation together with all of you. So as you heard, I wear three different hats or more depending on the day. And March feels like it's about a hundred years ago. When I think about what's changed in my work, like the experience that Julia has had at Amherst, I had to transition my course at the Kennedy School of a hundred students in experiential leadership class to go from the residential classroom to Zoom with about three days notice.

Kimberlyn Leary (06:52):
And as students were repatriating around the whole world, many of them only at the Kennedy School for a year, two things changed. First, my class was a class on leadership and authority, and it became a class on leading under conditions of crisis. The second is with students whose lives changed so abruptly. My role as a professor changed and part of the work that I did in class, actually in the context of the teaching, was to help students to hold and manage the grief that they were feeling on their own personal behalf, that they had family members who were ill, great uncertainty about whether they'd be able to graduate on campus—ultimately they were not—and just losing the precious period of time that they'd expected at Harvard. So all of a sudden at that moment, you're a teacher, as well as someone who is engaging with students to hold them through a massive calamity.

Kimberlyn Leary (07:57):
And then I would say that, you know, as a person who works in public policy, and I just started this new role at the urban Institute three weeks ago, you know, I've started a new position at a distance I have yet to meet in person, most of the people that I'm working with. And if I can just step back a little bit too, I would say that, you know, what's really changed is not just the technical parameters of how we all work, but, you know, we started off in March with the pandemic, really thinking that this was a collective challenge that affected all of us and might even bring us all together in some way, despite the pain and suffering. But as the challenge has changed, as we become aware that COVID doesn't affect all of us equally and disproportionately affects communities of color and low income communities. And then with the violence that's taken place with George Floyd's death and the civil unrest that's followed, I think we've realized that we're having to together accept, understand, metabolize, figure out what we're going to do about an America that looks very different than many people expected was the case in 2020.

Julia McQuade (09:20):
Thank you so much, Kim. Paula, could you tell us a little bit about your work and how things have changed for you?

Paula Rauch (09:27):
Yes, absolutely. So as Biddy said, I'm a child psychiatrist and my practice has always been hospital-based. I've been starting every work day for the last 38 years going into the Massachusetts General Hospital, and the work that I do has been working with early in my career with medically ill children with cancer, cystic fibrosis, and more recently predominantly working with families where a parent has either cancer or ALS, and really working in partnership with parents to help them think about how to support the emotional health and wellbeing of their children through the parent's diagnosis care and often untimely death. So I had been working before, always with the impact of a medical illness on a family, but not a contagious illness and going to the MGH every morning. So a very big change for me is instead of doing the care that I've been doing for so many years, by going to an inpatient room by someone coming to my outpatient office in the clinic, by going to the infusion units or to the neurology clinic, suddenly I am practicing looking at a screen practicing from my dining room where you find me now, my commute is short from the bedroom to the kitchen, to the dining room.

Paula Rauch (10:53):
But it's a very different experience. The kind of teaching that has been part of my practice all the years is again hospital-based. So it's been a lot of supervision of young trainees of colleagues. I credit my Amherst College education with having helped me to be a good communicator, and I really have loved the ability to talk about what psychiatrists and psychologists know and translate it in a way to make it accessible for other clinicians of different sorts. And so the doctor-year begins July 1, as it has for me for 38 years, but this year I am meeting my new trainees, our new trainees, virtually. I'm seeing my patients virtually. I'm seeing my colleagues virtually. And I think as Kim was saying, trying to make space to be both grateful for the ability to stay connected in these important ways and also to grieve the loss of a certain sense of hospital-based community and colleague community.

Paula Rauch (12:09):
That's very hard to reestablish through virtual connection. And as someone who generally both by virtue of gray hair and by being on the faculty for a very long time, young clinicians have often looked to me for guidance about how to negotiate, how to navigate circumstances. And so I think one of the really big changes for me was having to really take stock within myself, get settled myself to be in a position, to be able to be useful. I hope that I am always humble when I'm sitting with colleagues, patients, friends, family, I'm learning from everyone, but the need to ramp up the learning was so rapid in this circumstance to be so abruptly thrown into a different circumstance. And the patients and colleagues had a whole series of new questions on the patient front, working with families who were already stressed because of a serious medical illness and a parent, the whole process of trying to establish a support system for children changed radically.

Paula Rauch (13:29):
Who were you going to allow in your house during a time when there was a contagious disease? How are families going to function without a lot of the community supports, including in-person school, faith-based communities? And then amongst my colleagues, our hospital changed radically over a very short period of time. For those of you that don't know in Massachusetts, the surge peaked in April, but really the numbers were substantial. And it was impending for the month the end of March and into April, and the Mass General was transformed. Our pediatric unit became an adult COVID unit. My pediatric colleagues were treating adults instead of treating children. Our pediatric intensive care unit became an adult intensive care unit for COVID patients. And over the last 15 years, I've done quite a bit of work with military families.

Paula Rauch (14:32):
For those families, instead of facing the challenge of a parent with a serious illness, they face the challenge of a parent being in harm's way because of their service and sacrifice. And for the first time, or at least in what felt like a very different way, colleagues were coming and saying, we don't feel safe going into the hospital right now. This is a new illness. We weren't clear. It has changed in terms of what we know and our ability to help clinicians to feel safe. But for the first time people were entering the hospital and they were needing pediatricians, and primary care doctors were needing to talk to their children about how they were serving and being in harm's way as many of the first responders and essential workers were needing to do. So there was sort of an intersection for me of the kind of work that I had done before. But really feeling like that I was being called upon to answer questions, needs in very new ways.

Julia McQuade (15:33):
I really appreciate what you both said about these shifting roles and demands, that I think many of us have had to pivot and change directions and learn things that we haven't had to learn before. And I also, Kim, what you mentioned about the layering on top of that, of kind of coming to the realities of the racial injustices that are happening, of things maybe not being as we hoped in so many ways. It just is a lot of additional emotional bandwidth that that takes to have to sort of pull that and think about that. And it really has changed the landscape of what I think many of us are doing. So both of you, in essence, the sort of part of your jobs in many ways is about promoting emotional wellbeing, promoting mental health outcomes. So I'd like to hear a little bit about what you see as the challenges right now to mental health that we are facing in the midst of all of these concurrent crises. It started with Kim last time, so maybe I'll ask Paula first: Could you talk a little bit about the challenges you see playing out here in terms of mental health?

Paula Rauch (16:42):
So I think the notion that the challenges have been layered, that there was first the challenge of COVID, but that wasn't the first challenge that America's children and adolescents and all of us were experiencing. And before we really had our arms around adjusting and getting more accustomed to social distancing, trying to understand COVID, there were the tragic killings that brought another layer of injustice to the surface. I think the backdrop is that anxiety and depression are common already prior to COVID amongst young people, adolescents and young adults in particular. There was also a lot of angst and existential worry about climate change, appropriately so. So worries didn't start with COVID or the unfolding events of this summer of 2020, they occurred on a backdrop of already a stressful time.

Paula Rauch (17:58):
Fear in general, it narrows one's focus and it's harder to problem solve when you're afraid, because your focus is narrowed. And more than ever, people need important relationships to sustain them. Children and adolescents rely on their parents and the other caring adults in their lives. I always think about toddlers, how, when a toddler bumps his or her head, they turn and look to a parent. And if the parent is very worried, the toddler will begin to cry. And if the parent goes you're okay, you're okay, the toddler is more likely to take kind of a deep breath and carry on. And we refer to that as emotional referencing. We learn to emotionally reference off the people we know well. And this has been a time where everyone has been unsettled. Some people have suffered much more than others, but there's no one who's been unaffected during this time.

Paula Rauch (18:59):
And so it's been, I think, particularly important to think about those kinds of relationships. I spent a lot of time working with families and with colleagues focusing on facilitating communication and how important communication is in helping someone to feel that you get it, and also to be able to problem solve together and in sort of a overarching way when facing adversity. If one faces adversity within a relationship, it's possible to integrate even very difficult things as challenges that can build life skills. There are certainly things we wouldn't have picked, but there's the possibility to grow through that time. If adversity is experienced, feeling isolated, helpless, and hopeless, it's much more likely to get integrated as a trauma. And so we all need to be reaching out to each other and finding, both using old ways and new ways to support each other through the evolving challenges of the last few months, and frankly, the challenges that we anticipate in the months ahead.

Kimberlyn Leary (20:19):
Yeah. So, so much of what Paula is sharing with us about the experience of stress and trauma just can't be said often enough. You know, I mean, one of the challenges is that under normal circumstances, stress serves as a signal, right? It tells you that there is some danger in your midst and you can take evasive action, And then your stress will decrease. But that's not what's happened in the last months for us. Even early on in the pandemic, the very actions that kept us safe—staying at home sheltering in place—also exposed us to new dangers from the challenge if you were fortunate enough to be able to work at home, but also had to take care of kids at home. That challenge was stressful, even as it was keeping you safe. And if you weren't able to work at home, when we're a first responder, a frontline worker, whether it's a physician, a nurse or driving a bus for that matter, or working in a grocery store, then you faced a different set of challenges that you had to bear and a different calculus that you had to make.

Kimberlyn Leary (21:36):
So our experience of stress has also been I think altered by the very fact that we've gone from one kind of stress, a pandemic, to then an economic recession that differentially has impacted different communities and different people in different families. And then to the stress of recognizing that the country in which we live continues to struggle with significant forms of systemic racism and institutional barriers to opportunity and success. And if we think about stress this way, a friend of mine describes it as like a coffee table. The more you put on a coffee table at a certain point, it becomes overburdened. So that's been the experience of many in our communities, of just as you get accustomed to one part of the stress, of the crisis, you have to start coping with something else. And I would say if we think about what's been happening most recently in our country, there's ample evidence that racism affects people who are subject to it as a specific stressor.

Kimberlyn Leary (22:52):
And there are, you know, evidence-based research that shows a link between racism and psychological distress, anxiety, post traumatic stress disorder, and depression. And for many people of color in this country, for example, and those who feel closely allied with them, what happened to George Floyd became a collective trauma. And again, particularly for people of color and particularly for Black Americans. And there is a research that's just coming out that shows that the symptoms of anxiety and depression in non Hispanic, Black adults rose to 40% or so from may to June, and it remains elevated. So what we've seen though is that on the other side of this, and there is sometimes growth that happens in the midst of trauma, that structural racism and anti-Black racism have become a thing that we could all see in a way.

Kimberlyn Leary (23:58):
What has happened is that we now recognize we are in the midst of a collective problem. And this is just my own take on this. You know, I think many Americans are moved to action on behalf of the particular and on behalf of specific injustices, particularly ones that they can see with their own eyes. George Floyd's murder occurred on camera. And for eight minutes and 46 seconds, we watched a man slowly be suffocated to death. Now, possibly, and this is just a thought, possibly at a time when we're all attuned to the horrors of losing breath with COVID-19, this had special meaning, possibly it was a tipping point. These kinds of punitive policing situations and officer-involved deaths have happened many, many times. And of course, sustained attention by activists has helped the issues that we're working with right now become right.

Kimberlyn Leary (24:58):
But the promising thing, perhaps, in the midst of a tragedy and pain has been that as structural racism has become more of a collective problem, and as various organizations and institutions has seen it as something that belongs to them as well, there have been important new developments where we recognize at an institutional level, it's not just inadequate diversity, but we really need to look at the structural barriers that are baked into so many of our systems. So there is stress but there is also recognition of perhaps some new capacity and some new tools. And I think that's at the system level, the country level, and also for some of us individually in our personal lives as well.

Julia McQuade (25:55):
Thank you so much, Kim. I think you're so right that much of this is laid bare what needs to shift and the problematic institutional things that exist. And so, I think those are important things for us to keep in mind. You know, this also reminds me partially as a professor at Amherst college about how these stressors are also exacerbated by the social isolation. You know, I know that especially for our students—most of them are home. They're not together in their shared spaces. And with these events that have unfolded, especially around the racial injustices taking place, conversation, social support, active engagement is so critical. And I think for Amherst College students, they are scattered in a way that makes some of those connections much more difficult. And I think even similarly, when we think about processing what is challenging, the potential traumas that are existing.

Julia McQuade (26:50):
And I think for our students too, they go home to very different environments. And so it also may mean that what they are experiencing this summer at home, their friends and peers may not really have the same context because they're in a very different environment. And so there isn't that shared space that they're in on campus and together to help them maybe process together and see each other's points of views as much. And I think that really also affects this. We've talked a little bit about then this sort of intersection between these different pieces. And I wondered, though, if Paula, you had anything more to add about how you see these layers intersecting in terms of the clinical side and the impact that these multiple stressors may be having in your patients. Are there things that are different right now that you're observing?

Paula Rauch (27:43):
So I think some of the interesting things at the outset, one of the things that surprised me when I was talking with parents with cancer in the middle of March. I was expecting them, and, and let me first say, everybody is an individual, and it always worries me when I'm making generalizations, but I'm going to share a couple of points because I think they might be interesting to think about. So some of the cancer-affected parents said, you know, the rest of America is experiencing what I've been experiencing right along. I haven't felt safe. I've been worried being immunocompromised, worried about infection. So the difference between America with COVID and America without COVID for me, for that, person living with cancer and the risk of COVID at the outset, didn't feel as big as the risks to health and family of the cancer diagnosis.

Paula Rauch (28:44):
So that was that, that was a note to me to continue to be curious not to come forward with assumptions. I think amongst some of my colleagues, it was very important to make time to hear what was going on in each individual person's life and to give people permission to be sad about family milestones that weren't going to happen, the specific things that individual things that were hard. I think it was difficult. It remains difficult. When one feels grateful for privilege to also make space for the ambiguous grief that goes along with milestones that just couldn't happen as they were anticipated. And lots of challenges around saying goodbye, not in person. So it was not possible for, for the most part, for any family member to go in to many places, to nursing homes mostly to the hospital to say goodbye.

Paula Rauch (29:59):
All kinds of things were put in place with iPads and other virtual attempts, but it was painful to be facing these new ways of having to say goodbye. I feel like as people have adjusted a little bit to this new normal people's creativity has sprung up in all kinds of ways. And people are not so shocked. They're trying to figure out ways they're learning from each other. And then I think I found myself talking both in lectures to primary care physicians and pediatricians about how to talk to their own children about being in harm's way in this new way. And just to share language that we've used together with those who have deployed into harm's way, I encouraged parents to talk about what they were doing, why they were going to the hospital, what their jobs were, or what their first responder jobs were, or working in a supermarket, wherever the frontline work was. How providing that service to the community, connected to loving their child and wanting their child to live in a place where food was available to people, where people in the hospital got the kind of care that they would want family members to have.

Paula Rauch (31:25):
And then I think head, heart, and hand, and the hand is the implementation part. And here are the ways I'm doing that safely. Here are the people that I'm working side by side with that I trust. And so in that way, it was kind of bringing together military experience with facilitating communication, all in the service of trying in particular to support young people.

Julia McQuade (31:57):
Well, I have a question. Oh yeah.

Paula Rauch (32:00):
I was going to ask you a question Julia, about how Amherst has responded to some of the needs of students. I'm hoping to hear kind of some of the things that are happening during this unprecedented time.

Julia McQuade (32:12):
Yes. We're thinking a lot about the cognitive load and the emotional load on students, which we anticipate to be present moving forward and not changing. And so on the academic side we reduced the course load to three courses per semester, instead of four, really in recognition that we want students to be engaged and successful in their coursework, but that everything takes more effort. I think that it relates back to what both of you were saying at the beginning is that for students too, they have to learn a new modality and way to engage academically. And that's going to take more time. It's not as natural. It has some challenges to it. And so we know that students are going to be grappling with that in courses, and they want to try to make them as successful as possible in that.

Julia McQuade (33:02):
And we're also now, we're also having some greater flexibility in terms of the grading that we're providing to students, so that students have an opportunity to take a course pass/fail. And part of that is also in recognition of the uncertainties of what's happening, and that a student may find themselves ill or have a family member ill. And also that students are taking our courses now in many different locations, that social support may not always be there, that there may not always have, you know, a private space to work. And so just trying to make accommodations and flexibility. Many of us faculty are also thinking a lot about a greater responsibility in our courses for social connection, the things that happen organically on a small college campus that we don't have to actually manage so much as professors, the students are very good at that, that we are now having to be much more systematic in promoting those kinds of things.

Julia McQuade (34:02):
And so that's the side on the side of the academics, some of the things that are being done. And then the counseling center has done a tremendous job of supporting students, I think, through this crisis. The loosening of restrictions around tele-health has allowed for many students to continue to see counselors in our counseling session. In some states where that hasn't been possible, the counseling center has helped students to try to interface with local therapists. And then there's also support groups that are ongoing and that they think they're going to be even more of those. Because again, at this piece of the social support, and something that I've been trying to sort of communicate to students and demystify is some of this normalizing of the emotional load that's taking place and that it is okay to prioritize self care, to engage in self care that that has to become a more active priority than maybe we were doing previously.

Julia McQuade (35:03):
And so I think that we're at least very mindful of it. And in trying to sort of create opportunities for students also to come together and discuss some of these topics around racial injustice. There's been a big push for faculty to have more courses this year that really touch on those issues related to those subject matters. And so, and I think there's been a lot of responses from students. I think at Amherst particularly, students make sense and meaning in their academic work. And so having academic opportunities for us to have these conversations and come together about the subject matters, I think is really critical for Amherst College students. And I think they've been hungry for them. So we're trying to get there for that. I have one other question for the two of you, you know, I think we've touched on that clearly there's more mental health challenges going on right now. Do you perceive these as long lasting effects or do you think that things will dissipate?

Kimberlyn Leary (36:07):
Well, I think it's hard to know, and that's one of the challenges right now. We certainly know that in other big disruptions that the imprint of those last for quite some time and certainly students now whose academic engagement has been transformed by COVID, and by the other crises as well, will never forget that. It will always be a part of their college experience. The other part of that is that they are now part of a cohort who shares something in common with students across the country and across the globe. And I think two thoughts that I also had about this is that, you know, I think many of our students are trainees residents and so forth, have also had the experience of watching us, try to learn, use new technology, be beginners again, in a variety of ways.

Kimberlyn Leary (37:12):
And at least what I've heard from some of my students is how very much they've appreciated that, that it has narrowed the gap that sometimes exists when you have a professor, student, or a doctor or a patient. And so there has been this kind of bringing together of people even in their effort to try to engage in very different ways. I would also say that when we think about the imprint we of this experience, we can only, we can think of it in two ways. We can think about all that people have given up and all that they have to grieve, but there are also incredible things that students and others have done, of using technology to make a difference in their local communities, or in communities, across the country, across the globe.

Kimberlyn Leary (38:13):
Some of my students have organized, for example, to think about services like domestic violence shelters that are not open right now. And what can they do as a student group to work with others, to help create virtual opportunities for safety in other ways, just as for example. So I think that what I hope the imprint will be is that the tremendous creativity and of a willingness to begin to tackle really important problems that, you know, in many instances we put off contending with from making sure that we were really prepared for a pandemic to be issues that we're needing to really interrogate around race and racism in our country, and also around the globe.

Julia McQuade (39:10):
Thank you again. So we're going to transition over now to some of the questions that audience members have have submitted to us. So the first question is one directed towards Paula. So putting safety aside in psychiatry, how do you weigh the pros and cons of video full-face versus in person and masked?

Paula Rauch (39:36):
So with my experience now of what two and a half months I think in all seriousness, the real challenge is for young children doing at least Zoom-related virtual visits for most younger children is hard to do. It's different to be playing with a child, doing play therapy in an office than it is to be doing that on a screen. So I think there are certain populations for whom it really is a challenge. So younger kids, kids with a variety of developmental delays, I think families that have been living with the challenges of a child with autism, particularly severe autism, having lost the structure of school. Those families are really struggling and doing amazing things, but also it's been very difficult. I think there are many adolescents who actually have appreciated being on the virtual screen and doing tele-health and I haven't done the face-to-face visits with masks on.

Paula Rauch (40:51):
So in some ways that would be a different challenge to not be able to see teenager's or child's face to be able to read an important part of their reaction. So I would say in a lot of ways it's stay tuned. I think we're going to be learning a lot over the next months, weeks, months. There are other places, Canada, for example, does way more tele-health than we have done. There's been a move to do more tele-health here in the states for a while. I was slow to agree to do that. It took a pandemic to get me to switch to all virtual, but I am recognizing that there are aspects of it that work well. But I am having to learn to feel my patients in the same way through a screen, and to have a sense of whether they feel me as being with them in that way that I was talking about before—being in a relationship that is settling and helps someone to problem solve or to be feel understood.

Paula Rauch (42:11):
So I would like to have a better answer, but I would say it's pretty much stayed tuned. And yes and no.

Kimberlyn Leary (42:21):
And if I could just jump in there, you know, I think one of the interesting dimensions of tele-health, as Paula said, is that it's not only that individual clinicians may have been reluctant to put it into practice. There were all kinds of institutional barriers, and lo and behold, within about two weeks, we managed to innovate and get past those barriers. It was really a quite extraordinary thing for our profession.

Julia McQuade (42:48):
Absolutely. So the next question is about screen use. So I've read that screen use adds to depression. Can you think of ways to counteract this and the increased need for screen time?

Paula Rauch (43:05):
I'm wondering if that's more of a child question. If it is, I'm going to jump in, Kim. So they are all, you know, they're are all different kinds of screen time. So I think screens have been used as a way for kids to stay connected with each other, to stay connected with their classmates, to be doing yoga. I think there are there are many active ways to be engaged and also ways to be engaged both with peers with some adult engagement as well that have been positive. And then I think we all, whether it's kids or adults, we need to pay attention to our physical health and sitting in front of a screen and not, you know, at the expense of exercise, at the expense of being artistic or reading or doing other things, is going to be a problem.

Paula Rauch (44:07):
So screen time necessarily has gone up for children And families can only do what they can do. It's not, you know, people are really making do in very difficult circumstances. And I think picking one factor, like you can only be on a screen a certain amount of time, defeats the purpose. It's better to think more about ways to support emotional health than to get too fixated on an amount of time of screen time. But think of screen time as like a diet. It's not a problem to have screen time, but what else is in your interpersonal diet? What can you do together as a family? What are things to do solo that are energy and emotionally enhancing?

Julia McQuade (45:00):
So with the pandemic, do you think there's actually less stigma around seeking mental health therapy, particularly in communities of color?

Kimberlyn Leary (45:12):
I would say that the accessibility of tele-mental health, when it is available to people, has moved in that direction of making treatment less of a stigma. As I understand it, people who might have put off getting care for substance use through a 12-step program, for example, have found it an easier way to get care by dialing it up on their screen. So that's an advantage of being able to seek care through screens, In communities of color, I would say that over the last while, particularly among young people, 18 and into their twenties, have begun to have a different attitude about mental health care. They see it as a way to expand their own capacity.

Kimberlyn Leary (46:10):
And they see it as part of a social justice agenda. So over the last while, what you've seen with college-age populations is much more of an openness to mental health care. Still not so much in pervasively through communities of color. There is significant distrust of the healthcare profession. But from organizations like the Black Women's Health Imperative, to groups that are trying to use music and media in order to be more inviting, I think that we're beginning to see some changes in how mental health care is perceived within communities of color. And I do think that for some families, you know, to be able to not have to worry about bundling a family in the car to get to the hospital or get to the clinic makes a big difference.

Paula Rauch (47:16):
I think there also has been some movement towards a greater understanding of kind of mind/body. I have heard and have had other colleagues comment that some individuals who previously were convinced that their physical symptoms had no psychological connection, in the context of COVID they're suddenly saying, Oh, you know, maybe some of these physical symptoms that I am having are not just medical, maybe it has to do with how anxious I've been feeling. And so maybe there's some opportunities there both around building on mind/body practices that enhance wellness, and also recognizing the connection between physical symptoms and emotional health.

Kimberlyn Leary (48:05):
I would say too, in my classroom especially during March and early April, as students were actively trying to orient themselves, they were telling stories of positive coping and not so positive coping and sharing that among their peers. And I think the pandemic, and again, the sense of it where there's a collective challenge, has been—,it's created a platform for people's emotional experiencing to be relevant. And I would say the same during the civil unrest and protests, as people have been struggling with a myriad of feelings from anger and rage to shock and dismay or various combinations of those, they've come to recognize that their emotional health is necessary to cultivate just as their physical health is necessary to cultivate in order to have the kind of community impact that they hope to have, now and down the line.

Julia McQuade (49:12):
I think those are really excellent points. So I'm going to throw out one final question for all of us. Try to end on a high note. What are some of the things that students and alumni and their families can be doing to support their own emotional wellbeing, as well as the emotional wellbeing of those around them?

Paula Rauch (49:35):
I'll start. So I think the basic things are the things that we know but often are the ones that we don't do. Things that have to do, for example, with maintaining a regular routine, going to sleep at a regular time, eating healthful, regular meals, prioritizing family time or time with, whether it's family by birth or family by choice, but people with whom you enjoy spending time, whether that's, you know, eating a meal on Zoom or whether it's watching a movie together side-by-side. Prioritizing talking time in your household. So parents and kids, particularly parents can usually tell you the times that they're most likely to have a good conversation with their child and prioritizing those times as the grownups in a child or adolescent or young person's life. I always think about the importance that in communication, you're doing more listening than you are talking.

Paula Rauch (50:39):
I think limiting the amount of media, having a healthy media diet and modeling that not being all the time getting flooding information. When we did a study after the Boston Marathon bombing, one of the things that we learned from parents was that for their adolescents, because the adolescents were getting their information so quickly, sometimes parents of adolescents, and I think this is true of young adults, misunderstand the difference between knowing something and processing it together. So just because a teenager, a young adult has the information, often they have more information and they're teaching us, or at least that's my experience with my own children and now grandchildren. But spending the time to process it together doing the self-regulation things, the mind, body things, meditation, prayer, art, journaling. For me getting to that place of being settled and knowing for myself, when am I in that settled place? And for me, if I'm not curious, I'm not settled. So that's something I know. Gratitude, feeling okay about moments of joy, not feeling guilty about finding joy, and then also not utilizing dangerous coping strategies, and the ones that jumped to mind, alcohol and drugs. And, and if someone feels helpless or hopeless or overwhelmed, reach out for help. And if the first reach out doesn't work, reach out again. And after that again.

Kimberlyn Leary (52:13):
I think that's a terrific portfolio of actions, activities that anyone can make use of. You know, I'll highlight maybe just two of the ones that Paula has mentioned. I've heard anecdotally from a lot of people that during these last months, they have reached out to old friends from the past that they may not have been in touch with for quite some time. They've reached out to relatives that perhaps they only saw once or twice a year. That connectivity that re-constituting your network, I think has also been something that that many people have been able to do. And that they found a new joy that's come out of this time of so much otherwise lost. And then around the journaling, what I would mention is how important it is really to develop a perspective on your own experience. And that's one of the outcomes of journaling. There's a psychologist at Texas, James Pennebaker, who writes a lot about, writes about expressive writing.

Kimberlyn Leary (53:26):
And expressive writing, it allows to step back from your own experience and develop a take on it very much like what you get in the context of talking with a therapist or a counselor, only now you're able to do the act of writing, be able to acquire that kind of perspective yourself.

Julia McQuade (53:42):
You know, and I will add just from my own research, which focuses on how parents can socialize children around emotions that I think even within these challenging moments or opportunities, particularly for children and adolescents, to learn, to learn about emotions, to learn about how are the healthy and good ways to cope with emotions, what am I going to do with them? And similarly, other folks are doing some really wonderful research on the opportunities that come from talking about racial inequities with young children, of having these conversations that are really important learning opportunities. And so I think that also that can promote resilience, but also sort of knowledge and understanding. So I'm hearing that. Okay. So it sounds like I am going to be giving some of the closing remarks. So I wanted to just ask if either of you had anything that you wanted to end with. Oh, okay. Biddy is ready.

Julia McQuade (54:49):
So I'm going to say, thank you so much to both Paula and Kim. I know that I've learned a lot and I've really been so grateful to hear your expertise on these subject matters. And I'm going to turn this back over to Biddy Martin to finish us off for the evening.

Biddy Martin (55:06):
Well, you know what, I feel Julia, like handing it right back to you because you were about to say something that I would really like to hear.

Julia McQuade (55:16):
No, I feel good. I feel satisfied with this conversation. And so I'm in a good place.

Biddy Martin (55:23):
Well, it was a wonderful conversation. It certainly has has helped me. I feel a lot calmer at the end of this program than I did when we started. So thank you all. Thank you for the information, for the obvious compassion, for the insight, for the intelligence. Thank you. I hope perhaps we can count on all three of you again. Given the times. In any case, I also want everyone in the audience to mark your calendars and join us next week, Tuesday, July 24, conversation about student research in machine learning. Machine learning, being the algorithm driven technology that's used for everything from self-driving cars to credit card transactions. A professor of computer science, Scott Alfred, will be our speaker and he will have a moderator from the department of mathematics and Nick Horton.

Speaker 1 (56:24):
I know having listened to them both, that it will be a very enlivening and extremely informative conversation. Paula and Kim and Julia, thank you again for everything you do, not just for tonight.

Paula Rauch (56:43):
Thank you.

Kimberlyn Leary (56:46):
My pleasure. Terrific, to be in conversation with everyone here tonight.

Biddy Martin (00:09):
Welcome, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us. We're extremely excited about tonight's event. And let me introduce the speakers. Nikole Hannah-Jones, as so many of you know, is an award-winning investigative journalist who writes about racial injustice in the United States. In 2015, she was named journalist of the year by the National Association of Black Journalists. In 2016, you may have heard her popular two-part This American Life story, which was called The Problem We All Live With. And the story is about school desegregation in Normandy, Missouri, which is the district where Michael Brown attended high school. In 2017, she was named MacArthur fellow for her work, and I quote, reshaping the national conversation about education reform, end quote. But today, of course, Hannah Jones is best known as the creator of, and the lead writer for The 1619 Project named for the year the first enslaved Africans ended up in British North America.

Martin (01:28):
This ongoing multimedia project was produced in conjunction with the New York Times magazine. It reframes American history by placing the consequences of slavery and the vast contributions of Black Americans at the center of the national narrative. Hannah-Jones' introductory essay to The 1619 Project is entitled "Our democracy's founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true." The essay earned her the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary and the acclaim project is still going strong. We heard just yesterday that Oprah Winfrey will be adapting the stories of the 1619 Project for TV and film for worldwide audiences. We welcome you, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and we're honored to have you here. Khary Oronde Polk is an Associate Professor of Black Studies and Sexuality Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst. Khary is a cultural historian of the African American diaspora. He is a specialist in LGBTQ studies and the scholar of race, gender, and sexuality in the US military.

Martin (02:51):
Khary teaches courses on military history, Black European studies, queer theory, Black sexuality, and more. His astonishing book, Contagions of Empire, has just been published. The subtitle, Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad. And in this book, this very carefully and creatively researched book, Khary shows how the movement of African American soldiers and nurses around the world and the first half of the 20th century challenged American military ideals of race, of nation, of honor, and of what patriotism means. I want to thank you both for being here. We're so excited to have you Nikole, and to have you as an interviewer Khary. Thank you.

Polk (03:47):
Thank you so much, Biddy, and thank everyone who's tuned in to our livestream. And of course, Nikole, welcome to Amherst. It's wonderful to have you here, albeit in our virtual colloquium. But nonetheless, welcome. And I did want to let people know that if you have questions that you can submit the questions via the website that's connected to the livestream. And I'll try to leave plenty of time for your questions as well. So Nikole, it's been nearly one year since The 1619 Project debuted in the New York Times Magazine. And since then it has become, least in my mind, a cultural touchstone, enjoying wide acclaim as well as pointed criticism from pundits, academics, and historians alike. But I think about this text, in the way in which I might also think about the miniseries Roots. So in some ways, what the miniseries Roots was to the 1970s, or what the documentary Eyes on the Prize was to the 1980s, The 1619 Project seems poised to have the same kind of transformational impact on how Americans today understand the long arc of the Black freedom struggle in the United States.

Polk (05:32):
So, if you could tell us what inspired you to put this project together, and did you expect it to have the impact that it has had and continues to have?

Hannah-Jones (05:47):
Well, thank you for that introduction. And thank you Amherst for hosting this conversation today.

Hannah-Jones (05:59):
And I don't know that those comparisons are apt, I mean, everyone remembers their Roots moment, but I really appreciate you saying those words. What inspired the 1619 Project? In some ways this was a 25-year-old story that's been in my mind. I first came across the date 1619 as a high school student. That's when my the high school that I attended offered a one semester Black Studies elective. And I took that course. And in that one semester, I learned more about Black Americans and our history and our contributions then I had learned the entire public education that I received. And I initially became angry because I wanted to understand why in all those years, no one thought it was important for us to learn this history. A history that, as a Black student, had really always felt demeaning and had made me feel that we'd never really accomplished much or contributed much to our society.

Hannah-Jones (07:10):
And here I am in this class and learning about all of these people and all of these events and all of these contributions we made. So I became somewhat obsessed with that history. And when that course was over, I asked that teacher, his name was Ray Dow, he's the only Black male teacher I ever had, I asked him, give me another book. And every time I would read a book, I finished it, I would ask him for another book. And I just really began this inquest, this kind of self-study. And one of the books he put in my hand was Before the Mayflower by Lerone Bennett. And I actually didn't know what the title was referring to. And somewhere on page 35 or so, he talks about the year 1619. And I just remember it feeling almost like a lightning bolt.

Hannah-Jones (07:58):
I was like, holy shit. Like we were here since 1619. I had no idea that people of African descent, enslaved people, had been here that long. No one had ever taught me that date. And then it clicked to me that every American child learns about the Mayflower, which landed in 1620, a year after the White Lion, which lands in 1619, and yet no child ever was taught in America about 1619. So, the power of that erasure and how much erasure is just as important as what we're actually taught. That stuck with me even as a 16 or 17 year old child. And so I thought about the year 16, literally then. So fast forward, you know, a few years since I was in high school and what I was coming towards the end of book leave.

Hannah-Jones (09:02):
I think we're going to talk about that book. It's not done. But I was coming towards end of book leave. It was you know, about November of 2018. And I was thinking a lot about that. The following year was going to be the 400th anniversary of that moment and that, like so much of the history of Black Americans, so much of the history of slavery, it was probably going to pass with no national acknowledgement, no recognition. Most Americans had never heard of the date and it was just going to be erased. And how often do we get a chance to commemorate 400 years of anything in this country, but certainly something that I thought to be so foundational to the country that developed. So I was thinking what's the best way to mark that, and I just understood that I could write an essay, but an individual essay was never going to be enough to really give that date the gravity that it deserves.

Hannah-Jones (10:04):
And I just came up with the idea of doing an entire essay or, excuse me, entire magazine, and dedicating it through a series of essays, the entire magazine, to really examining the ongoing legacy of slavery. It was important to me that it would not be a history of slavery, that it would look at modern American society and answer that question. At my pettiest it was to answer that question that every Black person gets, which is, slavery was a long time ago, why don't you get over it? I wanted to show, essay after essay after essay, that we can't get over it because our country hasn't gotten over it. And I I've often joked, though it's not really a joke, that if you name anything in American life, I can trace it back to slavery. And so that's kind of what the project was that the legacy is very much alive, but it operates invisibly.

Hannah-Jones (10:57):
But if you look at all of these institutions, from our politics to our cultures, to our social norms to our legal system. Look, you know, look around American society and the fingerprints of slavery are there, but we've just ignored them. And the 1619 Project really was taking the 400th anniversary to force us to acknowledge the slavery is just as foundational to our country as anything can be considered foundational. Another answer to your other question will be much shorter, which is no, I had no idea whatsoever that the project will get the response that it got. And in fact I had panic and anxiety that I had managed to harness all of these resources from the times to produce this project. And on this one thing in American life that we never really want to talk about or grapple with, that we refuse to deal with. And if nobody read it or cared, I would never get the ability to do a project like this again. And I would also close doors on other Black and brown people coming behind me who had ambitious ideas. So the pressure was immense. I believe we had produced something powerful, but as you know, you can do something powerful and people still don't care. So there was no way I could have predicted the way that people have responded to it.

Polk (12:25):
That's, I mean, that's really amazing to hear, because I think we all have these anxieties about how will our work travel, especially without us. And I guess I'm interested, you mentioned being in high school, have you heard anything specifically from either high school students or high school teachers about the project?

Hannah-Jones (12:55):
Yes. I got a pop up on my screen. I've heard, so for those who don't know, we partner with the Pulitzer Center and the Pulitzer Center turns journalism into high school curriculum. And so that when the 1619 Project launched as a journalism project, it also launched as a free curriculum that educators could download and begin to teach the project to their students. So I, you know, before COVID stopped real life, I was traveling all over the country and meeting with high school students and educators all over the country. And the response from students is the most unexpected, but fulfilling thing that has come out of the 1619 Project. I can't tell you how many students I heard from who said that they felt affirmed and empowered by this story that, you know, they looked around the world much like I did when I was in high school.

Hannah-Jones (13:59):
And I saw that the image of our communities on TV and the explanations that we were given, which is that somehow we just didn't want better. And I knew it wasn't right, but I didn't have the facts to actually be able to push back on that narrative. And for so many high school students, particularly Black students, but students of all races, this project really filled in it, made their country make more sense to them. So I can remember experiences when I was on the road of students who wrote their own essays and response to mine and recited and engaged in them. I read an essay from a student who was an immigrant from Southeast Asia. And, you know, there's a part in my essay where I talk about that. The very reason Black and brown people are able to immigrate to this country is because of the Black resistance struggle that ends in 1965, our racist immigration quota system.

Hannah-Jones (15:04):
And I say like, you're here because of us and you have citizenship because of Black people, and yet we never get the credit for that. And instead, what you're taught when you immigrate here, immediately is that anti-Blackness is part of your Americanization process. And this young immigrant said, I never knew that. And it changes my entire perspective on my role here on what I've been taught about Black Americans. And those kinds of transformative moments for young people, you know, I think a lot, I told that story about 1619 in high school. And I think a lot about what that meant for me. And to know that I'm able to provide this project is able to provide a sense of empowerment for young folks is just so incredibly gratifying. And as far as educators, educators, one, have been educated by the project and have really been thankful to have something to supplement what we know to be a very poor history that kids are getting. Educators are tasked with teaching from their textbooks which are highly politicized.

Polk (16:26):
Well, I think it is, it's the question of the politicization of education that I'm interested in in terms of some of the critics, of the critiques that you received from these from different pundits. And I'm wondering how you receive those criticisms. Were some of them fair? Were some of the mean-spirited? Were they coded as did you feel that, that they were racist or just simply afraid of a history that they perhaps did not want to acknowledge?

Hannah-Jones (17:04):
I would say all of the above, depending on the critic and how I responded, depending on the day. Some days I was able to hold a higher ground and other days I had to go in there scrapping. So you know, what I will say is one, I was completely unsurprised that there would be criticism of the project. Of course there was, I mean, you're academic and you know, one, academics love to argue with each other. This is the nature of historiography. Historians provide their interpretations and other historians write counterarguments to those interpretations. That part is very normal. What's different course is that most Americans don't actually get how historiography works. So for them, there's a set of facts and that's all the facts and anything else is revision. And if historians argue with you, you must've gotten it wrong, especially when you're a journalist and this isn't even what you're trained to do.

Hannah-Jones (18:05):
So some of this I completely expected. You don't make certain arguments like, let's consider 1619 our true founding and not 1776, let's consider Black people are our true founding fathers. A project that is not deifying our founding or founders and not expect that you're going to get a lot of pushback. So of course I knew that there would be some, and I wanted people to be uncomfortable. We've been far too comfortable with this narrative that, this political narrative, that has tried to downplay and marginalize slavery, and treat slavery as an asterisk when it's clearly not. So that part I expected. The right wing attacks of course I expected all of that. And the right wing attacks have been largely fueled by the fact that the project has become curriculum in so many schools because they really don't want American children learning anything but a vaulted idealized history of our country.

Hannah-Jones (19:06):
What did surprise me, however, was the effort by some really esteemed historians to discredit the entire project. They circulated a secret letter that they tried to get a bunch of historians to sign on to. I think it's speaks to the project and also the integrity of, of many academics that they couldn't get any signatures to it outside of their five. But once they publish their letter against the project, and we responded and we published their letter in full, they didn't just move on, right? Like they kept publishing. And one in particular, Sean Wilentz of Princeton, I mean, I may as well call the name out, probably published four pieces against the project and they disputed one particular fact, which I could say I should've been more clear about, which was about the slavery being a motivation of some of the colonists during the revolutionary war.

Hannah-Jones (20:07):
And in hindsight, I probably shouldn't have dropped that bomb out there without a little bit more fortifying evidence. So I'll give them that, but their larger critique was, I didn't give white people enough credit. I was too mean to Abraham Lincoln and that our country was not foundationally racist, which I don't think that's a historic critique, obviously, because I don't know what history proves or disproves that. And so what you realize was that this really was a battle about the national narrative and what that national narrative should be. And that was really disheartening because it's one thing to say we disagree with this reporters interpretations of facts. It's another thing to try to discredit this work. So how I responded really, if you follow me on Twitter, just depends on the day.

Polk (20:59):
Yes, indeed. I have to say that, going back to your essay for the project, that the personal anecdote that begins your essay resonated with me deeply and I'm referring to your story about your father, a veteran and the American flag that he proudly flew in your yard as you grew up. And yet as a young person, in terms of how you narrate this story, you had learned through a kind of cultural osmosis that the flag didn't really belong to African Americans and you write that quote, how could this Black man, having seen firsthand the way his country abused Black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly fly it's banner. Now I come from a military family and a few weeks ago, my mother called me just around Memorial day.

Polk (22:01):
And she sent my father, who served 30 years in the air force, to the dollar store to buy as many American flags as possible in order to decorate their lawn for the holiday. And it's something that's become kind of a yearly tradition in the Polk household. And so though I grew up in a military environment, when I returned to the States for college, I too learned for the first time, it felt that the flag didn't really belong to me either. And I mentioned this because there's something about the question or the paradox of Black patriotism that animates aspects of The Project, its present and its critical essays as well as the creative work. But it also seems to resolve this paradox about what it means for African Americans to serve a country that doesn't always have its interest at heart. And you may not be able to answer this, but I was wondering if you could say a bit about why American military service or African American military service across the centuries plays such an important role in your project?

Hannah-Jones (23:26):
Well, I think that as a country we understand, or we believe, at least, that serving in the military is the highest

Hannah-Jones (23:39):
exhibition of patriotism, right? Your willingness to fight for and die your country. And we know that from the very first war, the Revolutionary War that this country fought, Black people have disproportionately signed up for service. I understand that to be, and I'm sure, you're the historian, so it's weird to be asked the question from someone about their area of expertise cause you get scared, you're going to mess something up. But my lay-person's view of that is of course that a people who did not gain full legal citizenship in their country until 1968, thought that military service would be the way to prove that you were actually worthy of full citizenship, that if you were willing to fight and die for a country, that didn't even, that forced you to serve in a segregated military that often didn't want you to serve or did not allow you to serve until they started losing the war,

Hannah-Jones (24:47):
and then they needed extra bodies, that if you were willing to put your life on the line for this country, how could your country then say that you did not deserve the full rights of citizenship? So to this day the groups, the two groups that serve the highest in the military are Black people and native people, right? The two people who have constantly had to prove our citizenship and I think a lot about what it means to not be treated as a citizen in the only country you can claim, right? We have no other country to claim. We have no other country to go to. We speak English because we have no other language. We hold the names of Europeans because we have no ability to maintain our own ethnic names. So this is the only country Black people have.

Hannah-Jones (25:41):
We have nowhere else to go and yet have not ever been treated as full citizens, and the only country we can claim. And that's why my essay also argues we're the most American of all people, because we were created literally on this land. So to have to try to fight and die, just to be recognized as a citizen, and this is what we have done. And this is why I didn't understand my father. It was very hard for me to understand how you could love a country so much that demeans you in that way. But I think what I come to in the essay, and it's funny because people ask, well, when did you finally understand your dad? And I was like, as I was writing the essay. I literally was 44 years old. (Glances off screen: I'm sorry, working from home.)

Hannah-Jones (26:36):
I was literally writing the essay and reading Black people claiming this country and saying, when during and after slavery, they tried to send us to another land, they tried to say, we're going to free you and then y'all got to get the hell outta here. And Black people were saying, no, our ancestors died here are our people's blood is in this soil. We're not going anywhere. And it's reading that and saying like it was the smartest thing we could have done right after slavery was left this country, right. There was no reason that we should think that a country that would treat us as chattel for 250 years was a place that would ever treat us fairly and that we should stay and invest in. And yet we believed so much in these founding ideals and in our ownership, right.

Hannah-Jones (27:28):
Even though white people were telling us, we didn't have claims to this country, we never bought that. We believed actually that we had a tremendous claim to this country and more of a claim than anyone else. And we were not going to leave. So reading that, then I understood, I understood what my dad was saying. That you don't have the right to make me feel that I can't claim this land and I'm going to proudly. You will never see me fly an American flag. Let's be clear, but I understand my father saying I have the right to do this, and you are not going to allow me to feel that I don't. And that has been, I think, what Black people have done in serving in the military and often feeling very conflicted about it. Especially as our military service began to be used against Black and brown people and other places, there's always been this deep sense of confliction about serving empire and serving in America, but also feeling that this is the thing we must do so that we can be treated as citizens in our own land, which is why I'm really excited to read your new book.

Polk (28:38):
Oh, well, thank you. Thank you. Back to 1619 Project and you know, it's really masterful and in some ways, giving us the long arc of the very long Black freedom struggle in the United States. And the many ways in which moments of achievements of rights seem to be eroding time again. From the Project you narrate about the Reconstruction era that followed the civil war and this oh-so-brief moment of Black political participation and self-determination and the 1860s and 1870s as well as the civil rights movement that occurred 100 years later in the 1960s. Often the civil rights movement is sometimes known as the second Reconstruction. So two days ago, the movement for Black Lives unveiled the breathe act, a new piece of legislation that offers concrete ways that lawmakers can create a new vision for the country that is safe for everyone, including defunding the police and divesting from incarceration, investing in new approaches to community safety, providing resources, to build healthy, sustainable, and equitable communities for everyone and enhancing the self determination of all Black communities.

Polk (30:13):
Now, I'm going to ask you a question, and this is the question of whether you're feeling hopeful today or perhaps pessimistic, but is it possible that in the words of Reverend Dr. William J. Barber, the second, that we as Americans within the United States may be on the verge of a third Reconstruction?

Hannah-Jones (30:35):
So I'm never hopeful. Let's just be clear, and not on my best day, but you know, it's interesting question and I have such great admiration for Reverend Barber. And so I never want to say anything against the Reverend Barber. But I think it's far too early to tell if we are in a third Reconstruction or not. When we think about the civil rights movement, that was a decades long movement, that was a decades on freedom struggle, of course, Reconstruction that follows the civil war, follows the deadliest war in American history. So we're only a few weeks into this current iteration and in many ways the media has already moved on. You know, there was back-to-back coverage of the protest initially. Now they might get a few seconds on the news every day. So I'm worried that the attention that is necessary will not be sustained.

Hannah-Jones (31:36):
I'm worried that we're seeing a lot of very fast superficial things happening. You know, Aunt Jemima's dead now. NASCAR finally realized after all these years that it's not in their values to let people fly a traitorous flag. But what we haven't seen is Congress passing a bill that would truly reform policing. We haven't seen real action on economic justice, which is really the linchpin of inequality. No one's talking about school segregation or housing segregation, and by no one, I mean, the people in positions of power to actually change these things. So, so I don't know. I think it's gonna take a while to see how sustained this is. If we're truly going to see a second Reconstruction. Now, the climate of course is ripe, because we've only seen these kinds of massive societal thrust towards inequality or towards equality when we've had massive societal ruptures and civil war.

Hannah-Jones (32:42):
The civil rights movement combined with the antiwar movement and Vietnam kind of creates this environment that allows us to make this massive progress. And now, of course, we're in a global viral pandemic, that's colliding with a 400 year racial pandemic, and you have millions of people out of work. You have suddenly all of these white Americans who are having to realize that your financial circumstances can become extremely precarious and it can be totally out of your control. So the condition that Black people have regularly lived in, now you're finding millions of white Americans in that similar position, and it's not for anything that they did wrong. And I think that is allowing them to see that that can also be true for millions of Black people, that we can also be in desperate financial circumstances, and it's not because we just need to take personal responsibility.

Hannah-Jones (33:39):
So that type of rupture certainly creates an environment where we could see a third Reconstruction. And then of course, you know, we have a white nationalist in the White House, and millions of white Americans who were willing to accept a great deal of racism have realized that it's harming them. It's harming them in a big way. And we have a federal government that is just missing in action in this most desperate time. So for those reasons it's possible. But I don't know. And I just think I'm really skeptical about how much transformation we're going to see right now. And then we also know that both periods of Reconstruction were met by a tremendous white backlash and that these Reconstruction periods last a decade or so, and then there's immediate retrenchment and a white backlash. And so even if we are able to see some significant gains, we know what's going to come around the corner from that. So yeah, not, I'm not a pessimist. I think I'm just a realist.

Polk (34:52):
Respect that. Could you tell us a little bit about your new book project and what you're learning as you re-enter, let's say the conversation concerning school segregation and desegregation.

Hannah-Jones (35:10):
So my, my new book project is actually my old book project that I just haven't finished yet. But for about little more than three years, I've been working on a book on school segregation. And it's really a book about the centuries long struggle for Black people to get a quality and equal education in this country. And the main narrative of the book is Detroit for a couple of reasons. Detroit is the poorest major city in the country, and it is actually the lowest performing school district in the country, but it's also the home of this landmark Supreme Court case in 1974 called Milliken V Bradley, which was a first test before the Supreme Court as to how much Brown V Board applied to the north. And the Supreme Court basically rules that Black children in Detroit did face unconstitutional school segregation, but you couldn't force white suburbs to integrate with Black cities.

Hannah-Jones (36:11):
And therefore it's impossible to integrate by court order in the north. And so, but the book really goes all the way back to slavery, and traces its struggle you know, beginning with Black people being the only people in the history of this country for whom it was ever illegal to learn to read and write, to after the end of the Civil War, Black people were being denied education even as they are, their tax dollars are paying for schools to be built for white children. And then today where we, you know, there's never been a single moment in American history where Black children have got the same educational resources or a quality education, and the book was going to make the argument that integration is the only tool we've ever known to provide equal education for Black children. But now I'm kind of conflicted about my argument at the end. So I'm not at that, I'm not exactly, I still believe that that's true, but I am somewhat conflicted now about whether it's the right thing to keep asking, to force our children into schools where they're not wanted. So I'm not sure how, how it's going to end, but it is tracing this centuries-long struggle for Black children to get an education.

Polk (37:31):
Right. So now I want to transition to some of the questions from the viewers. How does learning about the history of Black Americans enrich advocacy and activism today?

Hannah-Jones (37:50):
Oh, okay, good. I started with the easy one. I don't think you can truly advocate if you don't understand the architecture that built the injustices that you're advocating for. I think what the 1619 Project tried to do, for those of you who are not too young to have seen the movie The Matrix, it's the red pill, it's the pill that allows you to see all of the coding, the invisible coding behind the structures and systems that you take for granted. And without that knowledge, what are you actually fixing and how are you fixing it? What's really important to me, and not just in the 1619 Project but in all of my work, is to show the intentionality of the inequality. That this created, that it was created with a lot of thought, that it was created with a lot of resources, and that you have to apply that same amount of thought and planning and resources to undo the socially engineered inequality as you did to create it.

Hannah-Jones (38:51):
And I think we just don't have the language the lexicon to understand that. And so the advocacy almost always falls short. And so often the advocacy is about worrying about, you know, are people racist in their hearts? I don't care. You can hate every Black person in America, but what you don't have a right to do is deprive Black people of resources, to discriminate against Black people in public or private spaces. And you cannot be racist at all, but because of the legacy of slavery and discrimination, you have the wealth to buy into all white neighborhoods with property values that were artificially deflated or inflated because of the government with access to the best resource schools. And it has nothing to do with your heart, but everything to do with you being a beneficiary of a system that values white people more than Black. So to me, you have to have that base of knowledge if you are going to effectively change the systems that you say you're fighting,

Polk (39:59):
What can we do to dismantle the ideology of race that both rationalizes and distracts from gross inequity in US society?

Hannah-Jones (40:13):
I don't really get the question. I don't know how the ideology of race distracts from gross—the gross inequity, the gross inequity is created by the ideology of race. So I, I'm not, I'm not really sure how to answer that question. What I will say is like, you know, Black people didn't create race, and we could never use the language of race again, and it's not gonna erase the inequality that's been created through a system of racial cast. So I'm less concerned about how do we try to make the language or idea of race irrelevant, and I'm much more concerned about how do we actually deal with a society where everything was designed around race, and where we bring equality. I don't think ignoring what we all know is a fiction, but money is a fiction too, but I can't just go to the store and pay for things without it. Right. So something can be both a fiction and real, and we can't, I think until you deal with the fundamental underlying inequalities that race created, you can't seek to dismantle the ideology of race, because all that does then is it seeks to hide the infrastructure of the inequality

Polk (41:35):
Returning to the question of education, can you comment on legacy admissions at colleges and universities?

Hannah-Jones (41:46):
That's a rhetorical question. What am I supposed to comment on? Of course, it's white people's affirmative action. I mean, I'm not, yeah. We know that legacy admissions is affirmative action for wealthy white people. And it is the sacred cow, even as Black and brown folks are demeaned by affirmative action. At many universities up to 25% of admissions are legacy admissions. And almost always legacy admissions are less qualified than the student body at large. So my comment is get rid of them and continue affirmative action for Black and Brown folks who actually deserve it.

Polk (42:30):
The 1619 Project was enormous and enormously successful. Is there anything you would've done differently?

Hannah-Jones (42:39):
No, it was perfect. No I'm playing. I mean, sure. I mean, I read my essay now and I'm like, I wish I would have done this or written this better included this. We're expanding the 1619 Project into a series of books and there are several subject areas that I wish we could have covered, and we simply just didn't have the time or space. I wish the project would have engaged with diaspora some.In some ways it was intentional that it didn't because I really wanted the project to be about Black Americans, but it is a whole particularly when we're talking about the Caribbean and South America. So there will be an essay that is going to deal with that. I, I do regret that we didn't acknowledge and give more time to indigenous people and settler colonialism.

Hannah-Jones (43:36):
Frankly it's not an area that I have a great deal of expertise in. I wasn't as comfortable in that area. So it's a huge gaping hole in the project. I mean, the project is not about native people, but you cannot tell this story without acknowledging the role of settler colonialism in the making of America. So I'm in talks with some indigenous writers who I'm hoping will be writing an essay that better linking these stories for the project. And the other was the original project was supposed to have an essay on reparations. Trymaine Lee's piece, looking at the wealth gap was supposed to assess what is owed, but that actually worked out, I think the way it was supposed to, because then I got to write the essay that, I actually wanted to write that essay, but I just couldn't. And I got to write the essay that I wanted to write a couple of weeks ago. So those are like the big areas that I wish we had improved upon for sure.

Polk (44:35):
Let's see. A big question. What do you think are the best ways white people can help the movement for reparations?

Hannah-Jones (44:47):
Okay, good. So I thought you were going to say like, what can white people do to end racism? And I have a very flip answer to that these days, cause I'm tired of that question, but this question I'll answer.

Hannah-Jones (44:58):
So there's two easy things. One, H.R.40 is the Congressional bill that has been stuck in committee for 30 years. John Conyers, Representative from Detroit, has he introduced that bill every year for 30 years and he died last year with that bill never having made it out of committee. Originally the bill was just a bill to say, let us get together a commission to study, whether we should even have reparations. We couldn't even get that out. And now the bill is actually saying, let's put together a panel to talk about how reparations should happen. So, you call your Congress people and advocate for them to actually pass that bill out of committee so that we can look at how this would occur. And the other thing is to really educate yourself and educate your fellow white people on why reparations is necessary.

Hannah-Jones (45:53):
The recent polling I saw on this said about 75% of Americans were opposed to reparations, majority of Black people, but the minority of everyone else. And I truly think some of that you're not going to be able to move. But I think a lot of it is, most people actually have a very visceral reaction to this idea without understanding why it's necessary, without understanding what makes the Black experience so singular, without understanding that Black people were advocating for reparations during slavery. And from the moment that slavery ended and the delay of justice should not equal the denial of justice. And also, as I argue in my piece, what is owed reparations are not just about slavery, but the 100 years of legal, racial, apartheid, and terrorism that Black people experienced until 1968. We had legal discrimination against people in every aspect of American life, simply because they descended from people who had been enslaved until 10 years before I was born. My father's generation. These people are still alive. John Lewis is still alive. So I think it is about really educating yourself on this issue and then advocating with your own folks about why this is something that the government, so to be clear, white people are not writing a check, though, if any white person wants to write me a check, I'll give my Venmo after the talk. But reparations is about a societal debt and it is paid by the government. It's not about punishing white Americans.

Hannah-Jones (47:28):
Anybody want my Venmo?

Polk (47:33):
[Laugh]

Hannah-Jones (47:34):
That's going to be on Fox news tomorrow. I shouldn't even have said it.

Polk (47:41):
Oh, well this is actually, I do like this. This is an interesting question to me. The New York Times recently announced that they are going to capitalize the B in Black. Where do you stand on this conversation? And do you imagine going back to the work that you've done, especially the 1619 Project and with these new guidelines, changing things that you've written, you've written previously and capitalizing Black?

Hannah-Jones (48:13):
I mean, I'm certainly not going to go in and retype the B on everything that I ever wrote, but I'm a hundred percent in favor of them. When, when I first started out as a young journalist, I always capitalize the B. I think what people fail to understand is because of the very thing we talked about earlier, because we have been cut off from having any ties to another country or another ethnic group. Black people actually became an ethnic group in this country. We became a melding of the three races of people who lived here in 1619, which were African, white and indigenous the melding of every West African culture and ethnic group that was brought across the Middle Passage became one people here. And so we actually do have a distinct lineage and a distinct ethnic group.

Hannah-Jones (49:04):
And the capital B I think respects that I don't use African-American, it's always felt too soft to me. Black has always felt much more political and powerful. And I tweeted about this a couple of weeks ago when the Associated Press, so if you're not a journalist the Associated Press has long set the style for how you write certain things in journalism. And when the Associated Press announced, I mean, you have to learn AP style they call it as a journalism student. And when they announced that they were moving to the capitol B, I wrote about how amazing of a moment that was because I had that, you know, not literally beaten out of me, but taken out of me every time you would write the capital B, your journalism professors would mark it up. And as a journalist, the copy desk would lowercase to be automatically, and you just stopped doing it.

Hannah-Jones (50:03):
And so for decades, I haven't been able to, and no other journalists writing in a mainstream publication, or for that most academics have never been able to write a capital B. And so to see that change, and then finally, the New York Times also made the change was really liberating and empowering. And the sad thing is I'm so used to riding the lowercase B because I was forced to write the lowercase B for more than 20 years that I have to keep correcting it because it's not even my natural inclination, but I think it is a great and important and empowering move. And what a lot of people don't know is the NAACP also went on a campaign for Negro to get when we use the word Negro to get the N in Negro capitalized as a sign of respect, because lower casing, the way that you referred to Black people was just another indignity of not treating Black people as fully human. So Black is to me the same as calling someone Irish or calling someone Asian or Japanese. And it deserves to have that capitalization. So I'm very happy about that change.

Polk (51:14):
All right. So I think we have time for one more question. I'll return to one of my questions, and it's clear that your work as a journalist and as a Tweeter is deeply inspired by the life and work of journalist and early Civil Rights activist, Ida B. Wells. And for those who don't know Nikole's Twitter handle is Ida Bay Wells which is just brilliant. But I've been thinking about her work recently, especially her work as an investigative reporter documenting lynchings in the South in the 1890s. And as I think the 1619 Project chronicles, anti-Black violence has been a regular condition of Black existence since at least 1619. With that in mind, I've been especially disturbed by the recent reports of alleged suicides by African Americans across the country over the past few weeks, which reprises the symbolic image of what Wells' worked so hard to expose. First, could you say a bit about Wells and her impact upon you as a writer and a journalist. And second, how do you, as a journalist make sense of these alleged suicides?

Hannah-Jones (52:42):
Sure. So Ida B. Wells was, you know, hands down the most bad ass investigative journalists of her era. This was a Black woman born into slavery who was less than five feet tall, who would go into communities where a Black man had just been lynched by a white mob and start asking questions. Asking questions to document what actually happened, and then actually expose that the myths around Black people being lynched, which were that Black people were, you know, sexual predators and violent was actually that Black people were often accused of rape after consensual sex with a white woman, or being lynched out of economic retaliation. Of course, she had her newspaper destroyed, she was run out of Memphis and I had to live in exile first in New York and then ultimately in Chicago. This woman was also a suffragist, and really tried to force the white suffragist movement to stop being racist and include black women.

Hannah-Jones (53:48):
She was a Civil Rights activist, one of the cofounders of the NAACP though, because she is a woman and a Black woman, she was largely kind of written out of that story. When you see that old picture of the NAACP banner talking about a man was lynched today, Ida B. Wells is the reason that the NAACP started paying attention to lynchings because more upper class Black people at that time, didn't want to touch the issue of lynching. They thought, they actually believed that it was Black men being rapist, and didn't see it as an issue that was clean enough for them. And Ida B. Wells forced this into the national global conversation and also into the NAACP. She also refused to engage in class politics. She founded organizations to help Southern migrants to adapt and succeed once they got to Chicago.

Hannah-Jones (54:43):
So just in every way. She hyphenated her name, refused to give up her last name and hyphenated her name at a time when women simply did not do that shit. Most women don't do that now. So in every way I've seen her as a beacon. She really innovated data reporting. She was one of the first data reporting, she was the first person to catalog the number of lynchings that were occurring and where they were occurring. And we still use some of her investigative techniques today. When I think about, you know, as a journalist, my job is to be skeptical of everything. And so it's really hard for me to give an opinion on these alleged suicides, because we don't have enough facts. And it's possible in this country, we know very possible, that at least some of these Black men were lynched. But it's also possible that some of these Black men, or all of them, killed themselves because we are seeing a rise in suicides amongst Black men nationally, if you look at the data.

Hannah-Jones (55:51):
So I just, I don't know. What I will say though, and I wrote this in the piece What Is Owed, is that George Floyd was lynched. Right? Like, that was a clear, and I don't use the word lynching as metaphor. I think you don't, we should never use a word with that history in our country as a metaphor. But when law enforcement, and we know that according to some studies, law enforcement participated in about 90% of all lynchings that occurred in South. So to have a law enforcement kneel on a black man's neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds until he died, that was a lynching. And at the height of lynching, about two black people were lynched every week for 90 years. And today about five black people are killed by police every week. So maybe those hangings were lynchings, but even if they weren't, we can clearly see the parallels between this extra judicial violence with no consequence.

Hannah-Jones (57:00):
The phrase they used to use back then was the lynchings were done by "parties unknown," even though people knew there's photographs, no one was hiding it. And every time a police officer kills a Black person, and there's no consequence, it's still as if this person was killed by a party unknown, because there's no one who would get punished for their killing. So we do have a scourge of lynchings in this country, whether it's happening with those Black men being hung or not. And I will also just add in many cases, for instance, like with Trayvon Martin who was killed in vigilante justice or injustice it was Black reporters again, who forced those stories into the national narrative. Those stories were largely ignored by white media and white journalists. And it was Black journalists. You know, you think about Wesley Lowery with his reporting on police violence at the Washington Post. Trymaine Lee is the one from MSNBC that really forced Trayvon Martin into the national message. So we're still having to play that same role that Ida B. Wells played all those years ago. That was a long answer to, I'm sorry.

Polk (58:06):
Fantastic. Thank you so much. Biddy?

Biddy Martin (58:13):
Thank you. Thank you so much for that conversation. Thank you for doing the work you do, Nikole. And Khary, thank you to you. We have another event for the Amherst community on July 22nd, and the focus will be on mental health and wellness in 2020, in the summer of 2020. I hope you'll join us. We have a public health expert, Kim Leary, who's also senior vice president of the Urban Institute. And also Dr. Paula Rauch, graduate of Amherst, as is Kim, and the Davidson Chair of Psychiatry and founding director of the Marjorie Korff Parenting At a Challenging Time Program at Harvard. So join us on July 22nd on a Wednesday at 7:00 PM. And I wish that all of you out there could join me in thanking Nikole Hannah Jones and Khary Polk for such an important conversation. I wish we could listen to you for a lot longer, very much.

Polk (59:28):
Thank you.

Hannah-Jones (59:28):
Thank you. Thank you so much for hosting it and thank you. I really enjoy talking with you tonight.

Polk (59:32):
As well as well. Good luck on the second book.

Hannah-Jones (59:36):
I gotta finished the first one. Alright, bye.