 Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Ivanka Hall. I am the Executive Director of the Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition. The Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition is a social justice organization that was created to address the impact of racism on African-American disparities, including policy inequities, historical trauma, food insecurity, research, behavioral health, and health promotion by working to empower, educate for, and advocate for the community, for underserved populations. We are here. This is our fourth installment of Rhapsody in Black Connecting the Dots Between Race and Health. We are so happy today to have Professor Randall, Professor Reneal Randall, who has actually participated in a number of our activities with the Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition. So we're always happy to have her. Dr. Williams is going to do the introduction. We also want to thank IdealStream for supporting this endeavor over these last few weeks. This has been a month-long series. It will be available for you to look at later on on social media and on YouTube. And I'm just letting you know that we have brought in the best speakers that you could ever imagine for this Connecting the Dots series. And they've all kind of built into each other. And all of them mention each other. So the great thing about having great speakers is they all gave accolades to the people who were coming after them. And so we want to thank Dr. Randall for being here with us today. And Dr. Williams, you want to get us started? Yes, to have introduction and get out of the way so Dr. Randall can present. Good morning, Dr. Randall. It was great to have you and to see you again. Good morning. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. It is my esteem, Diana, to introduce Dr. Vanalia Randall, professor at the School of Law since 1990. Dr. Randall writes extensively on and speaks internationally about race, women, and health care. She's the recipient of the Ohio Commission on Minority Health Chairman's Award. And she was named one of the top 10 most influential African-Americans on the 2001 Black People Opportunity Employment Journalist. Professor Randall hasn't always been associated with the study or practice of law. She grew up during Jim Crow in the South. If you were a Black woman going to college, you either became a nurse or teacher. She shows nursing. She did like the profession, though, and had worked in nursing homes while in high school as a nurse. Professor Randall provided public health nursing. I was involved in public health work for more than 15 years. Professor Randall focused on eliminating disparities in health care for minorities in the poor. She believed a thorough knowledge of the law would help her become more effective in her mission. So she enrolled in law school. After graduating in 1987 from Lewis and Clark Law School, she became an associate with the Portland, Oregon law firm specializing in health care law and issues related to health and disability insurance coverage. She also served as an adjunct faculty member in Lewis and Clark College. She soon turned to teaching full time, wanting to make a greater intellectual impact. She has never regretted the decision. Since coming to School of Law, Professor Randall has also served as a consultant to the Clinton Administration Advisory Committee on Health Care Reform and as a grant reviewer for the National Institute of Health. She was also an expert witness in the state of Missouri versus Philip Morris Trial. She has been recognized in who's who in the world since 1995 and who's who in the world since 1998. Professor Randall retired from the University of Dayton School of Law in April 2013. And since then, she's continued to work on race, racism in the law, and racial health disparities. In particular, she co-founded Racial Justice Now. Racial Justice Now successfully advocated for the elimination of school suspension for Pre-K to third grade in 2014. Professor Randall published the first Ohio School Discipline Report Card and published the third edition in 2019. She continues to make abstracts of legal scholarship available on race, racism in the law, a web encyclopedia she has published continuously since 1995. Since her time, she's continued to lecture both nationally and internationally, having traveled to England, Japan, Ireland, and Switzerland. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce Professor Vanalia Randall. It is a pleasure and an honor to have you with us, Dr. Randall. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure for me to be here. You know, I always love doing things with you all because you're doing such wonderful work. And when I looked at the lineup of speakers, I was so honored to be listed among them. What I want to do today, I'm going to support people who've been to all of it. Some of this may be repetitive because I am going to go into health disparities a bit. But my focus is going to be on legal changes. Ultimately, I want to talk about legal changes that are needed in order to improve the health care, excuse me, health status. I'm in my 70s. So let me say I mispronounce words and I forget words. So just bear with me as I work through this. OK, so first I want to start off by saying that I always like to make sure that people understand that why I focus and have always focused primarily on the status, health status of Black Americans, I am not building a hierarchy of pain. I am in no way trying to say who's worse, who's on top, who's on bottom. I'm just saying I want to say here is the status of Black Americans in this country. And here's what I think needs to be done about it. So to start off with, the approach that I'm going to take is I'm going to identify, I'm going to look at health statistics, I think from maybe a different perspective than has been looked at before. I am going to talk about the origin of this huge disparity in health status between Blacks and whites. And then I'm going to talk about the role of the law in causing this disparity and why we need a new anti-discrimination law. I'm going to hopefully go through this pretty quick. I do not read. So I'm going to talk and I will assume that you're reading the slides as they're up. The slide presentation will be available. So if you want to, don't worry about copying notes because I will make sure that the slides themselves are available. So one of the things that we start off with, COVID has had people focus on for the, I've been doing this work for 50 years. And it was at the beginning of the US government really acknowledging racial health disparities. Before that, there was a kind of a denial that racism was an independent factor. But the reality is that 80,000 to 100,000 excess Black deaths occur a year even before COVID. Excess deaths is calculated by saying how many people would not have died in a particular year if we had the same death rate as whites. And 80 to 100,000. Yes, those people will eventually die. But what we're saying in any given year, Black people are dying in excess of what they should be dying as compared to whites. So when I thought about this, and I wrote my book, Dying While Black in 2006, one of the things I came upon was the CIA's World Factbook. And I went to it recently to see if it was still saying the same thing. And it does. Basically, the CIA, which there's a lot of reasons to dislike the CIA. But the CIA has a ranking chart of countries based on life expectancy. And it says on its site that life expectancy at birth is a measure of overall quality of life in a country. I'm like, wow, that's an interesting concept. Because if life expectancy is a measure of overall quality of life in a country, then we can look at the overall quality of life of Black male in the United States. And what we see, of course, is that Black male, first of all, there is something very wrong in the United States when the richest country in the world, the white males, are ranked 34th in the world. And so we can start with that. But Black males are ranked 71. And countries like Barbados and China and Dominican Republic, based on the CIA's definition of quality of life, Black males have a worse quality of life than men in Barbados in Dominican Republic in the Bahamas. A similar kind of issue is true for Black females. Black females have a worse quality of life than females in Barbados, in Cuba, in Vietnam, in Brazil. So not only can we say we have a lower life expectancy based on the CIA's definition that we have a worse quality of life in our country. And that is part of what is going on. And we know that. We know that very well. Now, I know most of you are very familiar with the racial component. But sometimes I have to make sure that people understand that this is not just about class alone, because almost always. And I suspect that there's someone in the audience that's going to say, oh, yeah, this is because there are more poor Black people. So the class distinction explains the race difference. And the answer is no, that's not it at all. Because if you want to compare, when you compare poor Blacks to middle class Blacks, that's not a race analysis. That's a class analysis. To do a race analysis, you have to compare poor Blacks to poor Whites, middle class Blacks to middle class Whites. And when you do that kind of analysis, you very quickly see that race has an independent impact from class. We see low birth weight babies. I put this slide up. Did I? Let me see. I put this slide up just because I find it really interesting that the low birth weight babies in the United States is worse than many African countries. So there is something going on when Black women have more low birth weight babies than much poorer countries in the world. One more slide to deal with this race-not-class-alone issue. If you look at the, so what this slide says, if we use education as a proxy for class, what you see at every level Blacks, which is yellow, have a higher percentage of low birth weight babies than white, which is green. But the almost distressing thing, I say almost, but it is distressing. The distressing thing is that Blacks who have a college education have more low birth weight babies than whites who didn't finish high school. So again, doing away with this is about class component. So where does this difference come from? Because that's important to talking about understanding the impact of stress due to slavery, segregation, and racism is important to understanding why we have to put high on the agenda. I would say number one on the agenda, changing the anti-discrimination law. And I'll talk about that. But chronic stress of any kind harms the body. Almost every disorder that we have access in has a chronic stress component. Even caused by chronic stress are made worse by chronic stress. So chronic racial stress is a component. And we are on chronic racial stress. You can't get rid of it. I was reading a book. And the book is a thriller. And in the middle of nowhere, the author goes off on some racial stereotyping. TV, news, I don't like the hearings for a lot of reasons. The Supreme Court hearings, because I realize that that would just be another source of racial insult. And that one of the things we have to do is find ways to limit the amount of racial stress that we're undergoing. Because that racial stress is a cause of the problems we have that we have. But it's not just current racial stress that the problem. It's also the intergenerational transfer of the impact of racial stress. And I'm going to play this video now. Turns out if your mom was really stressed, congratulations. Now you're stressed too. Thanks, O'Mama. Back in 1998, an ice storm hit North America. And if you live anywhere near the Canadian border, you probably remember it. I do. It was crazy. Everything was covered in ice from Michigan to Maine and Ontario to Nova Scotia. The weight of all that ice caused massive damage to infrastructure in both countries. And power outages dragged on for weeks afterward. Not to be caught out in the rain, so to speak, researchers at McGill in Canada found pregnant mothers who were without power and followed them and their offspring for 13 years to see how it affected them. Turns out the North American ice storm of 1998 affected the kids' DNA. It used to be thought that if I was physically stressed in my body, it wouldn't affect my kids at all. If I was in a famine, that my kids wouldn't be affected by that. And then it turns out that's not true at all. In the 1990s, the field of epigenetics came onto the scene. And we discovered what happens to our parents will affect us. And what happens to us affects our kids, and so on down the line forever. This study published in plus one found that the children of those mothers had, quote, distinctive patterns in their DNA methylation. DNA methylation is the on-off switch for how the DNA gives its instructions, whether to produce a bone or a red blood cell, for example, would have a different methylation. Alterations of that process change how the same DNA will be read by your body. In this case, a correlation appeared to exist between the length of time without power and subjective suffering of these mothers and the methylation of their children's DNA. 36 of the children tested showed the same pattern of methylation on their T cells. And that was the most stressed mothers. These cells are part of the immune system. So chances are, the kids are going to have some kind of a different immune system response than their parents do. If you're wondering what that will mean, you're right there with the other scientists. Nobody knows yet. It's not like they can compare kids pre and post DNA methylation. They were born that way. But this is the first time ever in humans that science has been able to show that a single maternal stressor was able to affect the DNA of the offspring. Now that we know this happens in humans, we can go back into history and see what we can learn from these epigenetic changes. Using the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children in England, a study of 14,000 pregnant women, their husbands, and their children, that's been going since the 90s, they found that men who smoked during puberty, way before they sired a kid, birthed sons, who were fatter than average. Even fatter than those who started smoking later. Daughters were fine, by the way. But for some reason, the methylation affected the boys disproportionately. A different study found that a famine feast cycle in 19th century Sweden altered the DNA of kids born as late as 1905. So grandfathers who were over-nourished just before puberty had grandchildren who were at risk of early death, which is freaky if you think about it. What about the Great Depression here in the States? How did my grandmother living through that affect me? What about the 9-11 attacks? That's a major stressor. What about going into space? How will that affect future humans and their epigenetics? One of the things that I've been very interested in epigenetic inheritance, because for us, there has not been a time that there's been very little time. I should know time. There's been very little time that descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States have not been under some kind of stress. Even during the Reconstruction period, which was only about six years, people were coming right out of slavery. Even the affirmative action period, which lasted about 16 years, people were coming out of legal apartheid. And since 1979, we have been in either a racial re-entrenchment era, which was, for me, 1980 to 1996. And we've been in neo-slavery. And if anyone wants me to define what I mean by neo-slavery, we'll be happy to do that, neo-slavery since the 1990s. So what does that mean? So we have, if you think about it, social determinants of health, we know, the speakers that have come before me I'm sure have mentioned social determinants of health because it's a well-accepted concept in health that the best way to improve the health of a community is to improve the circumstances under which they live. Individual counseling helps an individual person, but individual counseling can go only so far if you're counseling people to eat right, but they don't have grocery stores, if they don't make enough money, if they don't get the education that they need, if they're being stopped and harassed by police, are having to read about it, are having to watch videos, if the toxic dumps are being put close to their communities, if the healthcare facilities are being closed and they have to drive to get care, if the housing that they have is filled with lead pipes, if they're being targeted for tobacco, guns, alcohol and drugs, if they're being discriminated in employment based on their name, even based on a lot of circumstances, if they have bad food and water, and then of course the chronic stress, chronic racial stress. So all of that impacts individual behavior and choices, but and of course those choices impacts those things, but ultimately it's the historical deprivation caused by slavery, legal apartheid, racism and neo-slavery, and it's embedded social, racial and inequalities and discrimination that is causing health disparities. So that leads into a discussion of why I believe that it's essential for us to have and a new anti-discrimination law. And anti-discrimination law is a determinant of health because anti-discrimination law prevents or should prevent discrimination, preventing discrimination would result in lower stress, better employment, better education, better housing, more wealth, everything on the social determinant of health would be improved if we had an adequate anti-discrimination law because remember, the purpose of law is to limit and authorize conduct. We see it in tort law and criminal law and contract law. We pride ourself on being a rule of law nation. There's a lot of ways you can rule a country and we rule by the law. We prioritize our goals through funding, military versus health and human services, prisons versus schools, but all of that is done legislatively. It's not just tap and stance. The sources of the law we have is constitutional, obviously federal state level, statues, federal state and municipal level and regulations, federal state and municipal level and cases. Cases are laws because no law can deal with every circumstance in detail in cases or interpretation of a law and are then used by others in deciding what the law is. Which is one reason the Supreme Court is so important because the Supreme Court interprets the law, constitutionally interprets the law and everybody has to follow that. One of my concerns about Judge Brown Jackson is that her record on racial justice issue is mixed. She essentially has supported qualified immunity for police officer and of the 25 workplace discrimination suits that came, has come before her, she only ruled for the plane of three time. She also over, throughout a discrimination, a class discrimination suit, an attempt to have a class discrimination suit by Lockheed Black employees. Basically saying that she couldn't see any commonality between all the Black employees in the class, the Black employees in the proposed class. And she also did not allow for there to be a pre-class discovery which would have helped the class identify the commonalities. So that said, I am not at all that excited about her because I believe that we need people who are going to make decisions in the law that support the interest of getting rid of racial discrimination in all areas. And I'm not sure her history supports that she will do that. She may change, but if she doesn't, we will have to live with what she does for the next 50 to 75 years. So anti-discrimination law is institutional discrimination and action by the government, the results in unfair treatment are disparity. So we already know that everything is controlled by the law. This is what this thing, this slide represent. The legal system, communities, institutional discrimination, individual behavior, what you can do and consequently your health is controlled by the legal system. Right now we do not have adequate anti-discrimination law. In fact, it's so outlawed and so outdated. It's a big frustration for me when people talk about, oh, yeah, you can super racial discrimination. Oh, no, you cannot. You have to show intent, first of all. And intent, which means that you have to show that someone actually desire over substantially certain that they're, well, substantially actually desire, actually desire to discriminate based on race. There's regulations you should be able to sue based on disparate impact. But 20 years ago, the Supreme Court said, oh, well, no, that's in regulation. And because it's in regulations, you can't sue in the court and all you can do is complain to an agency. So there is no direct access to the court for disparate impact. It requires an individual to sue. Most discrimination, since most discrimination is not, is disparate impact and group discrimination, most individuals don't even know they've been discriminated against. Because no one says to them, you know, I'm not going to hire you because you're black. They say, we're moving to hospital because it serves black people. What they say is we're moving to hospital because our economic interest requires us to move it. There is no right of action for the community. So an organization like UO couldn't bring a lawsuit without finding an individual willing to sue. Even if you did all the work of gathering all those statistics, you still have to look for an individual to sue. So the Patient Protection and Incolubility Act has an anti-discrimination clause in it, which could have been used because it was a separate clause and it could have been used to try to cure some of these problems. But against everybody's objection, I wrote about it, I lobbied, they specifically tied the Patient Protection and Accountability Act of 2010 to Title VI. So the problem with Title VI, both of them have the same problems now. So basically, I want to take a step back just because I want to say that most of the racial discrimination, stereotype bias and prejudice is not racism by itself. That biases can be explicit or implicit. And most of the problem that we have is what I call colorblind racist. They're discriminating. They're clearly intentional, reckless, negligent discrimination, but they're not doing it explicitly. They're not doing it explicitly based on race. It is easy to get in court on old-fashioned discrimination. It's almost impossible to get in court on colorblind discrimination. And this just puts it, gives you another way to look at this. And this decision is countered. This decision to limit discrimination to intentional goes against other forms of access to the court. In criminal law, you can be found guilty of reckless homicide, negligent homicide. In tort law, you can be found liable for reckless negligence. In fact, in tort, there's, and in criminal law, there's strict liability. There are, you can be liable just because you did the act. It is only in discrimination law that we draw a line at intentional. And that's because the law in other areas of law, it is designed to provide access to an injured party. And discrimination law is designed to protect the people from being wrongfully accused. And we don't worry that as much in other areas of law. And we shouldn't worry about that in discrimination law. So what do we need? We need a 21st century anti-discrimination law and we need some, we need an organization to take that up. I am disappointed that all of this work that people are doing, they, the anti-discrimination law is not an area that is being pushed. We need to recognize multiple forms of discrimination. We need intentional discrimination, reckless discrimination, negligence discrimination. We may even say there's some strict liability discrimination. Strict liability says that we don't look at your state of mind. We just look at whether you did the act. If you did the act, you're responsible. We need to authorize and fund the use of testers. Because of the way the law is set up, testers, people who go in to test whether or not someone will be discriminated against, like the woman who changed her house to see whether or not she could get a higher price on its evaluation, that's a tester. She hasn't actually been discriminated against because she's sent in some white people to testing. Tests, we need to be able to say testers, we want to send testers into every area of discrimination and we want them to be able to sue based on the results of their tests. We need an organizational right of action. Right now, we only have individual right of action. We need to be able to say the Urban League that organizations can sue and that they don't have to identify an individual to be able to sue if they collect the data and show discrimination, they can sue. We need adequate fines and regulatory enforcement. That's always been a problem with Title VI. The fines have not been adequate and the enforcement has not been good. We need to pay prevailing plaintiffs' attorney fees. One of the barriers to the courtroom is attorney fees. I mean, nobody is gonna work for free. If you have a case that's not worth a lot of money and attorneys are not going to want to go in, if they're gonna be difficult to win, attorneys are not gonna want to go in. If we say, you know what? The person who discriminate will have to pay the plaintiff's attorney fees. You would have more attorneys willing to take on the expense of suing because they would be more like to get their attorney fees. We need to allow for punitive damages, especially for organizations because the only way, not the only excuse me, organizations can calculate settlements. That's a whole... Settlements are not a civil rights action. Let me say that again. Settlements are not a civil rights action. They do not change the law. They do not impact the law. They don't do anything to the system because the system can calculate settlements. I don't care how they just said $10 million settlement. The system can calculate settlements. There's a word for it and I can't remember it. And they will calculate and they've been calculating. So when you see all these civil rights attorneys, and I hate to even not put the civil rights attorney in quote, because they're not doing anything for civil rights. They're helping an individual gain money, but they're not changing the law and civil rights attorneys changed the law. Punitive damages can't be calculated. And so we need punitive damages. We need for discrimination. We need the law to say that punitive damages can be provided for, should be given. And I think that punitive damages should not all go to the plaintiff who brought the case. Some of it can be used to fund health services and enforcement. So I think I'm at the end and we can stop and talk. So I want you to remember, whatever the law does not forbid, it permits. And right now it does not forbid reckless and negligent racial discrimination. It permits it. And if you think about it, most discrimination in this country is probably reckless and negligent discrimination and not intentional discrimination. And if we want to improve the health, let me go back up here for a moment. If we want to improve the health, we have to eliminate racial discrimination as much as possible, because in every area of social determinants, would improve and stress would be reduced. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Randall. Vak, would you like to proceed with the first question or should I? You know, you know it. I have so many more questions. I can't answer all the questions. I want to ask you right now, Dr. Randall. I have to talk to you at another time, but because of the interest of time, we want to, you know... Oh, no, we have to talk. You know I'm always available to talk. And as I thought about this, I would be happy to serve as a consultant on drafting an anti-discrimination law. But we wanted to do that. We will have close relationship with you from now here on. And we look forward to that. So I have a couple of things. First off, excellent, excellent, excellent. You're always, you know, you explain every single step and all of the pieces that are needed. And so, and so what happens is, you know, most people don't, they just, you know, it's like, just like, oh, well, you know, if you, you know, this will happen. And it's like, okay, well, how is it gonna happen? And I think it's part of it is because they don't want it to happen. And so they never explain the process because it's not a process they're really caring about happening. So I have, I have a couple of things. So one of them is the epigenetics inheritance around the DNA. So I talk about, we talk about that all the time because I read a study a few years ago, probably about 10 years ago, that talked about people who had experienced, who had never been in the Holocaust, felt the pains of their grandparents. And I'm like, okay, well, what about black people? You know, because when the same thing hold true for people who, who's family members have been enslaved, you know, and they kept saying, no. And I said, no, and I didn't know the word. Now I'll actually change my PowerPoint and put the word on there. But I do talk about that because, so could you talk a little bit more about that? Because I think one of the things that happens to us is for some reason people think that all of the brutality that has been faced by the African-American community is just that it's the past, get over it. And so what they don't understand is how it is interwoven into who you are. And if I might add, Dr. Rand, real quick, that we respect international law as relates to other groups who've been impacted globally, but you're talking about American law, governing American situations of circumstance. So what you're talking about, there should be an application in American culture of this very issue. And it should not go without, you know, being attended to. So why are people playing this avoidance game about something that is quintessentially, that is American as apple pie? Well, for one thing, once you go down the epigenetic routes, you have to talk about reparations. Yes, I am. I mean, if you say there has been harm passed down from slavery, and you can prove that harm, and you can prove the harm done from Jim Crow, then it becomes harder to say, you know, my parents weren't here, you know, whatever people like to say about reparations. So I think one thing is people don't want to, well, first of all, it's two groups of people. They're white people who know this. And, you know, we don't get studied. They're doing all this epigenetic study. And as far as I can tell, I haven't, no one has said, let's do an epigenetic study on a descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States. And it seemed to me, there was a study on, it wasn't epigenetic. There was a study on comparing middle class African immigrants, women, to middle class black women, to middle class white women in birth outcome, okay? And middle class African women, birth outcome was more similar to white middle class, which says to me that middle class black women are carrying around in their bodies the impact of racial discrimination. And that impact, even if those middle class African women came from countries that were poor, the impact of that wasn't as bad as the racism that exists in this country and how it passed out. Now, I think the other reason is people are reluctant because when you talk about epigenetics, you're talking about genes and we have this whole history of people saying that we are genetically inferior. And I think people don't wanna talk about it because they don't know how to explain it. But I think it's explainable. See, I think the thing is all our genes are the same. Like what you call the switchboard that the light switches and stuff that controls your house. Anyway, you got all these switches in there. Every house has this box with all these switches, every single house. But the switches are turned off in some and on in others. When you use box. Fuse box. So inside the fuse, all the fuse, so you in this place, all the few box are the same, but all the switches are not the same because somebody stress came and cut off some switches. And you walk in the house and the lights don't come on and you say, why is this light working? And nobody's looking in the fuse box to see if the switches have been turned off. They're running around the house trying to do this, that or another. Epigenetics is stress flips switches. Sometimes it switches it on, sometimes it switches it off. But when it does, the impact is to cause illness. And what they know by epigenetics is it takes two generations for that switch to get righted. That presumes two generations without stress. So what happens to which gets cut off? When is it able to get cut back on? Because you're still undergoing racial stress. And that's like you go to an island and put up your knees and they're getting, you know. So I think that's the, I think the reluctance people don't know how to, they're scared of getting into the gene thing because we have this history of people saying we're genetic inferior and they don't know how to explain the switch thing. And they don't realize no matter what, people will use this. No matter, you know, the fact is people will use, try to say, well, why don't, you know, whatever they say. The issue becomes, if this is an issue, we need to study it, we need funding, we need studies and we need to figure out whether there might be medical ways to reverse the switches. And with that, you know, no president Biden has talked about, you know, funding ARPA H, which is based off of DARPA which has its own issues. But it's interesting that we can create anything out of whole cloth whenever we want to. So I'm surprised when you say there isn't, and there are institutions, there isn't a focus on anti-discrimination law when it's so central. If you would go about creating that, how would you go about creating that? What would you advise the administration, the president, justice department, whoever, or whatever entities to go about making that happen? The thing is, is that we have to recognize that Democrats and Republicans are opposites of the same coin. Neither one of them are really interested in really doing anything effective about anti-discrimination. No administration, not Obama, not Clinton. And in fact, some of their laws were really bad in this area. And I think that we might need to, I've been thinking about this, I think we might need to try to do what the federalist societies and those groups do which is just independently develop something and then start shopping it around. Because the Democrats have been in power what twice in the last 20 years where they had a majority, had both the Senate and the House and the presidency. And at no time had they tried to overrule the Supreme Court case that keeps the spirit impact out of the court. Why is that? Because they don't want them going to court. So I think we need, and we might also need to focus on, we may need to focus on anti-discrimination law at the state level. And some people will be in states that where it ain't gonna go, and we may even need to go down to the municipal level that say, hey, let's look and see if my city has some kind of anti-discrimination law they may call it a human rights law or something like that. And let's see if we can get some strong anti-discrimination to the city level. Now, if you're in the wrong state like Ohio, I know this from personal experience. When a city does something, Dayton tried to do some stuff about the housing issue and pass some ordinances to try to really deal with the funding thing and housing and the legislature came back and passed the law and said basically, you can't do nothing at the city level that because we don't want different laws that affect industry in different city. What? They did preemption. They do preemption all the time. All the time. They did the preemption. They do. They're big on, you know, wanting individual, they're big on saying, you know, we have to respect the rights of individual states. But once they get power in the states, they don't say the same about cities they're willing to force. So, but that said, there's no reason to, I mean, you have to try. And if we put together all these laws get passed, you know how these laws are getting passed? Someone wrote it and shocked it. They ain't sitting right in those laws in Texas, in Florida, in Ohio. We don't have half of them, can you read? That's a whole other discussion. I'm like, anytime lawmaker send me and don't tell me to truncate my words and send it back to them, I'm like, okay, can you read? When I send you something, you don't read it. Then you send back something and say, don't send something with all these words. Yeah. I'm very happy with this. That's what I was told. I'm like, put less words on slides. And I'm like, you know, I'm like, this is college. What am I, is it elementary school? I mean, yeah, it's everywhere. It's, but I want to start to run it is, we have Citizens United. This is corporations of people. Now you mentioned about organizations. I think something's like these organizations don't have the same access to anti-discrimination. Law or approaches or efforts. Well, how in one case, yes ma'am, how can they do that for one instance, but not allow it in another instance where there's an overwhelming evidence that you said that there's a need for that? Well, the thing is, the law is what people want it to be. So they, and so they don't want organization bringing discrimination suits because they realize that they don't want to open the floodgates of discrimination suits. And if you gave organizations the right to sue without finding an individual party, then your organization could collect the data, do the analysis and follow suit. They don't want that. And so, yeah, Greenpeace, someone says, well, you have to have an individual party. I said Greenpeace sues all the time on the environment. Greenpeace, so the concept of allowing an organization to sue is not a foreign concept. It's just not done in this area. So I have a question, Professor, about, so we know all across the country, particularly in the state of Ohio, we have all of these cities that have named racism as a public health crisis. And so the naming of the public health crisis, it's just, for me, it's just a show. You know, this is part of the show. Because it isn't coming along with a plan of action to eliminate racism and discrimination, you know. So, you know, I get, so no, I want you to talk about it because, you know, because I get blamed, you know, I'm like probably the most hated woman in Cleveland because I'm like, okay, so you said racism was a public health crisis, but where's the policy that goes along with this? Where's the policies to actually change the conditions of the people in the communities that are suffering the most? So how can you declare something as a public health crisis and not have any kind of policies to back it up? Like, as soon as you step to that mic, you should have said immediately. And here's our plan, there's nothing else. Here's the plan we're going to, we're going to put together these public health people who are gonna look at social determinants of health in our city, who are going to determine racial disparities and social determinants of health in our city. And we, part of the problem with people having to dress racism, they don't want to, they want to be colorblind in how they solve problems. And if racism is a public, is a public health problem, you can't be colorblind. You have to add a minimum collect data on your programs and whether or not they're really helping the people who are having the most problem. They don't want to do that because then they would have to change their program. And they may have to make programs that are racially targeted, and they don't want to do that. But I have to say, having said that, I never thought we would get them to admit racism as a public health problem. So it's a tiny step, but it is a step down the racism way because during my work, it was, oh no, racism is not a public health issue. Racism is not a public health issue. Racism is not a public health issue. So now you can use that combined with your anti-discrimination law to go to the city who has said racism as a public health issue and say, yeah, you, thank you. We are so proud of you. And now you need to eliminate discrimination based on race in the city. And here is the law that will do it. We want to do that. So because Dr. Williams runs our policy committee and I think that having the anti-discrimination law come out of that policy committee and then going to the city and the county and the state for us because we do all of Northeast Ohio and saying, going through all of our cities in Northeast Ohio and saying, you declared racism as a public health crisis and we want to help you along the way. So these are the things that we need now. And so we definitely, we want you to be involved with that policy committee with Dr. Williams. If that is, is that all possible, Dr. Randall, I'm happy to be involved as a consultant but I do not commit myself to regular meetings. Okay. Okay. Yeah, we, they, because this is something that I think that if they're working in committee, they can, we can craft something and then go. This may be a good time. There's a lot, talking about, there are a lot of racial justice and the law centers being started because there are a lot of black deans right now. This is something fairly new like last seven years. And they're all sort of doing something. So it may be, it may be something that you can get help from one of those centers and I know some people and what's her name is back in Ohio. She used to be in Cleveland. I don't know. Black law professor writes on health. I'm drawing a blank on name. I think she's out of cases. Is she out of case? Was she out of case? Was that? She was out of case. And then she went to Illinois. Rhonda Williams, is that her? I think so. I don't remember. Dr. Rhonda Williams. Anyway, no, no, no, no. She's going back to Ohio State Law School. She may be a good person because she does a lot of writing on race and the law and health, that's what I meant, race, law and health. Anyway, this is a time, my sense is, I'm testament about how long this will last because my sense is these schools do stuff when there's people there who wants to do them. And as soon as those people leave, they stop. And so there's no telling how long, what kind of longevity any of these centers will have, but that's not really our problem. We can get their help, some of their help while they're still up and going. Dr. Wren, you mentioned that you had questions and criticisms of Justice Kataji Brown Jackson. Did you have a more favorable review of Justice Michelle Charles and what do you think about her appointment? I think- I think they're all bad to tell you the truth. What would you say to them in terms of to try to persuade them as they move through, if she is confirmed, you know- She's got to be confirmed. I mean, the Democrats have a lot of conservatives, but in their party in the Senate- But they've agreed to vote for her. Imagine agreeing to offer that vote. But they still need the what's her name, the woman that, yeah, they still need her. Then she hasn't said anything, which makes me worried about what she's up to, you know, but I think she'll get a couple of Republicans because I think there are Republicans, women Republicans who are on the line because of how they voted on what's his name. And they are being challenged in their state by Republicans and they need. So I think they'll be confirmed. I've been voicing this because I want us to stop asking for black people, ask for people who have a certain political viewpoint who is going to support what we need and that person be black, you know? Because I think that my own feeling as a lawyer who reads cases, it is going to be horrific to have a black woman saying that qualified immunity, that what the police done was within the scope of what they needed to do and that there's nothing that can be done because of qualified immunity. Are turning down cases on discrimination, it's kind of like, what is the point? If we, someone said to me, well, they have to go for the greater good. I'm like, isn't getting rid of racism part of the greater good? Are you saying that the greater good is maintaining racism? And so they have to do things to maintain racism. I think she'll be confirmed. I hope to see what she does. I sort of think she'll be mixed bag and that more often than not, she'll end up being center moderate on racial issues. Dr. Randall, let me tell you, you are absolutely amazing. I have thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to sit at your feet and just hear you just, I just think you're phenomenal. And you just make it plain and to the point. And I hope that I can one day be like you. You already are. I just wanna, I'm like, oh my God, you are just phenomenal. One of the things, I guess the last thing that I wanna say is that we had an issue with one of our organizations that had declared racism as a public health crisis. And then one of their board members who was African-American went back and went into committee and said, we need to rescind that because it's not about racism, it's about discrimination. And so could you answer to African-Americans who say, we don't need to talk about racism because racism is too hard a topic for white Americans to talk about. We need to make it kinder and gentler for them. Well, see, racism is it. Discrimination is a component of racism, but the racism is the problem that we've got to get rid of and it manifests itself in discrimination. I don't know, it's kind of like, if we can feed people putting the same discrimination, but at the end of the day, that's only part of the problem in terms of, if you looked at my chart, discrimination is a component of it. Stereotypes, biases and prejudices is a separate component of it. Together, they make racism. And if you're gonna only focus on discrimination, then you only really focus on part of it. I am sorry that white people are so sensitive about the word racism. I'm sorry that black people are so sensitive. The board member who went back was voicing their own uncomfortableness, their own feeling of I don't wanna have to go to white people that I work with, that I live with and use the word racism in front of them because I don't wanna have to deal with potential backlash or potential people seeing. The problem is, to the extent that black people are doing that, black people are a problem, not white people. And there she said it, that's what I said. That's the way to conclude the conversation right there. So the Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition would like to thank you, Dr. Randall, for coming out this week with us. Thank you so much. For our Rhapsody in Black, connecting the dots between race and health, which is brought to us by Ideal Stream. We wanna thank them for their support. We also wanna thank UK and Ohio for our anti-racism efforts in hospital settings that we have been working on for the last year. This is going into year two. And we hope that you'll join the Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition for other discussions that we have. And then Dr. Williams, you wanna close us out? Oh, well, I just wanna echo what you said and just thank you, Dr. Randall, for your expertise. Thank you all for inviting me. You know I love doing this. We love and appreciate you and look forward to working with you down the road.