Anne Pollock: 00:07

In some ways, it was coming full circle to the 09/11/2001 moment that the narrative starts with. We started out with this narrative of, oh, now we're all in this together. Before there was division, but now we're together. And how quickly that broke down.

Ruha Benjamin: 00:25

So while the book does actually give so many different great examples of how to take the text off the page and move into action, just knowing things differently is also a form of action that can spur us, I think, to have more energy to to invest in change wherever we are in our own backyards. So this is Ruha, and I'm thrilled to be in conversation with my dear friend and colleague, Anne. We're trying to remember how long our friendship goes back. I think we met in 02/2007, at MIT. We were both still grad students ending our grad work around that time, and we have stayed in touch and engaged each other's work all these years, and it's just really my honor and pleasure to be in conversation about your new book and Sickening.

Ruha Benjamin: 01:22

Welcome.

Anne Pollock: 01:23

So thank you so much for being here, Ruha. And it is just amazing to think, you know, it's been what is that? Fifteen years now that we've been in conversation about these topics. And I think that that conference, back in 02/2006, was one in the Center for the Study of Science, Technology, and Medicine. It was difference in science, technology, and medicine.

Anne Pollock: 01:44

That's kind of the theme. And this was a conference that was organized around race, pharmaceuticals, and medical technology. It was a very exciting time in that, kind of field with the release of Baidil, which was a drug that was very controversial at that time and, of course, which we've both written about a bit since then. And so to think about the ways in which the conversations have continued but also deepened in those fifteen years since then. And so, of course, it's been such a privilege to be in conversation and learn so much from your work all along the way.

Ruha Benjamin: 02:20

Awesome. So I think, you know, one of my favorite insights of yours, Anne, that animates all of your work is this idea that the ethics of the event should not be separated from the ethics of the uneventful, where you draw our attention again and again to this, relationship between slow and swift violence. Can you say a bit more about this formulation? And while you're at it, maybe, share with us how your previous work brought you to this new book, Sickening?

Anne Pollock: 02:54

So thank you so much, Ruhambra. I mean, that's a really generous, question, and way to engage with the book. And indeed, that is a really central theme, I think, in all my work. In my earlier work on race, heart disease, and medical technologies, so including pharmaceuticals, one of the kind of frustrations for me in the way that that conversation was happening was that we were all talking about this drug called Baidil, which was the a very controversial drug because it was a drug that was indicated for heart failure in self identified black patients. And as we all pointed out, which is very true, this is egregious.

Anne Pollock: 03:34

Right? There is no reason for the FDA to put its imprimatur on racial categories, in this way. And it was very much motivated by market interests that a particular pharmaceutical company and the way that it was approved wanted, to do. And yet, I think one of the things that really struck me as missing from a lot of that conversation was an awareness of the ways that this problematic pharmaceutical approval was very much continuous with all sorts of things that have been happening in racialized cardiovascular research for decades. And so there had been, I found in my own research then, a real durable preoccupation with difference in heart disease research.

Anne Pollock: 04:20

It didn't just start at the twenty first century with this kind of patent, politics that was happening around Bayaudal. It was much more long standing. And so that was kind of the topic of my first book, which is called medicating race, about heart disease and durable preoccupations with difference. And one of the things that really struck me there too was the ways in which, yes, sometimes it was happening that heart disease researchers were, looking for ways to profiteer or to exploit black markets. But it was also happening that there was real denial of care and that a lot of the black cardiologists were involved in that research around BayhDill and much more long standing research too, were authentically trying to serve these populations and that that mattered too.

Anne Pollock: 05:09

And so unless we critiqued the everyday ways in which patients were excluded from cutting edge care, from basic care, from access to the kinds of, elements of life that would foster flourishing, unless we were focused on all of those things too, seemed a bit disingenuous to critique just this one black drug. And so that is something that I've been, you know, really thinking through for a long time, the way that that pharmaceuticals and racial categories, play out, and mutually inform one another in really complicated ways. The impulse is often to this quandary ethics. So this idea comes from Anthony Appiah, who is a philosopher who talks about oftentimes, when we're talking about biomedical ethics, we talk about, you know, okay, this moment in which, someone needs life support. And if it's turned off, then the stakes are very high.

Anne Pollock: 06:06

And and we talk about these, really extraordinary circumstances. But a lot of the ways in which we live and die are not so dependent on one technological switch. They don't happen in that way. They're much quieter. They're much more continuous, with our lives as a whole.

Anne Pollock: 06:25

And so I think that that's something that has preoccupied me since then. And then I, you know, I took a foray into some some different kinds of work for my second book, which is about South Africa and drug discovery. It's continuous in some ways because I was very interested there in how scientists understand themselves as involved in social justice projects even when they're doing molecular work, as well as when they're doing social endeavors. I'm very interested in the ways in which experts see themselves as doing social justice work and maybe authentically are also doing social justice work. But this book, my new book really returns to some of the other themes, in medicating race and the ways in which racism shapes health, and access to medicine, but also access to other elements that help us to flourish as people.

Anne Pollock: 07:20

And so that's where, this book picks up on, the race and medicine scholarship, in a slightly different way while trying to also bring it to a broader audience, including undergraduates, I hope.

Ruha Benjamin: 07:35

Thank you. Thank you for that, mini intellectual history. And this is also just to encourage listeners who, are gonna be drawn to Sickening to also, engage your previous work because there is a way that this this thread and this undercurrent connects all of these texts. So let's talk a little bit about Sickening itself. The book is structured around six powerful cases of anti black racism and how these shape health, illness, and premature death.

Ruha Benjamin: 08:08

Can you give us an overview of the cases and perhaps how you chose them?

Anne Pollock: 08:14

Yeah. I chose a case study approach in part because I think that it works really well in the classroom, for example. It's easy for students to get their heads around, a particular case and really engage and kind of work through diverse elements when it's presented in terms of cases. So that's kind of what motivated the case study approach in general. And then the cases are really diverse.

Anne Pollock: 08:35

So it starts with the deaths of black postal workers in the anthrax attacks in 02/2001 and then goes on through what I call an unnatural disaster with chronic disease after hurricane Katrina. As you can already see with those first two examples, surprisingly to me, the anthrax attacks are often largely forgotten in the public imagination. It's an extraordinary event, and I think because it happened so soon after 09/11/2001, it kind of got forgotten. Unlike hurricane Katrina, which everyone is familiar with even, for example, in The UK where I live now, but not everyone is aware of this element of the impact on chronic disease. So, you know, how could a natural disaster cause chronic disease?

Anne Pollock: 09:26

So how does a storm and the management thereafter lead to increased deaths by heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic diseases? And so that's what then becomes the case for that chapter. The third chapter, also somewhat less remembered event, around mass incarceration. So the Scott sisters case. So this was a case in which two sisters, were serving double life sentences for a trivial crime in a Mississippi prison and were released, on suspended sentences conditional upon one sister donating her kidney to the other.

Anne Pollock: 10:05

And so this was an absolutely egregious case that, I mean, it was egregious even before the organ donation element of it was added in the conditional release. But then, it's a really interesting opportunity to think exactly where we started with the ethics of the event and the ethics of the uneventful, where mass incarceration and this egregious condition for release are both, ways of shaping access to health and well-being. And then the fourth chapter looks at environmental racism with the ways that the in the Flint water crisis, General Motors were machines were protected, while the people of Flint had to wait quite a while, before their infrastructure was repaired such that the water could become safe. And it required much more fundamental changes to the infrastructure because the city waited so long to address the needs of the people. And so here too, this is an example of a case that, I mean, lots of people, have heard of the Flint water crisis.

Anne Pollock: 11:13

Yet I think that this small element of the way that General Motors engine plant was able to protect its machines provides maybe a different window, into that widely known event. And then the fifth chapter is about police brutality and looks at the case of Dejeria Becton in McKinney, Texas. So this is a pool party case that people likely remember, from kind of the viral videos on social media in which, the most kind of egregious image there was of a small black girl teenager wearing a bikini pinned under a police officer. And so here in that chapter, I'm looking at that as an example of the ways in which segregation is enforced through police brutality and also the ways that segregation, creates differential access to recreational facilities and bodily flourishing. And then the final, chapter is about the Serena Williams birth story.

Anne Pollock: 12:14

And this one is, again, probably a very famous one. And I'm very interested in the ways that this is a story in which we have an extremely powerful woman, very capable of, navigating, all sorts of systems, obviously knows her body very well, and still face these denials of care that have become so infamous and, indeed, that she herself has helped to underscore. She really highlights that even as someone who's been hyper surveilled throughout her career and who, you know, has certainly had plenty of surveillance throughout her pregnancy, surveillance is not care and, and really thinking through that that difference there. So the way that I've chosen the cases is really thinking through the wide ranging elements that would help in a classroom environment, for example, to look at a whole bunch of different windows into how it is that what an epidemiologist like Nancy Krieger would talk about as the accumulated insults of living in a racist society. So it's not that these are all separate that, you know, either we're talking about segregation or we're talking about the impact of mass incarceration or we're talking about just straight up denial of care and refusal to address the needs of the patient before them in cases like the postal workers in the anthrax attacks or Serena Williams, that all of these things are happening kind of at the same time.

Anne Pollock: 13:45

And yet looking at them kind of in turn helps to see the way that these interconnected systems, I think, operate.

Ruha Benjamin: 13:54

Absolutely. And a keen listener will notice that all of the cases are in the twenty first century, and that's something that you make a point of in your intro, is that in many ways, when we think about medical racism or scientific racism, we wanna hearken to the past, to Tuskegee, to Henrietta Lacks, and so your deliberate choice of bringing us right under our noses in our students' lifetimes, you know, to think through the persistence and the the production of of these forms of, premature death, I think, is a really important part of the choice of your cases.

Anne Pollock: 14:29

This is something that was so informed by your work too. I mean, so I think that one of the themes that you so powerfully explore in your work on organized ambivalence, for example, is around how we often look at, okay, where is this distrust coming from, and how can we address it? And it is true that historical events such as the Tuskegee syphilis study do inform distrust. That's the case. We get we too rarely look at the way that distress is cultivated in the present.

Anne Pollock: 15:02

Right? Like, we don't need to only look to the past. And so, you know, even though so for example, in the postal workers chapter, I do talk about the way that postal workers do talk about the Tuskegee Syphilis study, and it is important, that history. But we also see that in 02/2001, when a postal worker goes to the doctor and says, I believe I've been exposed to anthrax, he's turned away until to take Tylenol. Right?

Anne Pollock: 15:26

He doesn't we he doesn't have to go to that history. So I think that the book does actually have a lot of history, but it's told in a looped way so that you first are in the twenty first century moment in the time of our students' lifetimes and then go back to infamous abuses. Or also segregation too, I think, is also important to think about in that way. So looking at present day affluent suburbs in Texas and then going back to saying, okay. Where does this come from?

Anne Pollock: 15:57

So that that way we're really, you know, rooting it in our students' lives and experiences and in our present situation that is the one that we have responsibility to change.

Ruha Benjamin: 16:10

Absolutely. And, you know, the focus on anti black racism, it it reminded me when you were talking about Serena, not just how surveillance is not care, but how class is not protective in the same way for everyone. And so, really, oftentimes, I'm sure you get all the time people trying to force a false choice between is this race or is this class at play, and of course they're inextricable and you see that. And you also see the way that in Serena's case and broader in terms of broader patterns of reproductive health, how professional black women, their reproductive health is often poorer because their treatment is poorer, than high school educated white women in The United States, as just one example in terms of infant mortality and maternal morbidity. And so I think that this centering of anti black racism is an important, piece of it.

Ruha Benjamin: 17:04

And so I know I have a chapter that shocked me most, I think because you think you know what happened based on the headlines and then your sleuthing and analysis and interpretive, you know, chops brings other things to light that I hadn't realized. And so perhaps there was something like that for you. I will say for me, chapter four on environmental racism really stood out. I think perhaps also because many of the concerns you address in this chapter connects to my most recent work around race and technology, but here you have a case in which, as the chapter subtitle puts it, machines are protected while humans are abandoned. Can you say a bit about this juxtaposition and how your broader argument about race and citizenship takes shape in the context of the Flint water crisis?

Anne Pollock: 18:00

That case is a powerful one for me too. I mean, in part because I am from Michigan originally, and there's this way that the dynamics in Michigan have been such a stark microcosm of the radical disinvestment that has happened in The United States. And, of course, then later, I moved to Boston, which is where we met, but then to Atlanta for ten years, which is its own very interesting sight. But I think that the situation in Michigan has been such a profound example of the ways in which what we often think of in global health, I'm now in a part department of global health and social medicine. And so these market forces that force the disinvestment, not only in health, but also in the infrastructures that would foster health.

Anne Pollock: 18:53

So both. Right? So both health care to take care of you when you're sick and also the basic infrastructure that would make you get sick later or, you know, seem to ameliorate that. Right? And so that radical disinvestment happened in Michigan in ways that are as stark, I think, as what we see in a lot of context that we would normally characterize as as global health context in which an emergency financial manager is put in place.

Anne Pollock: 19:22

The elected officials are disempowered. And who is the emergency financial manager looking after? You know? He's not looking after the people of Flint, but instead the finances of Flint. Even that, he does a bad job at.

Anne Pollock: 19:37

I mean, this whole situation becomes way more mired in debt than it was before. But yet I think that that move is itself important. And so I think that, you know, this, in some ways, is, one of the only chapters that has, like, a really identifiable villain of the emergency financial manager. And yet, I mean, I'm not interested as much in that guy who occupies that role, but in the system that puts him there and that structures him to pay attention to the needs of the most important corporate resident of Flint, which is the General Motors engine plant, and not the citizens of Flint. And so, you know, I really you know, I think that that is just such an important part of social justice work is demanding that the people who are the citizens are actually the more important, for us than the, than the corporate citizens who tend to get the lion's share, especially whenever there is a moment when they say, oh, it's a financial crisis.

Anne Pollock: 20:38

So we don't have resources, to do that basic care. That is exactly the situations when disempowerment of the people, and radical disinvestment in infrastructure can and does take place.

Ruha Benjamin: 20:53

So if we could nerd out on this just a little bit more, a mini deep dive into chapter four. In several places, you comment on the STS focus on nonhuman actors, thinking about the machines or, you know, the technology of General Motors or the pipes, thinking about the agency of these nonhuman actors and what is called more than human politics. You say, as long as stratification among humans is not ignored amid the analytical elevation of these other domains, This move has a great deal to reveal about contemporary biopolitics. Can you give listeners who aren't familiar with this approach to nonhuman actors a sense of the stakes of your intervention in this chapter?

Anne Pollock: 21:43

Yeah. So this is, of course, very nerded out. Right? For us, so in science and technology studies or science, technology, and society, which is the interdisciplinary field where I was trained, there's a lot of interest in this kind of question about how do politics become durable through technology. And so, you know, so where someone in a particular moment in time, which is a historically unequal moment, the development of technology is shaped by that inequality.

Anne Pollock: 22:14

And because powerful people are often making decisions about that, winds up reinforcing that inequality. And so I think that that fundamental point, is one that is widely respected within science and technology studies. And yet, I think that there's, something that often gets lost in that work with the elision of differences among humans. And so when I was doing my PhD, at MIT, which is very much a a place that trains a lot of people, in this kind of work, I was sometimes told that my interest in race, gender, class was a bit old fashioned. You know, that that really what you know, that the the cool politics, was what was happening with the more than human, and that now we had climate change.

Anne Pollock: 23:06

Well, that was still global warming, I think, then. It, you know, was in the transition between global warming and climate change in the discourse. And then now we would all be in this together. We were all that really what we needed to do was kind of move beyond, questions of race, class, and gender, and instead think about these panhuman questions that were coming to the fore. And so I found I found myself to find that, you know, that that's a bit of a false choice.

Anne Pollock: 23:37

I I think that we should do both. Right? And climate change has precisely underscored the ways that the stratification among humans matters more than than ever. You know, it's not that these kind of global catastrophes somehow make inequalities among people matter less, but that they instead exacerbate them. And I think COVID does something similar.

Anne Pollock: 24:01

So I I, basically, I think that both of these are useful, so that we need both kinds of attentions to biopolitics. So both one that looks at this kind of classic question, that we get from philosopher like Michelle Michelle Foucault saying that, okay, the question of whose life is fostered and then whose life is disallowed to the to the point where they sicken and die, that that is a form of biopolitics that still matters and is profoundly racialized. At the same time, it also often operates through infrastructures, and that makes it can make it very invisible. And I think this is something that you highlight so well in your own work that, like, sometimes when we don't see the human actor who is actually, like, explicitly denying the mortgage or, you know, explicitly refusing access to the hospital or, you know, doing whatever it is that that is a denial of care. If we don't see that person, sometimes we don't see the way that that structure works.

Anne Pollock: 25:06

So So I think that it has the potential actually to help show the ways that structures reinforce very human inequalities, but it has to keep that justice question there. And I do think that there's a lot of STS stuff that just doesn't keep the justice question. It's like, look how groovy this is to think about the more than human world and the way that humans aren't part of this environment. And and it gets kind of trippy and, a fun philosophical exercise, but I think is great, you know, for kind of the dorm room hallway or something, but is not necessarily what we need for our kind of politically and justice engaged academic work.

Ruha Benjamin: 25:46

Agreed. So for anyone who is unfamiliar with academic publishing, there's absolutely no way that Anne could have possibly started this book at the beginning of the pandemic and it be out now, so which means that she she started it years ago, and it's just great timing. But throughout the text, it's obvious how relevant the analysis is to the sickening conditions of COVID-nineteen. And and at the end, she gives us this gift of taking each chapter in turn and making those connections explicit, connecting the forces at play in each case to the events of 2020, including an awareness of the everyday horrors of police violence. So So we get the official connections between the text and events, but I'd like, Anne, if you could just say a bit about how the multiple crises of the last eighteen months got under your own skin personally, how living through the last eighteen months in London shaped your thinking, writing, and probably mostly revising process?

Anne Pollock: 26:52

Yeah. I mean, the timing of this book was extraordinary because I turned in the manuscript in January 2020. I was able to get it kind of going under peer review just as the well, and the University of Minnesota Press. Jason Weideman is a fantastic editor there. Was able to kind of get it moving, early on, as we were all kind of going into lockdown.

Anne Pollock: 27:19

So then it was off my desk, and I had a bunch of friends read it and also teach it in their classes because I so in draft form, because I wanted to be able to, kind of revise with the experience of classrooms in mind. And then that also gave me the chance to be thinking about revision as we were going into lockdown, both on both sides of the Atlantic and, of course, many other parts of the world, and also seeing the inequalities as they became increasingly visible, with COVID. And so then by the time I got the peer reviews back and was revising in the summer of twenty twenty, it was very much informed by that moment. And it seemed like in some ways, it was coming full circle to the 09/11/2001 moment that the narrative starts with, which was another moment in which we started out with this narrative of, oh, now we're all in this together. Before, there was division, but now we're together.

Anne Pollock: 28:23

And how quickly that broke down. You know? So in a way, it does, I think, come full circle. I think that writing from a distance, though, a from a so most of the material I've been thinking about for a long time. I mean, I've been thinking about that postal worker call.

Anne Pollock: 28:39

It's haunted me, kind of throughout, my career. I think that for me, the audio of the 911 call that one of the postal workers made is a real precursor to the viral videos that have become so familiar. And so I don't know why it was, but I was the one who was listening to it on the radio, and hearing the operator say hello and the postal worker say his name and his address, and the operator say, and what's the problem? And he said, my breathing is very, very labored. And the operator says, and how old are you?

Anne Pollock: 29:17

Says, 55. I don't know if I have been, but I suspect that I might have been exposed to anthrax. And hearing that recording released after we already know that the denial of care that he described in the 911 call would lead to his death. And so for me, that really has been something that has informed the way that I've understood the moment since then as viral videos have become a way that we see, these particular egregious cases, but which are continuous with, you know, much, much broader phenomena. So I think writing about it now has helped to see the continuities and discontinuities, I guess, over the time.

Anne Pollock: 30:05

I think the distance helped with talking to people here, about the book. And so this was true both in 2019 as I was finishing the first draft, and then in 2020 when I was, doing the revisions, was the way that people here would ask these naive questions that were really useful for outlining the specificity, that's at stake. So I think that, you know, it's it's very easy to say that, okay, the health disparities in The United States are due to structural inequalities. That is true. But how that operates often gets glossed over significantly, and I think it's useful to stop and slow down and really think through it.

Anne Pollock: 30:50

And so when Europeans, which I will still call British people Europeans, and I do also have a lot of European colleagues here in Britain too. You know, when I would say to them that, okay, these postal the postal workers went to the doctor and said that they, had been that they believe they've been exposed to anthrax and they were turned away with Tylenol, and they would say, well, why did that happen? And it's a really important question. And so I think that it is useful sometimes to write about The US without taking for granted that we know how it operates. And so so I certainly have found that useful.

Anne Pollock: 31:27

I think the other things have just been those personal experiences of and, you know, we can be very critical of The UK response to COVID too. But just seeing the way that there's been this kind of, hunger games element to the vaccine rollout in The US where people are, like, all jockeying on Twitter and stuff. And then, you know, compared to for me, like, I got a message from the NHS saying it's your turn. How about you come to this place that's easy walking distance to your house at this time or this time or this time? And if those don't work for you, go online, you know, click one, you know, and just go.

Anne Pollock: 32:04

Like, that approach?

Ruha Benjamin: 32:06

I can't even imagine. I can't even imagine it. I mean, I have a colleague here who essentially was part of a hub of people who spent hours helping register other people because it was so complicated.

Anne Pollock: 32:20

And versus here, I mean, I had friends who were a little hesitant about the AstraZeneca vaccine, and, so they didn't go when first invited. And they got phone calls saying, we see that your turn was ten days ago, and you haven't come in. What's up? And then they ended up talking about that. And it's just such a different approach.

Anne Pollock: 32:41

And I think it's helpful for remembering, you know, the specificity of the injustices of The US system and potential things that could be done about that. Oh, great.

Ruha Benjamin: 32:52

So I I will say that one of the things that I love most about this book is how it ends with what you call an assignment, a sickening assignment, but which also gives us a very concrete look at your own analytical approach through a series of questions and provocations that anyone can use to analyze other cases past, present, and future. I'm definitely planning to use the assignment in my political bodies, course this spring, but I can see it adopted in courses and discussions that may not even be primarily about health. So I for students, let's say, who are listening to this podcast as part of a class, because I imagine people teaching the book and also, inviting their students to listen to you talk about it, what do you want them to take away? Or put differently, what do you tell your own students when they're overwhelmed by a greater understanding of the sickening conditions of our social world?

Anne Pollock: 33:51

Yeah. I think that, for me, a lot of the scaffolding that I kind of provide in the sickening assignment is I mean, it's partly there's I guess there's a lot going on there. I mean, part of it is that I have been trained and taught for many years at engineering institutions. And so kind of turning writing assignments into problem sets is something that I learned from my own, supervisor, Joe Dummit. And, you know, that that that actually is a useful it can be a really useful exercise that can be applicable to other fields too.

Anne Pollock: 34:24

So this idea of, okay, I'm gonna I have I've heard about this egregious thing that has happened and to step back and think through, okay, Let me find a microscale, of which is often the first one. So if you think about the postal workers, for example. So that nine one one call, a really intimate scale for thinking about what's going on But then the meso scale of what's going on in Washington, DC in 02/2001, but then the macro scale too of, like, HMOs and the way that they work to reinforce, systematic exclusions. You know? So so really thinking through, okay, what's going on with scale?

Anne Pollock: 35:04

That's just the start. Right? So then also, going back and thinking through how to inform the account and so reading media really closely. So this book, unusually for me, doesn't have novel interviews, doesn't have unearthed archives that are not publicly available. But you can learn a lot just from reading what is already published in the media and also from activist organizations, you can read that stuff closely and, come up with additional analyses.

Anne Pollock: 35:40

And I think and then this is connected, of course, to reading relevant scholarship, including citing black women. And so this is something that I think is also important for that we teach our undergraduate students. I think sometimes we wait until we're teaching master's students and PhD students before we talk to them about citational politics. But I think that it's actually really important for undergraduates to think about too because, if we don't pay attention to who are the experts, what are the expert voices? You know, that if if we're not paying attention to that really intentionally, I think that that's actually part of what alienates a lot of people from academia too.

Anne Pollock: 36:20

You know, so kind of putting that right there in the assignment, I think, is important. And then, yeah, I encourage students to add a whole bunch of layers of analysis. So looking at history and infrastructure, technology, economic context. And this could be treated like a tick box, but I actually think it's more of a of a prompt and a spur. And so this is a version of, an exercise that Donna Haraway, has done in her classes, and then Joe Dummit modified.

Anne Pollock: 36:47

And so it's kind of a modification of, like, okay. Let me think about as, like, a whole bunch of different elements that might be coming together in this, in my case, event, and then writing the account in a way that remembers the humanity. I think sometimes when we kind of these cases become a moment of outrage on social media, it can be really divorced actually from the individual people who are living complex lives. So remembering the humanity, I think, is really important when we write. Like, sometimes I get students who write just so stridently about people, and it's troubling.

Anne Pollock: 37:23

But at the same time, it's also important to remember social justice. So I think one of the other things that happens is sometimes people get so into the human story that they forget that it's, like, also part of larger structures. And so I think that that balance is really important. And then, of course, in their own written account too, citing black women is important. So making sure that that they are also practicing the citation on politics that they should do.

Anne Pollock: 37:49

And I think you're absolutely right. I mean, this, even though I imagine it for the classroom, it's not only limited to that. I mean, I think that activists can find these tools useful too. So this is something that I've talked about with Kamara Jones, who's a physician and activist that, folks may know, and others. But I think that, you know, these kinds of analytical tools are also useful for anyone who wants to stay outraged and yet not be defeated by the doom scroll.

Anne Pollock: 38:20

Because I think that it can be really defeating. Right? Like, you can just kind of read about all the horrible things that are going on in the world and feel like, okay. I guess I'm not getting out of bed today. And I think that that scaffolding can be helpful in order to develop an analysis that helps avoid that kind of paralysis that I think can often happen when we look at these really bleak bleak subjects.

Ruha Benjamin: 38:45

And I and I think it goes back to your insistence on the specificity and looking at the fine grain details of these cases because it for me, at least, it's the case that when I'm reading at that level of specificity, you see who, what, where, when, why, and you also see all of the places it could have been otherwise when a different choice could have been made, a different investment could have been had. And so you begin to see it's not inevitable. And so the knowledge of the specificity actually, for me reading it, and I hope for students, is empowering, that you see the places where change is possible, both how it could have been otherwise in the past, but how our choices collectively, especially in terms of our institutions, etcetera, can move us in a different direction. And so while the book does actually give so many different great examples of how to take the text off the page and move into action, just knowing things differently is also a form of action that can spur us, I think, to have more energy to to invest in change wherever we are in our own backyards.

Ruha Benjamin: 39:57

So Anne, thank you so much for this gift of a text sickening. It won't make you feel sick at the end. That's my point. It will be biblically. It will make you energized in order to share it with others, to teach it and to really begin to act on it.

Ruha Benjamin: 40:16

And so thank you to the press and thank you to this podcast for allowing us to have this conversation today.

Anne Pollock: 40:23

And thank you so much, Ruha, for being such a generous reader. So I mean, of of manuscripts over the years, but also of this book. And I really look forward to your, forthcoming work too and to continuing to be in conversation.