In this episode, I will be speaking with Dr. Gail Christopher, a renowned social change agent, author, and expert in health equity and racial healing, who joins the podcast to discuss the urgent need for unity and understanding in a divided America. She shares her insights on the historical roots of racial division, the impact of current political and social dynamics, and the power of her RX Racial Healing methodology she developed and which is being used successfully at 75+ universities…
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- The historical roots of racial division and how they still impact society today.
- How political polarization and social media are hindering racial healing efforts.
- Dr. Christopher’s RX Racial Healing methodology and its potential for fostering unity.
- The importance of authentic dialogue and community-based initiatives for change.
- The connection between holistic health, social justice, and the hope for a more unified America.
Bio:
Gail Christopher is a very accomplished woman and colleague. Dr. Gail Christopher is an award winning social change agent and author with expertise in the social determinants of health and well being and related public policies.
Links to Dr. Christopher’s Socials: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gailcchristopher/
Socials: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/nche_4all/ (@nche_4all)
LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/company/national-collaborative-for-health-equity/
Threads https://www.threads.net/@nche_4all (@nche_4all)
Bluesky @nche4all.bsky.social
Link to Dr. Gail’s Book: https://www.aacu.org/publication/rx-racial-healing-a-guide-to-embracing-our-humanity
Dr Carolyn’s Links
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolyn-coker-ross-md-mph-ceds-c-7b81176/
TEDxPleasantGrove talk: https://youtu.be/ljdFLCc3RtM
“Antiblackness and the Stories of Authentic Allies” – bit.ly/3ZuSp1T
Carolyn Coker Ross
Gail, welcome to the inclusive minds podcast today I have with me, Gail Christopher, who is a very accomplished woman and a colleague. Dr Gail Christopher is an award winning social change agent and author with expertise in the social determinants of health and well being and related public policies. She is a prolific writer and presenter. She is an author, co author, and has contributed to 14 books, hundreds of articles, presentations, publications and more. Her latest book is RX, racial healing, and we’ll be talking more about that. Later, she retired from her role as senior advisor and vice president at the WK Kellogg Foundation, where she was driving was the driving force behind the America healing Initiative and the truth racial healing and transformation effort. In 1996 she was elected as a fellow of the National Academy of public administration. Doctor Christopher became a senior scholar at George Mason University Center for the Advancement of of well being, and executive director of the National Collaborative for health equity in 2019 in 2021 she was selected by the APHA governing council to serve as the APHA honorary vice president for the United States. And lest you think she’s retired in 2023 the American Journal of Health Promotion honored Dr Christopher as one of the 10 most influential women scholars in health promotion. Wow. I’m impressed. Wow. Thank you. You’ve been busy.
Gail C. Christopher
I know I I’m call it a call it workaholism. I guess that’s one way.
Carolyn Coker Ross
That’s probably what our kids would call it, don’t you think?
Gail C. Christopher
But I have a friend who retired recently, and she phrased she changed the term to rewired. So okay, I like that. She’s, instead
Carolyn Coker Ross
Instead of retired, rewired. It’s going to take a lot to rewire people like you and me. I mean, we’ve been going, going, going for a long time, but I just want to highlight that your bio hits a lot of hot button topics that are in the news lately, like, you know, your work in health promotion and truth racial healing and transformation. You know, just what can you give? Give me a little bit of a perspective, particularly in terms of your work in health promotion. And you know what we’re seeing now with the appointment of Robert F Kennedy junior to hit the it’s to the post, and I don’t want to get into the weeds with politics, but just your perspective and how you have been feeling about that change,
Gail C. Christopher
I have been what used to be called an alternative health practitioner for all of my career. I’ve been, you know a licensed naturopath, napro path and clinical nutritionist. So I’ve always understood that there is a mystery, there is a healing capacity within the human body that we can support and that the today’s conventional medical interventions that are primarily pharmaceutical and surgical, they’re just one part of the healing paradigm, as it
Carolyn Coker Ross
were, absolutely, and you and I agree on that,
Gail C. Christopher
you know, and so It we’re in a moment of of change, I believe, and and there is the possibility that that we will take a giant step forward in terms of our relationship to the human body. And, you know, so I’m, I’m feeling positive in the sense that I believe that, you know, our minds are more open. We have this tendency in this country to make everything a dichotomy. It’s either this or it’s that
Carolyn Coker Ross
it’s right or it’s wrong, or, you know, and
Gail C. Christopher
that’s, yeah, it’s just kind of, it limits our capacity for, I believe growth and understanding,
Carolyn Coker Ros
my hope is that we don’t leave science behind when we take a giant leap. And you know, as you know, I did a fellowship with Andrew Wiles program in integrative medicine. And one of the big issues when I started in integrative medicine, 2000 Four was, can we bring science into naturopathy, integrative medicine, you know, functional medicine and so on, instead of just throwing supplements at it, which is no different than the current medical paradigm, where we just throw medications at a disorder. So, yeah, I agree with you that there’s possibility, and there’s also, you know, hopefully it won’t go the other way, where we leave science completely behind. But I want to talk about you’re one of the authors of the anti blackness and the stories of authentic allies, and you wrote a very interesting chapter that also hits on timely matters in terms of, you know, racism and racial healing and that sort of thing. So I just want to ask you, why do you think racial healing is an important strategy and topic now, given the pushback on dei and all of that
Gail C. Christopher
well, you know, our language changes through the through the years, it the focus has to be, I believe, on Building a society that is capable of extending love and empathy and compassion to all we built this society, or this society was built on the basic fallacy of a hierarchy of human value, and We are in denial about the legacy of that policy,
Carolyn Coker Ross
can you say more of that hierarchy of human value? So everybody’s on the same page with that. You were back
Gail C. Christopher
in the 1700s when, you know that era they called the enlightenment. You know, you had one particular, I believe it was a botanist, Linnaeus, that created a false taxonomy of of humanity. You know, he hadn’t traveled the world, but he knew there were lots of places in the world where people had come back with stories that there was, were these diverse cultures, and there were, there was African, there was, you know, Native American, or native indigenous people the world over. And so he basically created this taxonomy. And he created many other taxonomies of many species, but of the human family. He created this taxonomy which was hierarchical in nature, and it put white males at the top of this hierarchy, and, of course, black people were at the bottom, but you had many all the other different types of people in between. Yeah. And this became the basis of what was then called, you know, what evolved to be called, scientific racism. It became the justification for destruction and cruelty, as it related to people who were not in that top category.
Carolyn Coker Ross
And it was also the justification for slavery as well.
Gail C. Christopher
That’s where I was going. It was the justification for the annihilation of indigenous people the world over. It certainly was the justification for enslavement of people from Africa in this country for the better part of two and a half centuries. So this idea that there is, you know, some difference in human species, that there’s some difference in value, intrinsic value, you know, it became the basis of our society, and we really haven’t relinquished that,
Carolyn Coker Ross
right? Yeah, it’s, it’s, and it’s playing out in our public arena right now, basically, where white supremacy it, which is that that same part of that same doctrine is trying to come to the forefront again.
Gail C. Christopher
And, you know, I don’t use that term because I feel like every time we say that, we reinforce that fallacy. And so that’s why I try to get people to see it as part of of a bigger fallacy that, you know, is antiquated and it belongs back in the 17th century. It that we are in the 21st century, and we’re still adhering to this nonsense. It’s almost unbelievable, but I discovered over the years, that people will let that go, but they do it when they’re there. They broaden their circles of engagement, and they interact authentically with people who are different than themselves, and that’s the basis of the RX racial healing methodology. Technology,
Carolyn Coker Ross
yeah, and I want to talk about that a little bit more in just a minute. I too, have experienced, you know, I do, have been doing a lot of consulting in the health equity space, and have seen what you talk about, when people kind of share their own narratives with each other. There’s really, you know, kind of a communal feeling, we’re all part of the human race, kind of feeling, and yet the divides, the extreme divisions in our country now, now, are really challenging that principle. I just want to tell you a brief story. I run a group, an eating disorder type group, which has been going on, has been together for over maybe five, seven years, and it’s it’s a tiny group at this point, people have dropped out and moved on or doing better, whatever. But recently we had a meeting, and in that meeting, one of the participants, who happened to be black, was sharing her concerns and her the stress she was experiencing at her work that was caused in part by The ICE raids. So for example, someone had, you know, arrested a young mother, and her child was left at the school with no one to pick them up. She was a single mom, so she was expressing how she felt about that and and, you know, her concerns for the child and so on so forth. And then one of the other members who, again, had been with her and sharing very in depth stories of their own personal trauma, and you know, how the eating disorder affected their lives and all of that stuff for over five years, spoke up and said, Well, that can’t be because, you know, the President had said he would only arrest criminals And this, you know, the discussion went back and forth. But instead of it being like when we discussed, you know, these deep trauma experiences, suddenly that this tension came into the group. That really was very surprising to me, because these two people had been very close in their relationship and and so on. So it, you know, it brought to mind how the, I don’t know whether you call it, the politicization of hatred in our country, has really made it difficult for people to find and and stay on common ground. And you know, I think it definitely threatens the integrity of the group, because people now, you know, are have that divide between them. So how do you think that this RX racial healing and your experience with it can help overcome these extremely deep divisions in our country.
Gail C. Christopher
I believe that, and my experience is that if you bring people together for the purposes specifically of connecting at a heart level. The process that I’ve developed involves anywhere from 24 to 26 people in a circle. It is CO facilitated by two very different people who are modeling, if you will this notion of of you know, difference not being a barrier to authentic communication. And there’s some resonance that happens. We divide into pairs, and we have, you know, into private discussions. We have prompts that people respond to, and then they the prompts are always positive. The prompts are always a reminder of agency and the meeting of basic human needs, whether it’s self expression or security or agency. And then the group comes back together as a circle, and they do deep listening to the stories that have been shared and and there is a electromagnetic, biological, biochemical and physiological dynamic that happens in the circle that really does open the heart a little more to this notion of our shared humanity. Now, don’t get me wrong, the there has been a manipulation and an exploitation of fear and racial division. There is, there is a masterful manipulation, and of course, social media plays to that. We’re in a very critical moment. In our society today that is not very different from the Civil War era of the 18 hundreds, and the sense that this adherence to this need for superiority and control and the exploitation of the masses, so that a few people’s wealth can be protected. I mean, that’s a political reality.
Yes, we an area right now, where political identity is the dominant tribal identity, as it were, in this country. And so, if we could elevate and take to scale this attempt to build the connective tissue that will allow us to to not be so easily manipulated politically. I think there’s a crisis right now in our country that that requires this kind of intentional work.
Carolyn Ross MD: Why do you think political identity has superseded all of our other identity? It seems to even have superseded our identity as Americans, even, you know.
Gail Christopher: Well, because it’s been an intentional strategy to do that, you know, and every major movement in the history of our country, whether it was the Abolition movement to end slavery or the Civil rights movement that came about later to end Jim Crow. The woman’s every major movement has been accompanied by a major shift in our mass communication with abolition. It was newspapers. We had 3,000 newspapers in this country, and it made a big difference with the Civil rights movement. It was television, you know, with the new deal. It was radio, you know. And so now we have this new thing, social media. And unfortunately, it’s a runaway train, and it’s been exploited to create these political divisions.
We, you know, Obama’s administration. Obama’s campaign was the 1st campaign that brought some sophistication to leveraging social media. But then it was usurped in the campaigns that followed. And and that’s and you know, quite honestly, that’s why. And the other thing I would say about social media and the the use of it. It has a much more addictive capacity. It literally changes the brain. Yeah.
Carolyn Ross MD: Nobody was addicted to newspapers. That’s for sure.
Gail Christopher: And nobody was really addicted to television or movie.
Carolyn Ross MD: Okay. Yeah.
Gail Christopher: Know what I mean. But this, this idea of having this, this phone in your hand, or this computer, you know in your life. And the social media component really does pull you. It changes the brain, it increases the dopamine levels. It affects the actual functioning of the brain. And so that’s how we got to this. When Elon Musk bought Twitter he knew exactly what he was doing, and he turned it into his platform for communicating and building these, you know, this base of extreme rhetoric.
Carolyn Ross MD: Okay.
Gail Christopher: It’s a critical moment, and it’s gonna require sophisticated intervention.
Carolyn Ross MD: How do you see this? Your process being spread across our very large country in a way that could shift the prevailing narrative that everybody’s different, and you’re either on this side or that side, and all of that.
Gail Christopher: Well, we’re we’re coming at it from multiple directions. 1st of all, you know, we engage universities and colleges right now. There’s 75 college campuses around the country that are implementing this work on their campuses and within their communities. We’ve also engaged public health departments. You know, we had over 250 public health departments in this country that have declared racism a public health crisis.
Carolyn Ross MD: Hmm.
Gail Christopher: We’ve engaged the libraries in this country, and then we have local communities that have embraced the process. So. But it’s not where it needs to be honestly, and after last night, and you know the 2Â h of what it was I.
Carolyn Ross MD: Were you talking last night when that there was a State of the Union address.
Gail Christopher: Yes, yes, but it wasn’t that. You know what I’m saying. It was. It was more of the campaign rhetoric, essentially, that found its way rather than governance rather than a Union conversation about our country. It was more of the campaign rhetoric in that form, right?
Carolyn Ross MD: Really it was kind of the use of the White House stage as a bully pulpit, they call it.
Gail Christopher: Well, but but you know the con, the content from what I understand was a continuation of the campaign rhetoric. And anyway, that’s not important. What’s important, though, is that we do have to have a counter narrative that focuses on our humanity, on our need for one another, on our interconnectedness as an expansive human family. And even though we have an annual day of racial healing that involves tens of thousands of folks every year we had one this year. It’s now in its 8th year.
We still have not taken this to scale in such a way that it can immunize, if you will us, against the risk of extreme polarization and exploitation for personal gain.
Carolyn Ross MD: Yeah, what do you think would be a motivation that people could get behind to? Go back to racial healing like, how can? How can how do you see Americans who are backing away from this being motivated to you know, really return and and be more solid with moving it forward.
Gail Christopher: Well, we do. At my organization, the National Collaborative for Health Equity. We do an annual poll that we call the Heart of America. Poll.
Carolyn Ross MD: Okay.
Gail Christopher: Truthfully. Most Americans are not what we’re hearing and seeing in this moment, this politicized moment, our poll results, which is a nationally representative poll over 80% want us to be unified. As a country. The ground is fertile. We just need someone who wants that as opposed to wanting division and wanting denial of the true history of our country. So it’s unfortunate, in my view, that our recent election didn’t produce a continued commitment to the healing the the last President used to call it healing the soul of America. But we just. We have to recognize that there is there is a heartbeat in this country that wants unity that wants healing. And somehow we have to find another point of of critical mass. Another point, another leverage point, if you will. That’s that that prioritizes this. I don’t know exactly what that leverage that fulcrum is. If you will, to help drive this healing work. I pray for that every night in terms of trying to figure out how we make it happen, particularly with this, the urgency and the scale that’s needed right now.
Carolyn Ross MD: Yeah, you say, 80% have a heart.
Gail Christopher: Yeah. And they want him.
Carolyn Ross MD: But but a good proportion of those had to vote for the current administration in the last election. So where was there?
What was more important to them than their heart for healing.
Gail Christopher: Well, you know, let’s be clear in terms of breaking those percentages down, you know. This was a close election. You know. We have a flawed election system which emphasizes certain Key States. Now, after all was said and done, the popular vote margin. I’m believing.
Carolyn Ross MD: Yeah.
Gail Christopher: Was very narrow, right? And so I just you.
Carolyn Ross MD: But but I’m just wondering, even given all of that because I do believe Americans have good hearts that we want the best for all of our people, and and that the segment who are focused on, you know. I don’t know what what you want to substitute for the words white supremacy, but who are focused on that is pretty narrow. But oh, really good people, you know, like the people in my group Voted for this person.
Gail Christopher: Well, I think it gets back to what I was saying about the social media and the false narratives people were struggling. We’re coming out of a pandemic. People were struggling economically. You know this notion of the price of eggs right.
Carolyn Ross MD: Oh yes!
Gail Christopher: And so people people bought the hype that many people did enough people did to give the margin of victory. You know people bought the hype. And of course, let’s not. Let’s not ignore the deep subconscious biases that are at play in our society, and my research has indicated that the the most entrenched bias that we have in America is ageism. So that was a factor at least.
Carolyn Ross MD: So, true. Yeah.
Gail Christopher: You know, that was manipulated in terms of the the incumbent President and that was played very, very powerfully. And then we have, you know the gender bias, you know. I I if if if we’d had our druthers quite honestly, if we were being very strategic and very practical, I’m not sure we should have had a female running against. You know the current President, because of the entrenched bias in this country that we haven’t dealt with in terms of gender hire.
Carolyn Ross MD: That showed up with Hillary Clinton.
Gail Christopher: Absolutely it did, and it was exploited to the nth degree.
Carolyn Ross MD: I know. Right? Yeah. Well, you know, in my medical practice, you know, I’ve been a physician, Integrative medicine, addiction, medicine, eating disorders, all of the mental health stuff. For a number of decades, let’s say. My central question from when I was a new baby doctor was, What does it take to heal? And I still, I still have that central question. Now, kind of writ large in terms of what it sounds like. You have the same kind of question, like, what what does racial healing really take? And do you have any insight into what would it take to kind of turn the ship around.
Gail Christopher: Well, I believe that, and I’m not.
Carolyn Ross MD: Talking about politics. Sorry to interrupt. Okay.
Gail Christopher: No, I believe that the healing mechanism is natural.
Carolyn Ross MD: Okay.
Gail Christopher: That our body is always healing that the same intelligence that creates the body in the womb. it heals the body after we are born. And so these healing mechanisms are natural, they are innate, they are inherent, however, the the ethos, the condition that works against that is, of course, fear, threat, yep, fear and threat. Right when we are in a state of fear. Trauma, the perceived threat, certain parts of the brain, the amygdala, as you know, triggers, the the release of excessive hormones that work against our health and our well-being. That’s on an individual level.
When we create a society, we have created a society that is not informed optimally about these natural innate mechanisms. Right then, we don’t understand what it costs us as a society to continue to adhere to this fallacy of a hierarchy of human value. So I feel like and I believe in my heart that we have to shift our understanding as to what it is that contributes to our health and well-being and living in a society that is divided and polarized and rooted in fear and antagonism. It’s making us all sick and
Carolyn Ross MD: Yes.
Gail Christopher: You know what I’m saying? Yeah. So that’s my perspective. As someone who is committed to reverence and respect and awe for the innate healing capacity that defines our being.
Carolyn Ross MD: Yeah, I want to just ask you, how did you? I mentioned to you that I’ve had this question. But how did your journey on this start, and I read a little bit in your chapter in the book about an experience you had at a camp when you were a teenager, was.
Gail Christopher: Well, you know I was. I was blessed to have a summer at what? At Chautauqua Institute. Now Chautauqua became a a publicly known place with the tragic shooting of the author there. I think it was 2 years ago, or 3 years ago, but Chautauqua was one of the 1st places in America that had these summer experiences of education and arts and culture. and I was given a fellowship to go there one summer from my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, and like every major city, I grew up in a segregated community, and I’d never been outside of my segregated community until I went there, and my roommate happened to be white, and she was raised on the other side of town, right? I was on the east side. She was on the west side and we became friends during the summer. You know, we had bunk beds and we we would talk about our families and our experiences and I tell the story that at the end of the summer was almost over, and I was what we lived in these Victorian dorms, Victorian houses that were converted into dorms, and I was walking down the street, and I saw an ambulance in front of our house and I couldn’t understand why an ambulance. So I ran. I ran to the house, and as I got to the house they were carrying my roommate, roommate out on a stretcher and I turned to the house parents to see what had happened, and they told me that my roommate, who was white, who had attempted suicide.
Carolyn Ross MD: Oh, my!
Gail Christopher: And I ran up to the room. That was my instinct, and and sure enough, she had written a note to me and the note said that I’ve come to know you over the summer, and my father, who happened to be a police officer in that city right of Cleveland. My father has taught me to hate black people.
Carolyn Ross MD: Hmm.
Gail Christopher: I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to live that way anymore.
Carolyn Ross MD: That’s so. That’s such a poignant story. Was that something that that triggered your entire journey in this direction? Do you think.
Gail Christopher: No, I think it. It did stay with me, you know. I’ve had many experiences as a black woman that continued to build on my my understanding that racism is so harmful. You know I’ve lost family members, you know. So I have seen the and felt and experienced the harm that racism causes.
Gail Christopher: But I also had that early experience of you know that that veil of of separation having been pierced by this very innocent friendship of of teenagers right and the effect it had on her personally in terms of this notion of racial hierarchy being challenged. So I think I think all of those things. But I think the most important thing was my journey as a holistic doctor, where, you know, when you, when you work with people
in a healing capacity. As you well know, you know, you realize who we are. You realize we’re the same. We have, you know, we have the same organs. We have the same blood that flows through our veins, we have hearts that beat, we have this miracle of life and these.
Carolyn Ross MD: And we have 99.9%. The same DNA, too.
Gail Christopher: No question right? And so this notion that the superficial differences that were simply adaptations to the climates in which our ancestors evolved that they should become the basis of societal organization and cruelty. We just know it’s absurd.
Carolyn Ross MD: Yeah, that’s so true. Well, tell us a little bit about how we can get by your book. Rx. Racial healing a guide to embracing our humanity.
Gail Christopher: Thank you so much for asking the question. And and here’s the book. Just so people can see it. But it is published by and available through the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Aacu. And if you go to their website, aacu.org.
You can purchase the book. All of the proceeds from the sale of the book actually go to support the work that’s happening on college campuses across the United States. So the book really does help us to continue the work and keep this momentum expanding. So I’m honored that I have this partnership with Aacu, and we we want to have, you know, many more college campuses, at least hundreds of college campuses begin to create the next generation of people that recognize the fallacy of this hierarchy of human value and are committed. We have a movement we call truth, racial healing and transformation. It is a truth and reconciliation process for this country which may not come to fruition, you know, over the next 4 years, but it’s been gradually becoming a reality over the last 7 years. At the local level. We had resolutions put forth in Congress by Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Senator Cory Booker, to get a national effort. You know these things take time. It took a hundred years to end and abolish slavery.
Carolyn Ross MD: Yeah, everything does take a lot of time. Well, it’s just so fun to talk to you. I could talk to you all day.
Gail Christopher: Well, thank you for the interview. Thank you for inviting me, and congratulations on the book itself.
Carolyn Ross MD: And thank you so much for all of the work that you do. I think it takes people with optimism which you clearly have as well as people with, you know, reality in in their corner to do this kind of work. And it’s it’s very powerful. And I’m really excited to be talking to one of the 10 most influential women scholars in health, promotion, too, so.
Gail Christopher: Thank you very much. I’m always honored, but but you know we’re all in this together, you know, and we’ll we’ll all celebrate when the work is, is at least significantly done at a scale that’s grand enough to change the political climate in this country.
Carolyn Ross MD: Yes. Okay.
Gail Christopher: All right. Well, thank you.
