Dr. Delbert Wigfall, a retired pediatric nephrologist, joins Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross to discuss the profound impact of systemic racism on healthcare access and outcomes. Drawing from his extensive career and co-authorship of “Anti-Blackness and the Stories of Authentic Allies,” Dr. Wigfall shares powerful insights and real-life examples of the disparities faced by underrepresented minorities in both mental and physical healthcare, including organ transplantation.
This crucial conversation explores the historical roots of these inequities, the importance of advocacy and understanding, and the complexities of achieving true diversity and inclusion in medicine.
Key Takeaways:
- Understanding how systemic racism creates barriers to quality healthcare for marginalized communities.
- The significance of lived experiences in fostering empathy and challenging biases.
- The underrepresentation of Black men in medicine and its impact.
- The need for a nuanced understanding of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall’s Links
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/delbert-wigfall-aaab7716/
Dr Carolyn’s Links
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolyn-coker-ross-md-mph-ceds-c-7b81176/
TEDxPleasantGrove talk: https://youtu.be/ljdFLCc3RtM
To buy “Antiblackness and the Stories of Authentic Allies” – bit.ly/3ZuSp1T
Hi, this is Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross, bringing you the Inclusive Minds Podcast. This podcast was inspired by the book of which I’m a co-editor entitled Anti-Blackness and the Stories of Authentic Allies. Lived experiences in the fight against institutionalized racism. If you’re a psychologist, a social worker, an addiction professional, or a healthcare provider, or anyone who wants to broaden your horizons, then this podcast is for you.
The goal of the podcast is to help you understand some of the more complex issues facing our culture today. My guest. Are experts in their fields, and we’ll be talking about a wide array of topics including cross-cultural issues, the intersection of race and trauma, social justice and health inequities.
They will be sharing both their lived experiences and their expert opinions. The goal is to give you a felt experience and to let you know that you are not alone in being confused by these complex issues we want to provide. Provide nuanced information with context that will enable you to make your own decisions about these important topics.
Hi everybody. It’s Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross, welcoming you to the Inclusive Minds Podcast. My guest today is Dr. Delbert Wigfall. Let me tell you a little bit about him. He’s a native of the southeast, born in Charleston, South Carolina, and raised in the southeastern segment of the country. His family traversed South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida before settling in Atlanta, Georgia, where he completed high school.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Oh, we’re going way back then. I gave you everything.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Yeah. Um, so he completed college at Williams College in Massachusetts Medical School at Emory University in Atlanta and residency training in pediatrics in Houston at the University of Texas. After two years of practice in Atlanta at Grady Hospital, he completed subspecialty training in the care of children with kidney disease at the University of California Los Angeles.
Dr. Wigfall relocated. To North Carolina in 1987 and remained a part of Duke University School of Medicine Health System. Aside from his clinical career, he focused on diversity inclusion in the Department of Pediatrics and in the medical school. He co-founded the Multicultural Resource Center and continued to focus on culture, diversity, recruitment, and selections of students and trainees harassment.
Grievances and cultural climate. He has helped to encourage candor and compassion and communication and fostered community in the school and the department. He has been more actively involved in discussions of race disparities in health during the time of the pandemic and racial violence. He has recently completed the racial equity and inclusion training and has been trained and certified as a Duke University Office of Diversity Inclusion Trainer.
He has continued to focus on university-wide diversity training and the ongoing work of dismantling racism with the institution until his recent retirement. Welcome to the show, Del.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Thank you very much.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Uh, now Del is also an author in our book, Anti-Racism and the Stories of Authentic Allies.
Available on Oxford University Press’s website and his chapters entitled The Impact of Systemic Racism on Mental Healthcare. So, um, you know, we’ve heard a lot of statistics about, you know, the impact of systemic racism on mental health care. Before the pushback, the current pushback on DEI and your chapter has a lot of statistics that support that underrepresented minorities do not receive or access, uh, quality, uh, mental healthcare.
But beyond the statistics, can we talk about any cases that might. Illustrate this problem. Do you remember any cases in your practice or even in your life or your family’s life where, where that mental health care disparity showed up?
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Yeah. It’s interesting. I guess in the practice of pediatric nephrology, I think we used to say that it was sort of newer neuropsychiatric nephrology in a sense, because most kids.
Who have now nephrology,
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: I, I hate to interrupt you, but so everybody knows nephrology is the study of kidney diseases.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Correct. Okay. Correct. So, children who have impairment of kidney function very often don’t grow well, which of course puts them into a position where they’re often harassed or maligned in terms of school.
Mm-hmm. Uh, kids who have chronic disease in general create attention within families because then you have one child who. Desperately needs help and other kids potentially who are normal, whatever that is. so there is, there’s an inherent tension that evolves within families. One parent oftentimes becomes the caretaker of the sick child, and the other is sort of the breadwinner that creates.
Emotional and fiscal and intimacy issues within parents. So the family structure really gets to be dismantled or disrupted. Mm-hmm. Um, and in that circumstance, it’s really critical to have the social and psychological support for the families themselves.
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: So we saw it. Every time we saw a child who had end stage disease, end stage, meaning basically they needed some replacement, uh, either dialysis or transplantation.
So that in and of itself happened all the time. And what were the issues that would come up when a child or a family system would need mental health care? What were some of the issues you would see? The issues could be around identifying and accepting the diagnosis. It could be issues of compliance either with medication or with diet or with follow up.
Mm-hmm.
And oftentimes it became an issue of fiscal incapacity really, in terms of just didn’t have the money to pay, didn’t have the money to pay for. Case in point, a family whose breadwinner this is, the African American family and the child was probably. A first grader in terms of age.
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: They had four kids or have four kids, I assume at this point.
Um, and one had a potentially reversible disease that might over time decrease in terms of its intensity and actually go away. In this circumstance though, the breadwinner was the dad. This is an intact African American family, which in of itself. Is maligned because we don’t believe that there is such a thing.
But they were, uh, probably just above the poverty line. Dad had an old car that could get him back and forth to work unless it didn’t. With his limitations in terms of salary, whether or not he had enough gas to drive the family to appointments, I would a half, two hours away whether or not he could take the time off from work to bring his son to clinic.
If there was any issue, for whatever reason, those things did not fall into place and they didn’t show up, then it causes all of this maligning of them and their understanding of so,
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: so in other words, their, the doctors and the nurses are thinking they’re irresponsible. They don’t care about their kid, their.
Absolutely do what they need to do or whatever. Yeah, absolutely. And so how, how does that have to do with systemic racism? And I think that’s what we need to kind of get into.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: There’s so many different factors that come into play in terms of systemic racism. One has to be appreciative of the fact that people who are from underrepresented groups and, and we can even come back and talk more about that because intersectionality, um, but.
For those families, there are issues of money. In real sense, the fact that persons from underrepresented backgrounds oftentimes have more menial jobs and labor and smaller incomes,
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: which ’cause of historical inequities
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: because of historical inequities that not only limits where they live and how they live, um, limits educational opportunities, which have always been laced with racism, it limits.
The ability to get adequate insurance. Yeah, that’s fiscal. And there are racial limitations even in that respect. Some of which depends on where they live and how they live. Where they lived oftentimes is also laced with all of the historical racial implications because of redlining and whatnot that have persistently put people into communities that create issues within themselves.
I think both in terms of acceptance and access to care.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: So you’re, but you’re the doctor in this situation and you know about all of these inequities, and yet you may have staff around you who are, like you said, maligning or blaming the parents and. Uh, de you know, denigrating them. So how were you able to bring your knowledge about, uh, systemic racism and, you know, health inequities into play to help them understand what was going on?
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: A big part of it is just two things. One is advocacy, and the other is an appreciation of concordance and the impact of concordance. The advocacy comes into play in large part because I understand the backgrounds from which they come. My. Background while varied and ultimately I guess those, there are people who would say I was quite successful.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: You know, I think I’m one of those people, if we measure, if we measure it by how many trips you can take when you’re retired.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Well, there is that, but I think having an appreciation for what the underrepresented community looks like. Growing up in the southeast, in my age group, we were church going on Sunday.
Not necessarily all day. We lived in relatively small communities where people knew each other. And the first town that I remember actually, part of what was valuable at that time was it was normal to be an African American. There were a. Shops. There was. The schools, the teachers lived in the communities.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Yeah. The teachers were black. They lived in the communities. They knew your parents. They knew the parents.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Yeah. And so you saw people who were professional by our standards. Wow. Right. The ministers, the teachers, the funeral directors, all these people who contributed to the economy and community and the community.
Yeah. So I sort of had that as a backdrop.
I didn’t grow up eating steaks and caviar. Right. So I have an appreciation what, for what diet looks like.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: And what we ask of patients when we prescribe diets, an appreciation for what they can do, what they can’t afford, because I had all those things as a part of my plate, so it’s easy for me having that concordance.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: You have a deeper understanding of the patient’s lives because you come from that background, as do I in Texas, kind of the same sort of scenario, but maybe your staff don’t, your white staff. Exactly. That. They may have come from the suburbs or you know, who knows where and but what if they themselves would say to you, well, yeah, we were poor growing up, so how is your problem a racism problem?
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: I think under those circumstances, the best thing you can do is advocate correct misinterpretations, point out the flaws in their logic or those factors which are not relevant in terms of decision making.
One of the things that I think we oftentimes don’t do is when someone doesn’t do exactly what we expect him to do, we can make up an excuse or an explanation for what they’ve done, and it’s so much simpler just to ask,
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: yeah, why didn’t you do this?
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Why didn’t you, yeah.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Why didn’t you bring your son in for his appointment?
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Yes, exactly.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Now you’ve as a pediatric. Kidney doctor or nephrologist, you also had to, uh, refer patients for transplants. And I, I know you and I’ve talked in the past about the tremendous amount of bias and inequity in the, uh, organ transplant system.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Who gets the kidney versus who does not get the kidney. Did you see a lot of that when you were in your career before you retired?
Um. I was sort of in a sweet spot with kids because kids get a little bit of preferential treatment with regards to graphs when they became available.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: That’s good
Dr. Delbert Wigfall:. Um, so it was unusual for a kid not to receive a graph.
A large proportion of kids who have end-stage disease in the United States are underrepresented. In terms of their backgrounds. Mm-hmm. So it looks very much like the adult population in terms of kidney disease. Over half of the people who are on dialysis are African American or Latinx. They’re people of color.
So the children sort of fit into the same categories, but knowing that the. Endpoint of dialysis or lytic treatment is transplantation.. You can’t, you can live on dialysis for an extended period of time, but there are issues that come up there. In terms of lifestyle and longevity. A transplant is much more
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: and quality of life too.
And quality of life. Mm-hmm.
Um, so it’s much more problematic if you’re not at the table making the decision.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Yeah.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: One of the things that happened with a child, when a graft became available, they would call us to see whether the child was healthy enough to undergo the transplant. So you had the opportunity to intercede before the decision was made, and sort of push and advocate again for the kid, you know, and it’s not just kidneys. I’ve told students, even after retirement, I’ve done some lectures and sort of sat in and moderated some discussions. One of my students. I also did some student advising, Career wise a good bit of it, who has gone on to do oncology cancer treatment and actually is working at a major university in Massachusetts in the city of Boston that you’ll go unnamed.
But when he was in his training, he had an African American male who was in his mid twenties, who had been down on his luck literally.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Hmm.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: He had been drug abusing, he had been homeless, he had been a street person. Um, ended up in the hospital. It turns out he had heart failure and he was at a point where he was going to require, uh, cardiac assistance, right?
They can put in pumps into the heart and actually help to sustain a person. But like dialysis, when they do that, the endpoint is transplantation to go on that assisted device. They go through screening and discussions basically to make sure that the person is a good candidate.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Yeah,
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: whatever that means.
This person, while in his twenties with years of productivity ahead of him, didn’t have an address, was not supported by his family, didn’t have a job, and didn’t have insurance. He was deemed not acceptable. Because of all of those factors that I and other people have written about in this, in this wonderful book that everybody should buy.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: But I’ll second that. Well, I think I’ve mentioned to you about my own family in which, uh, there was a lot of bias towards my brothers who both, uh, one brother ended up getting a transplant and the other brother didn’t. But both of them were, had substance use disorders and we know that. Childhood trauma and historical trauma are associated with an increased risk for substance use disorders.
But even still many people in the transplant community are, I mean, I know in Texas with my youngest brother, he had cirrhosis of the liver. You know, he was shamed. For his, you know, his substance use disorder and basically told he didn’t deserve to get a, a new liver. And I think that’s, you know, for, for me as a, a physician, kind of shocking.
I understand that organs are, I. You know, in limited supply and so on. But, uh, I was lucky with my older brother who, uh, got a transplant when he was in his late forties and he lived for another 20 years. He ended up having, well my sister gave him one kidney, so that was worked for a while, and then he had a think two.
Uh, cadaver kidneys that, uh, took him through the rest of the time and he was, uh, clean and sober the rest of the time until, you know, very near his death. So people can change, but I think it’s hard to, if you’re a family member, it’s hard to reconcile, you know, a physician not being willing to help because of their bias against people with substance use disorders.
Which is a trauma issue. It’s not, it’s not a, an issue of willpower.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Right. And I. One of the discussions that I have with students, what’s interesting because we literally talked about this case, um, from the standpoint of trying to do the right thing for the person, for the patient.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: And there was a discussion of another patient who needed an orthopedic procedure.
And a bone surgery, a joint surgery, and as a consequence of that need, it was decided that if he could demonstrate his ability to basically do the self-care that would be required before the surgery, then they would deem him. Capable of taking care of himself after the surgery. Well, for him to do that meant that he basically had to limit his work hours.
He couldn’t limit his work hours because he was taking care of himself quite adequately. And of course, insurance is all linked to employment and whatnot. as we talked about it, I said, why should we be given the opportunity to decide whether or not this person is going to be. Compliant and capable because of what he does before surgery.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Yeah, right.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Theoretically, you know, with your own family members, with the dialysis routines and the the diet and the medicine, it’s onerous,
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: it’s, it takes up a lot of your day to do all that. Yeah. Right.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: So to do all of that, to prove to the world, so to speak, that you can take care of yourself after the fact, after you have the opportunity to have the more salutatory or surgery.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Whether it’s a crime, but it’s more like to prove that you deserve to get the surgery even. Right. Right. And I think that’s where the bias comes in.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Absolutely.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Because as you know. If you’re human, don’t you deserve to have a chance to live? And I think there was a big documentary made about the beginnings of this question in the, uh, the kidney transplant world many, many years ago, like maybe in the fifties, where they had a board of people who would, you know, decide they were like God, because they could decide, oh yes, for you, but.
No, no, no. Not for you. For whatever reason. And obviously there were has to be some bias in that if they’re all white men on the board and a lot of the patients, especially with kidney disease, are African American.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Yep. You know, and it became a problem and it actually cropped up just briefly.
Unfortunately, it was not necessary for it to evolve and become a process during Covid.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Oh, okay.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: In the early months of Covid, you might remember that everybody was, there were the shortages of ventilation or ventilator hours. The breathing machines and everything was necessary to make them work. And several patients, uh, a higher percentage of patients who developed covid ended up having other organ damage, whether it was the heart or whether it was the kidneys.
The kidneys, particularly because of some of the medications that were used early on, they’d end up requiring dialysis. Well, the concern. Rose very quickly, much in the same sense. If this is gonna come and this is gonna become much more endemic than what it is, then we need to have the ability to decide who’s gonna get a ventilator.
Or who’s gonna have the ability to be dialyzed, some of which is at the bedside. How are we gonna decide that process? So they were gonna create a committee, and I was asked whether or not I wanted to participate. I said, no, no, absolutely not. now I’m not God and nor do I intend to be godlike. And I think that that requires a level of decision making that none of us really have in truth.
You know, me medical care is. A privilege or is it a right?
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: I think it sort of boils down to that same element of bias that makes us believe that it’s more of a privilege and who are be privileged. And who is likely to be privileged. It’s not under, not underrepresented minorities for sure. Yeah.
Okay. So in your chapter, you also mentioned that there are fewer black men going into medicine. And maybe tell us some of the reasons for that briefly, but I think more important is what has it been like for you before you retired? Being a black male physician? I.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: The whole medical journey has been fascinating in a sense.
Yeah. ’cause it has been the antithesis of what I observed around me, at least in terms of majority students. Even in medical school, when I went to medical school, and you would appreciate this, and I’m not sure whether or not the ard, but the first day of medical school, there were I think 125 in the entering class.
There were six African American students.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Yeah, I think there were eight in my class, but it was at University of Michigan, but it was more than 125 in the class.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: So the dean came in to do his introduction and he, you know, like they oftentimes say, you know, you look around you, you’ll see all these people, you know, some of them will graduate with you and some won’t, and playing the odds, X percent probably won’t graduate.
So that, that, that means approximately six students won’t finish with this class. How would you hear that? I’m sure you would hear it the same way I did. And we looked at each other like what the hell just happened at the point in time that I, half of the students who entered would not be able to move on to the second year because of deficiencies and that was true in that class. Two out of the three people who were left behind, graduated, one didn’t. He went on to have a really very productive career in mentoring and advising. As is often the case, we can advise because of the holes that we have fallen into.
Rather than the opportunities that we’ve been given.
So it started off with that, uh, residency was relatively benign in Houston, the one thing that I learned was conversational Spanish. So many patients were Spanish speaking only. And so I could do a history and physical mm-hmm. In Spanish, which was really godsend even when I went to Los Angeles for training.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: But do all of these things, put, especially the medical school scenario, put more pressure on black and brown students to feel like, oh my God, I don’t wanna be in that, you know, percentage who don’t make it. And so I’ve gotta work extra hard, which I think certainly was the case for me.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Definitely. And I think the other thing that I saw as I went through my process in residency, there were.
Well, I was the only person of color in my year of training, and there was one other person ahead of me. When I went into fellowship, I was the only person of color who was in the fellowship training. When I left Fellowship and I went to a national meeting, and at that point in time there were close to 500 pediatric kidney doctors in the country.
I walked into a breakfast meeting and sat down at a table because there were other brown people there, and that’s what we do.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Admittedly, we look for like numbers, but it turned out that that table. Really represented the totality of persons of color who were pediatric doctors who specialize in kidney disease in children.
So there were less than eight people in the entire country.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Wow.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: And I began my career. It’s not much better now It’s better, but it’s not a whole lot better. So there is a problem in terms of candidacy and finding the positions and actually. Matriculating,
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: getting through medical school, residency, fellowship, all of those different tests,
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: you suffer from feeling like an imposter.
You’re a stranger at a strange land. You know, I often told them a test taking problems, test taking problems. I told students, and I continue to tell them that they’re bilingual, even if they only speak English, because they also speak culturally from their heritage. So they can speak to people who are represented phenotypically by appearance at least.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: People who look like them. Yeah,
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: right. Because of the sim similarities in terms of the experience set.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: And the studies do show that if you’re even have a, a doctor who looks like you, that your results are better overall, you know?
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Absolutely.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Yeah.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: And I think some of that becomes an issue of communication.
It’s cultural competency for whatever, or however one wants to define that. And there is. A sense of security. I told a student of my, again, I still keep in touch with him, who is now on faculty at the University of Utah. Okay. And she was asking how I sort of survived and I said, you know, one of the things that I realized when I came to North Carolina, ’cause I was concerned about practicing in the southeast even after all of my background, it’s that people want to be cared for professionally and personally.
And if you are empathetic, when you walk into the room and you sit and you listen to them and you try to address their concerns, they appreciate that. And some of the race issues really dissolve. Uh, to get back to your question about black men and black men in medicine in general, I think we have a series of.
Missteps that have happened in terms of education and in terms of access. People say that you can’t be what you can’t see. Right? So if in your community you don’t see professional people of color, then there’s no reason for you to emulate
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: mm-hmm. What you can’t see, or to be able to even imagine that it’s possible.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Yeah. So there’s that. There is an educational system that has been flawed, um, and really has not been. Is supportive and nurturing and encouraging as the place where I grew up,
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: especially I think to, uh, little black boys. I’ve seen exactly over and over as I volunteered with my kids that, you know, first of all, boys are a whole different breed that teachers don’t often like.
And then if you have a little black boy, that makes it even worse. So that, that starts the problem right there.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Absolutely. As a friend who finished Duke, who has written extensively on the problem of violence in the community and sort of the way that black boys are enculturated into gang violence and often suffer the the negative impact, whether that’s incarceration or whether it’s death of being associated with the wrong crowd again.
I was in Charleston probably about eight years ago with a group from my undergraduate school, a group of about 25 who finished in the undergraduate program out of 500, and about 16 or 17 were men. So we decided after we lost one of our classmates that we were gonna get together. So we rented a huge house in Charleston and did stuff as sort of visitors, you know, we went and toured things that we otherwise probably would not have seen.
We got on a tour bus and the guy asked, what did we do? Well on the tour bus, I think there were eight physicians, a couple of lawyers, a minister, you know, so all professional people.
he said, this is what’s lacking in Charleston. Kids don’t see black men who look who have your professional background and your acumen.
They’re not mentored by you.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: So that’s an issue, and I think the whole. Process by which you grow becomes in itself impaired. So you don’t have the sense that you can accomplish, and nobody’s really pushing and nobody’s really supporting the programs that were created to try to encourage underrepresented youth.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: And much less so now with, uh. Current administration. Well, a lot of people also dismiss the impact of like historical mistreatment or historical trauma. Recently I got a reply on a YouTube video that I had posted on intergenerational trauma and the commenter, the person in the comment suggested that people of color or black people who’ve had historical trauma should speak to other.
Groups who have experienced trauma and learn from them how to just move on.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Gosh, that sounds
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross:I, I don’t know if you, if I don’t think I put the, you know, your head exposed emoji, but that’s what I, What do you think it will take for people to even develop curiosity about. The differences, you know, between different groups, whether it be race, ethnicity, gender, identity, you know, ableism, all of that.
It seems like everyone’s sort of shuttered to that, you know?
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Now it’s fascinating. It’s sort of. In terms of the head exploding emoji during Covid, when Tony Fauci was Anthony Fauci, Dr. Fauci was doing all of the presentations on one occasion. He said that it was becoming apparent that people of color were suffering more from Covid and the detrimental impact of Covid than other groups.
Yeah, and maybe that was something we needed to study. And my head blew up because we knew that 50 years ago we, that 60 years ago, people have been
right about, you know, inadequate treatment and awful outcome in every context for years. So my head exploded.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Everything from, you know, what we’ve been talking about, kidney disease or transplantation to the most mundane things like childbirth.
Childbirth. You know, Serena Williams talked about this in a, I think Vanity Fair and her experiences after her first child was born when she almost died because the doctors ignored her complaints. In other words. Yeah.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: I have a friend who’s a retired judge whose son lost his wife postpartum to hemorrhage.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Oh my Huh.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: And they were or are. He is an affluent person, relatively speaking, so they were an affluent couple, second child, post-grad kind of degree.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: It’d all have been good. Well, I mean, oh, could be good. Look at Serena. She’s totally affluent and married to probably one of those tech bros. Um, he seems like a much nicer guy than the other tech bro.
So, yeah. But I think all of that ends up being so problematic. What’s gonna make it better? What’s gonna help people to really open their hearts and minds, you know, because most of the time, if you and my friend Gail Christopher, who I, is also an author in the book, she has a, she has a, a process that she uses where people get in a group and just share their experiences and, and most of the time she has found as have I, and trainings that I’ve done that when people hear.
Your personal story, your lived experience, they can, they often can relate to it better than when it’s reading about an article in the news and so on.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: We actually did something similar in all of places in church.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Okay.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Uh, back when police violence sort of stepped up and became a more visible thing. The rector at my church said to me after Michael Brown was killed, I.
He can finally see it. Right. I think it’s one thing to hear about it, it’s another thing to actually appreciate and sort of have it enter your space, your psyche, your, your being. Mm-hmm. It’s one thing to hear it, but it’s another thing to actually understand it, to be able to see.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: It’s true. We’ve talked about you and I’ve talked about how many white parents say when black parents talk to their kids about, you know.
How to behave when you get stopped by the police. That’s kind of a common trope with black parents that you know, wanna protect our kids. And when that is spoken about, often a white parent will say, oh, well I’ve had the same talk with my kid, but there’s a huge difference. And many people don’t stop to think, well, what’s the difference here?
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: One of my coworkers told a, a story of doing some basically volunteer work mm-hmm. Around Thanksgiving, filling in a nearly new shop for some of the families or some of the workers so that they could be at home with their families for Thanksgiving. Mm-hmm. And so she ended up out on the interstate at 11 o’clock, 12 o’clock at night, and she got stopped.
She got stopped because she, she’s,
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: she’s black or white?
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: She’s white. She got stopped because she was driving too slow. So she was driving 45 or 50 and everybody else was driving 80. Who else? But they were concerned about her concerned. So she got stopped and she said she talked to the policeman who was a local resident and it turns out she knew his family and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And she, so she went on with this story and. Those people who came from backgrounds of color looked at her like she was an albatross because they said had they been stopped, it would’ve been horrific.. It would’ve been, even if nothing happened, the impact of being pulled over at nighttime, it would’ve been horrific.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Yeah. And he that something. You know, what, what, what would she say? What would we say fatal would’ve happened? You know, the white parent can talk to their kid, but the kid is much, much, much less likely to be shot by the cops in a routine traffic stop, stop than you know, the black parent’s kid. And so that’s the huge difference.
It’s a matter of life or death if a black person is stopped. Whereas it’s a matter of getting to know my local policeman. When your, your colleague was stopped, you know?
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: I had the same kind of experience, I guess, with my son. Fortunately he was not involved, but we were just watching the news at one of the local malls, as, it’s not necessarily a typical at this point, there was a big brawl that broke out and largely African American kids who were embroiled in this fight.
And so all of the young kids got kicked outta the mall. Literally about an hour and a half or two hours later, two guys, two African American kids, came up to the mall just to come in and do some shopping and hang out unaware that this thing had transpired. Wow. And as soon as they walked into the mall.
They were trapped by security guards. So I said to my son, what do you think would’ve happened to your friend X? He said, nothing. I said, there is the problem. Yeah. These kids were totally uninvolved, knew nothing of circumstances, but But
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: completely innocent.
’cause they were black.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: And I think that’s what, you know, white America has a hard time understanding.
They, they hear the problems. We talk about this, they hear the statistics and they think, well, you know, what’s the big deal? You should just, you know, the father with the kid who’s has a disease, you should just get a second or third job. I, I know growing up, my father had three jobs, including one that went through the night.
I don’t know when he slept, but know, so,
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: yeah. But you’re pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but sometimes you don’t have boots.
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Yeah. Or straps. Sometimes you don’t have straps on those boots, even if you have boots. So given what’s happening happening currently, I think a lot of people are struggling to, you know, have.
Hope, how are you dealing with, ’cause you, you’ve worked in the field of DEI, the, the bad word. I probably shouldn’t even use it in the podcast anymore, but, you know, you and I both have worked in this field for uh, a long time and does it feel like, you know, it’s. Groundhog Day, or,
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: you know, I think I heard actually, uh, it wasn’t really a podcast, but a person speaking online about the issue of DEI and what was her take home message was that she finally had learned what DEI was part of what is a problem I think.
In terms of DEI or DIE or whoever, however it’s agreed. Or DIB or, yeah. Yeah. Is that like race and racism? Right. Two different concepts, but linked by a black, white juxtaposition., so when you look at DEI efforts, they see black, white, and it means that the black person’s gonna get into school or the black person’s gonna get a job.
Black. I, I’ve done all those things. So I say black translate to African American or whatever is de jour. But the whole point of it being that when you really look at the people who benefited from DEI efforts in terms of diversifying the workforce, intersectionality where. People belong to multiple different groups.
The people who were most helped by DEI were white women. To start off with the second category were white men and the white men, not because they were necessarily selected, but because they represented different groups, whether it was those who had physical limitations in a wheelchair, whether they were gay, whether they were a religious order or sect that was pulled in.
Or someone who came to this country and became a white person, relatively speaking, but still representing a different group of people, uh, like Asian Indians. Like Asians, the Chinese, Japanese, I mean, there are a lot of people who came into the United States and sort of assimilated in a way that was not so disruptive or chaotic.
They came because they wanted to be here. The African American people came because we were brought here. So in which we work and live is entirely different. Mm-hmm. So it’s impossible for all of those different groups to appreciate the plights of African Americans because they’ve never really experienced them.
So part of what really needs to happen is that people need to appreciate that diversity doesn’t mean black or white. Diversity means holistically looking at people with the gifts that they bring and if you can,
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: and valuing them for those gifts,
right? It doesn’t mean overvaluing somebody for race, and that’s what it’s been politicized to be.
It’s like. We gotta get all the people who’ve been quote unquote overvalued because they’re black or Mexican or Latinx or whatever and take them out because they’re a DEI hire. But like you said, it’s really not about that. It’s about just seeing differences and being able to, you know, appreciate and have empathy for people.
I think that’s, that’s what we need to work on. Well, I don’t wanna keep you much longer ’cause I know you have a busy active environment life, which I’m so jealous of.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: Join me!
Dr. Carolyn Coker Ross: Yeah, I’d love, I’d love to. It’s been so great to talk to you. Dr. Del Wigfall and for you to be on the podcast. The book I think, talks a lot about lived experiences of people dealing with these issues, and your chapter was very useful as well.
Very, very good. So I appreciate your taking the time. Thank you.
Dr. Delbert Wigfall: It’s been my pleasure.
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