328. White Homework Podcaster Tori Douglas Williams Bonus Episode

Books Tori Recommends:

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson

Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland

by Jonathan Metzl

Links we mention:

https://acestoohigh.com/got-your-ace-score/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95ovIJ3dsNk

I'm Tori Williams, Douglas and I am a writer and anti racism educator. I actually grew up in, was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. That's where I live now. I've lived in the Pacific Northwest, my entire life, mainly in Portland and Seattle. And yeah, I didn't really, I kind of came to this work. I sort of fell into it.

A lot of, a lot of different things sort of brought me to this place. But I mean initially like, gosh, there's so many, there's so many places I could go.

Did you go to Portland State University to their conflict resolution program. Like, do you know that they have a program there? I applied to go there and then I could never come up with the funding. And it's really hard to find a job in Portland.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. It is so hard to find a job here. I hear that for sure.

You can't even be a substitute teacher without a master's degree or at least that's what they told me. I don't know

That, that, that sounds right. No, I did not. I have not attended that program. I've heard about it. And I think that like, conceptually, it seems really good. I have a lot of friends, obviously you've gotten to Portland State, so yeah.

How did you get into this work?

I might end up there. I've been talking to the Dean of the School of Public Health about like going into that program.

So yeah, it was, it was journey. So I think that the thing that really kind of kicked it off for me was when I got pregnant with my oldest child, I started doing all this research around birth outcomes for black mothers and they were abysmal. So essentially finding out black mothers are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy related complications than white moms.

And black infants are like twice as likely as white infants today. And like the first 30 days of life. And that really kind caught my attention, made me really nervous for obvious reasons. And then when I was pregnant with my second, that is when the Ferguson uprising happened as a response to Michael Brown being murdered.

And that was kind of when I was like, okay, this seems important. Like I need to start speaking out about this issue and then fast forward another two years or so two, three years. I'm trying to remember, I guess it was probably two years. I ended up getting a job at a, in a neuroscience lab at OHSU here in Portland and it's a super diverse lab and the PI is black and a lot of the post-docs were, were people of color.

And a lot of the work that was being done there was around racism and implicit bias.

And it was just a really incredible learning experience even though I was working and not like in the, in the actual med school program. But that gave me a lot of, a lot more information and sort of, kind of, it started to like back up what I had been learning...