Changing up Aunt Jemima

Amid the protests brought on by the senseless killings of George Floyd, Breona Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and countless others, many companies are finally (reluctantly?) moving forward with altering images and messages that denigrate African Americans. It’s a little late to be stepping up, and stepping up in a climate of intense pressure isn’t the same as independently taking the bull by the horns, so to speak, but at least change is in the air.

Among the images to be transformed is Aunt Jemima, the iconic woman who appears on pancake mix boxes. The original image of Aunt Jemima was based on a woman named Nancy Green, a woman known for animate storytelling and excellent cooking skills. She was also born into slavery.

While the icon has been revised several times over the years, corporate spokespersons acknowledge that the image is based on a “racial stereotype” (i.e., caricature) of Black women, namely the mammies portrayed in books like Gone with the Wind (the film version of which is returning to HBO Max with added historical context in an attempt to situate the characterization of Scarlett O’Hara’s devoted slave, Mammy).

Up next? Uncle Ben and Mrs. Butterworth.

To buy or not to buy?

The second installment of my column, “Farming from Afar,” for Prairie Farmer was published today on the website (the print version will appear in the July 2020 issue).

https://www.farmprogress.com/management/buy-or-not-buy-weighing-land-acquisition-afar?

This piece addresses my thinking process when faced with the prospect of acquiring more farmland some two-and-a-half years into my inherited role of absentee landowner.

Letters in response to “Sheltering Mom”

I was pleasantly surprised to see two letters to the editor in today’s LA Times in response to my op-ed “Sheltering Mom”: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-11/caring-for-an-elderly-parent-during-the-pandemic-promise-to-care-for-yourself-too

I’ve received a number of personal messages via email from other caregivers of those diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. It seems that many are struggling with how best to care for loved ones with this disease amid the pandemic.

Things have changed.

An op-ed that I wrote appears in today’s LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-08/coronavirus-covid-pandemic-nursing-home

My mom, who’s struggling with late Alzheimer’s, has been living with us since August 2019. After two years of driving back and forth to Illinois (1200 miles roundtrip) to assist my aging parents, my husband and I made the decision to move Mom here.   And while a long-term nursing facility is needed to care for Mom properly, keeping her safe in a way that we increasingly find ourselves unable to manage, the pandemic makes that choice problematic. Simply put, there is no good solution to our current predicament.

The print version of the article appears alongside two other opinion pieces that reveal how much all of our lives have changed during 2020: an essay on the need for improved public safety in LA (and, let’s face it, everywhere) and another addressing the need for reparations amid current racial tension and protests that are turning more violent every day. Things have changed, at the same time they remain (disturbingly) the same.

Understanding virus data

My Monday Morning Briefing from The New York Times included a piece on “How virus data can mislead.”

The upshot is that we tend to look at current health numbers and believe they reflect the present. Rather, the numbers are “always two or three weeks old,” according to one expert, reflecting safety measures enacted during the weeks prior to that. So, if there’s a decrease in cases of COVID-19 right now, it’s because we (finally) took the necessary precautions beginning in mid-March: staying indoors, maintaining a safe social distance, wearing masks and gloves when we headed out.

I made a run to the grocery store yesterday and while the majority of folks seemed to be continuing to follow precautionary measures, a handful had thrown caution to the wind. They headed up and down aisles sans masks, ignoring instructions to stick to a one-way traffic flow and keep six feet away from other shoppers.

Later, I went for a stroll at a local park and saw two large groups of people celebrating–one a birthday party for 20+ kids and their parents and another a wedding shower of no less than 15 for a newly-wed Mr. and Mrs. (as announced on a sign hung from the pavilion beams). Nothing like kicking off another year or a new life together than a round of COVID-19. Yikes.

Please excuse the funky formatting of the following article. I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the boxes without losing the text!

How virus data can mislead

Life in New York City felt pretty normal in early March. Children were going to school. Restaurants and theaters were packed. On March 9, I recorded a podcast in front of a few hundred people in Times Square.

In hindsight, we know that the coronavirus was then sweeping across the city. Deaths peaked in early to mid-April. And the typical time from contraction to death is from three to five weeks, according to my colleague Apoorva Mandavilli — which suggests early March was near the peak for transmission.

By The New York Times

Over the next couple of weeks, it’s going to be important to keep this recent history in mind. Without mass testing — and the United States is not doing mass testing — there is a lag before a virus outbreak becomes apparent. Most people who develop symptoms don’t do so for at least five days, and sometimes longer. The worst symptoms usually take almost three weeks to appear.

With more parts of the U.S. starting to reopen, many people will be tempted to look at the data this week and start proclaiming victory over the virus. But this week’s data won’t tell us much. It will instead reflect the reality from early May and late April, when much of the country was still on lockdown.

“The data are always two or three weeks old,” Ezekiel Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania told me. “And we have a hard time understanding that things are different from what we’re looking at.” Crystal Watson of Johns Hopkins University told The Associated Press that we wouldn’t really know how reopening had affected the virus’s spread for five to six weeks.

It’s possible that the reopenings won’t cause the outbreaks that many epidemiologists fear — because many people will still stay home, or because they will venture out cautiously, or because the virus may spread more slowly in warmer air. But it’s also possible that the country will find itself suffering through a new wave of outbreaks in June.

Either way, I’d encourage you not to leap to premature conclusions.

Welcome to the kingdom of the sick

Salon.com just published an article that I wrote about facing the coronavirus while teaching a course at UAB called Writing and Medicine. Take a look!

https://www.salon.com/2020/05/02/welcome-to-the-kingdom-of-the-sick/

The title comes from Susan Sontag’s examination of metaphors in the way society talks about health and illness, saying that all of us at one time or another hold citizenship in “the kingdom of the well” and “the kingdom of the sick.” In an effort to distance ourselves from the realm of the sick, we construct metaphors that aim to explain why others–not us–are diagnosed with the most complex and least understood of diseases . . . like COVID-19.

Two years in

Today is the two-year anniversary of Dad’s passing. I can’t believe that he’s been gone so long, though I tell myself that’s because it seems that Dad has been with me every step of the way. Each time I hop into his red pickup or face a decision pertaining to the farm, I envision Dad sitting by my side. Sometimes he nods in agreement, assuring me that I am handling the family business and the myriad aspects of my life beyond the farm just fine. Other moments, I imagine him giving me that “are you sure that’s the way to go” look, encouraging me to think things through, again, before acting.

In December, I wrote about the journey I’ve been on since Dad passed away–and the ways in which he prepared me for this journey by teaching me about so much more than running the farm–for Prairie Farmer magazine. Check out the online version: https://www.farmprogress.com/farm-succession/family-ground

Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Dad and the example he gave me for living strong.  Thanks, Dad. I miss you.

 

 

Disparate Perspectives, Unifying Messages

Two articles addressing breast cancer were published today in the popular media:  Angelina Jolie’s essay in Time magazine (where she now serves as a contributing writer) and Shabnam Mahmood’s article on BBC.com. The two report from disparate perspectives, but both convey a similar message.

Jolie’s essay discusses the many positive advancements in breast cancer research and increased efforts to provide access to detection and treatment. She then acknowledges that “while [the] stories” she presents of new findings and survival rates “should give us hope, we still have a long way to go.” She catalogues a plethora of other ills facing women–not just the physical manifestation of breast cancer, but also factors like women’s rates of depression brought on by a host of cultural and institutional realities. Among them, according to the World Health Organization, are “discrimination, overwork, poverty, malnutrition, low social status and unremitting responsibility for the care of others.”

While I am often skeptical of insights offered by individuals who enjoy extreme privilege and access to the best care the world has to offer, I was in total agreement with Jolie’s point that as human beings, we must remember that “it should not take someone getting sick to realize that caring for them and not harming them is necessary.” Simply put, too many women, both those living in our own backyards (like Edwina and women like her who face cancer while struggling to survive in homeless communities) and those across the globe, suffer in unimaginable ways physically and mentally every single day. It doesn’t take a cancer diagnosis to ruin their lives, or for them to experience unrelenting fear.

They are already in peril.

Jolie encourages readers to “[h]elp young women know their value. Help keep women you know safe. And before a woman is in the hospital, dying, and that reality is written on a diagnosis sheet, look into her eyes and consider the life she is living and how it might be with less stress.” Women are survivors in so many ways, and these ways should be acknowledged and responded to consistently and conscientiously whether or not a woman adds breast cancer to her identity.

https://time.com/5709290/angelina-jolie-cancer-research-prevention/

Mahmood’s report “Treating Breast Cancer When You Can’t Say ‘Breast'” offers a similar sentiment, when the author notes both the toll of breast cancer in Pakistan and the broader cultural landscape that cannot be ignored when addressing that toll.

The author begins by saying that “Pakistan has the highest rate of breast cancer in Asia. Early detection is essential to treatment but medical experts fear many women are not coming forward due to a culture of modesty.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-50103088

Because breasts, and cancer associated with the breasts, are tied with Pakistani women’s sexuality, discourse regarding the disease–and related symptoms, health education efforts and programs–is restricted.

It’s not just men who are avoiding the subject, either. Women fear discovering they have breast cancer—or risking screening that might reveal a positive diagnosis–because detection, at any stage, can have devastating effects apart from the health consequences. Women with breast cancer are frequently perceived as unmarriageable, and their plight considered an inappropriate subject for conversation.

As a 26-year breast cancer survivor, I was encouraged when I came across these two publications on the same day in October. While there’s plenty of pink in the article about breast cancer in Pakistani–the Pink Ribbon Foundation is in full swing in the country, lighting up national attractions like cotton candy on a stick (an effort that I doubt does much to change perceptions of the marriageability of a breast cancer survivor or the expectation that she must marry to be worthy)–neither story waxes over the complexities of talking about breast cancer in context.

It’s not about the disease. It’s about the individual lives the disease touches–how and who we are before and while breast cancer comes knocking.

No, Cosmo, No!

Cosmopolitan magazine screwed up big time. The publication sent out a tweet on Monday touting cancer as a route to weight loss.

Here’s a response from The Washington Post, a rant that I’d far rather draw attention to than the misguided message in Cosmo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/04/12/dear-cosmopolitan-magazine-cancer-is-not-a-diet-plan/?utm_term=.c4b2155779e2

As someone who’s experienced breast cancer twice in the last 24 years, I guarantee that enduring a grueling treatment regimen and looking one’s best don’t go hand in hand.

My 2nd Act on New Focus Network

The documentary series focusing on My 2nd Act productions in different cities is soon to hit New Focus Network, which will carry the stories of female cancer survivors into viewers’ homes.

According to the following announcement, the Birmingham show in which I participated will follow the debut in the series focusing on women in the Raleigh, North Carolina production.

Let’s go, ladies!

https://t.e2ma.net/message/bm57db/76ytd5