Fresh Air - Best Of: The Race Card Project / The Early AIDS Crisis

Episode Date: February 10, 2024

Journalist Michele Norris has spent the last 14 years collecting what she describes as "an archive of the human experience" with The Race Card Project. She wanted to see how Americans really talk and think about race, so she asked people to share their thoughts in six words. Norris adapted the project into a memoir called Our Hidden Conversations. Also, we'll hear from Kai Wright, host of the WNYC podcast Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when so little was known about HIV, and so much was misunderstood.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Tanya Mosley with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, what Americans really think about race. Journalist Michelle Norris has spent the last 14 years collecting what she describes as an archive of the human experience. She wanted to see how Americans really talk and think about race, so she asked people to share their thoughts in six words. Here are a few. Was considered white until after 9-11. Urban living has made me racist. I suspect grandpa was a Jew.

Too black for black men's love. Also, we'll hear from Kai Wright, host of the podcast Blindspot, The Plague in the Shadows, about the early years of the AIDS epidemic when so little was known about HIV and so much misunderstood. Throughout his career, Wright has covered the HIV and AIDS crisis and its impact on communities that are often overlooked. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. In 2010, a year into Barack Obama's presidency, people were declaring that we'd made so much progress that we were close to achieving a post-racial society. Award-winning journalist Michelle Norris wanted to know if that was true. She wanted to explore

how Americans really talk and think about race. So she came up with this idea she named the Race Card Project and placed postcards in airports and coffee shops that asked a simple question, race, your thoughts, tell me your six words. Norris was sure that most of those who would respond would be people of color because those are the ones we often hear talk about race. But over the last 14 years, a vast number of the responses, over 500,000, have been from white Americans in the U.S. and the world. People from all walks of life sharing their most honest, intimate, and revealing thoughts about race. Norris has turned the Race Card Project into a new book titled Our Hidden Conversations, What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity. Here's a snippet from the audiobook.

Mom's racism took my love away. Dad said, date your own race. My grandfather would hate my children. My dad's prejudices live in me. I hear my grandfather's hateful words. Grandma, you can't say that anymore. That's an audio snippet from Michelle Norris' new book, Our Hidden Conversations. Michelle Norris is an award-winning journalist and author.

She's a columnist for the Washington Post opinion section, the host of the Audible original podcast, Your Mama's Kitchen, and a former co-host of NPR's All Things Considered. Norris won a Peabody Award in 2013 for the Race Card Project, and her first book, a memoir, is titled The Grace of Silence. Michelle Norris, welcome to Fresh Air. It is so good to be with you. It is so great to have you, Michelle. You describe this project as an archive of the human experience, and it really is. I just can't say enough how it's both moving and educational and sobering and yet joyful and hopeful.

And I was reading things that I know people don't share. I felt like I was actually inside of someone's home. I was listening to a conversation that maybe I had not been privy to before and there's so much diversity of thought and geographical location and ethnicity and gender in this book. I'm just wondering why do you think the majority of your responses though have been from white people? You know I get this question and I'm just not sure I do you think the majority of your responses, though, have been from white people? You know, I get this question, and I'm just not sure I have the answer. I thought, you know, in the beginning, I thought because I work at NPR, and let's be honest, the majority of our listeners are white Americans.

I thought, well, maybe that was part of it. But we've been at this for 14 years. And so, you know, I haven't been on the air consistently at NPR for a long time. A lot of people write to us from – and I don't think that they maybe come from the NPR universe. I think a big part of it was modeling. Say more. What do you mean? we have this presumption, this assumption that white people aren't invited to the party when it comes to a conversation about race, that there's no room for them in this conversation, that most of our conversations about race are centered on people of color. And usually, if we're going to have a conversation about race, there's an expectation that it's going to be by or for about black people. And to the extent white people are involved, they're

bystanders. They're watching over our shoulders and saying, this is a person of color. They're not expected to lead the conversation and maybe not even be in the conversation. And when we started, I think the website was key because we were gathering stories, but we were also presenting them. We were making them available. So people could come to the website. They could submit their own story, but they could also see, oh, this is what this person is saying. This is, yeah, this is what they're, oh, these are the rules of engagement. Oh, oh, I have a, I have something to say.

And it looks like, it looks like I might actually be able to say it right and so many people shared with you that they feel left out of the conversation yes especially those who identify as white but then those who identify as asian or middle eastern or latino that our conversations are just so binary in the united states it's so black and white and and there are a lot of people that we've heard from who feel like they have been sidelined, you know, as well, even though they're seen as people of color. You know, some people feel like they've been sidelined, and they're not people of color, but they're of a cohort that they feel some difference attached to them because they were in the military, because they're Jewish, because they are part of a religious minority of some kind.

And they come to the project and they realize, okay, there's this big, diverse symphony of voices, and I can be a part of that. I want to give some examples of this and the layout of the book. It is unique because it is a compilation of your writing and photographs and postcards and written quotes and first-person stories. And then there is the audiobook. You know, I think those who are into audiobooks, there are hits and misses on that. Sometimes people are just relaying and reading the book and then other times it's a full production. And this is definitely a full production because you have real people sometimes reading their six words and others going deeper into their stories

in their own words. I want to play an example of this from the audio book. This comes from Michelle Welsh who lives in Maryland and she's sharing something that she's grappling with as a parent. Let's listen. I'm relieved my son looks white. Michelle Welsh, Saverna Park, Maryland. I'm biracial, white and Pakistani. I look Pakistani. My husband is white. My son is a big, blonde, fair-skinned, blue-eyed toddler. We live in an affluent, largely white town. I'm grateful he will never be asked his nationality, be the diversity hire, or live with an identity crisis. Is that wrong? To want

life to be easier for your children, even if it seems like a step backward? That was a submission to the Race Card Project from Michelle Welsh in Maryland. Michelle, this woman is asking a pretty profound question that involves her child knowing and understanding the realities of life for a person of color and wanting the best for him. And you received quite a few of these from various races and nationalities, people grappling with how their identity is perceived based on their physical appearance. But as you mentioned earlier, also these things being illuminated for them because of the interactions that they're seeing with their children or how they're seeing their children perceived in the world. There's so many things that I appreciate about that particular six-word story. Her honesty, let's start there. I mean, you know, to put something like that out in the world that she's wrestling with, I appreciate that she asked it in the form of a question. You know, she's grappling with this. She's wrestling with this. One of the many,

you know, lessons that this book has provided for me is that, and I guess I should have understood this based on my own experience as a parent, that your notions of race and racism and difference and belonging and identity alter in some way when you create life. And then when you watch that child grow and you watch that child march through life and develop their own identity and you watch how the world responds to your beloved, this beloved human being that you are raising. And there are a lot of cards that reflect that. Well, my child look American enough. I wish he was a girl. I'm glad my son is white. So I'm overwhelmed by the honesty in these cards. And I think that it belies the original assumption in the creation of the Race Card Project.

I created the Race Card Project because I thought no one wanted to talk about race. And yet a woman in suburban Maryland, who probably doesn't have these kinds of conversations at work, maybe doesn't even have them at home, you know, don't know how often she has them in her community, felt emboldened to step up to a space like this and have that conversation, which to me suggests that there was a bigger appetite for this than I originally thought. You know, there's another through line in this book of white people in particular. We've already talked about like the fear of talking about race, but there's also a through line of folks who feel tired of talking about and hearing about race.

And I want to play another clip from the audio book. This one is from Douglas Thomas from Florida. He's talking about his thoughts about being a white man. Let's listen. White privilege. Enjoy it.

Earned it. Douglas Thomas, Florida. I'm not apologizing for something I have no control over. Every major contribution to mankind was done by people of my race. Society owes white people a debt of gratitude, not scorn. That was an audio excerpt from Michelle Norris's new book, Our Hidden Conversations. Okay, Michelle, this one was really interesting to me because, for one, the honesty. This is how he really feels.

And if we are truthful, what he's saying is embedded into the fabric of our society. But it also made me wonder how often you received messages where white people in particular felt they were being unfairly made to feel guilty for being white? Well, you know, you see a number of them in the book, and that's because there are a fair number that are represented in the archive. We should say that that particular excerpt that you just heard from the audiobook was not read by Mr. Thomas. That was one of the cases where we had one of the voice actors read that because he chose not, he submitted his card, but he chose not to read his in the book. So I just want to clarify, clarify that. And, you know, and we've received some finger wagging from people who say, why did you include those kinds of stories? Do we really need to hear from people who think like that? And what we're trying to do in this project is understand

racial dynamics in America. We're trying to hold a mirror up to America so the citizens of this wonderful country can see themselves and see how, understand the lived experience of race and understand all of the various perspectives that shape the way we live and shape how we interact with each other and wind up shaping policy. I mean, a lot of the things that we see in America, you know, we think that it just happened in some sort of anaerobic way, that this boardroom looks the way it does because it just sort of happened. Or this neighborhood has this kind of racial competition because it just kind of happened. It often happened because of policies, it often happened because of decisions, it often happens because of attitudes that people have, assumptions people have. And so it is worthwhile understanding the root cause of some of this, the actuality of some of this. And so I decided that in order to really present the fullest possible picture of what race and identity look like in America, what the voice of this issue would sound like, I had to hear from as many people as possible. And I had to make sure that when people looked in that proverbial mirror that they saw the full picture.

We're listening to my conversation with award-winning journalist and author Michelle Norris. She has a new book, Our Hidden Conversations, What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity. We'll hear more of our conversation after a break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Let's get back to my interview with award-winning journalist and author Michelle Norris about her new book, Our Hidden Conversations, What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity. Michelle is a columnist for The Washington Post and the host of the Audible original podcast, Your Mama's Kitchen. From 2002 to 2012, she was a co-host for NPR's All Things Considered. Her first book is a memoir titled The Grace of Silence.

You set out to write this book. You wanted to do it for such a long time. But then you started listening closely to your own family conversations, and you learned some secrets that they had purposely shielded from you, specifically an incident with your father and your grandmother's profession. Your grandmother was a traveling Aunt Jemima. She would do pancake mix demonstrations. And you didn't learn about this until much later in your life. Well, this is my second attempt to write a book about race. The first time I was planning to, you know, Barack Obama had just been elected, and I was going to go out into the world and listen

to people talk honestly about race, because we were talking about America becoming post-racial. I thought, I think something more interesting is happening out here. I think this is going to be a rather complex chapter in American life regarding race and identity. And so that was my intent. But then when I started to hear stories in my own family, I realized I wanted to write a different book because I had discovered secrets from both of my parents, my mother and my father. My mother's mother, yes, worked as a traveling Aunt Jemima when pancake, when convenience cooking was relatively new and pancake mix was something novel. She was traveling the country doing cooking demonstrations at county fairs and Rotarian breakfasts and things like this to try to convince people to buy Aunt

Jemima pancake mix. And when she did this work, she had to dress up like Aunt Jemima, hoop skirt, headscarf. And she was supposed to speak in this sort of slave lingo. They gave her scripts. I discovered, I did a lot of research on these. There's a whole army of these traveling Aunt Jemima's that worked across the country. And they turned out they were paid pretty well to do this work. But my family never talked about it. And when I did research, I discovered, I found newspaper clippings of when she was going into these small towns, found a recording of where she actually was interviewed. How did you find out about it? Did someone just mention it to you, and then you went on to research it?

In both of these cases, when I learned about my father's incident in Birmingham, Alabama, and my grandma Ione's work as an itinerant Aunt Jemima, in both cases it was aging uncles. It was my Uncle Jimmy on my mom's side, my Uncle Joe on my dad's side. And just, you know, as people get older, they enter a space of disinhibition. They just, you know, as people get older, they enter a space of disinhibition. They just, you know, say what's on their mind. And my Uncle Jimmy had started talking about this in part because he wanted to know more about it. He was doing some research on her and started to talk about it. My mother and other family members, you know, it's a complicated thing when Aunt Jemima is a member of your family.

And she was doing this work in the late 40s and the early 50s. And her work as an Aunt Jemima was starting to rub up against the aspirations of black Americans in America. To shed themselves from this. Exactly, exactly. And so what I found out is that when Grandma was going into these towns and doing this work, they gave her the script. She was like, I'm not doing that. And she, in these interviews, would talk about when she would go into these towns that she would not use the slave patois. There was this whole, the catchphrase for Aunt Jemima was, L-A-W-S-E, L-A-W-S-E, I sure do make some good pancakes.

I'm not even sure I got that right. But that was what was written on the page. And she was supposed to, you know, come in. My grandma's from Minnesota. So first of all, that's not her accent. And you have to remember that if you grew up with Aunt Jemima today, Aunt Jemima on the pancake mix before she was removed in, you know, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, they decided to just take her off the package altogether. But she spent the last 20 years as a fairly cosmopolitan looking woman on the pancake box. She had a, you know, wet set hairdo. She had a nice little Peter Pan collar and little pearls around her neck. They tried to update her and take her out of that. She got a total upgrade. And before that, Aunt Jemima looked like, you know, looked like a slave woman. And that's the woman that my grandmother portrayed.

But when she went into towns, she used her English. I mean, my grandmother was very proud of, she had won awards for diction. She had, you know, won oratory contests when she was a kid. She was always fussing at us about making sure that we, the G was attached to the end of the word when we were talking about something. We were talking about something, talking, not talking. She said, this is what you were going to need to do in life. So that was the woman I remembered. And that was the woman I discovered when I did a little bit of research about her and realized that when she would go into these towns, she decided to be subversive, that she was going

to be an ambassador. And she said that she would use good English and that she would sing gospel songs because she wanted people to know she was a woman of God and that that would be a hook for them and a point of respect, and that she would focus on children. Because if a young person could see a woman of God who spoke clearly and spoke in a way that was clearly educated, that that might live inside them and that might change the expectations that were fed to them in an America where, let's face it, white people were often told that black people are less than. Michelle Norris, thank you so much for this book and this conversation. It's been so good to be with you. Thank you.

Michelle Norris is the author of the book, Our Hidden Conversations, What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity. You've probably heard the comparisons, the height of the COVID pandemic to the early days of the HIV-AIDS crisis. Millions of people have died from both diseases. Both ravaged communities and exposed the fault lines in medical care. Well, in a new podcast series from WNYC and the History Channel, journalists Kai Wright and Lizzie Ratner take us to New York in the mid-80s when the HIV virus first took root. So new, it didn't even have a name. Hi!

So nice to meet you! Valerie Reyes Jimenez remembers how it all started. This block has changed so much. Or at least when they first started to notice it. We said that people had the monster because they had that look. They had the sucked-in cheeks. They were really thin. A lot of folks were saying, oh, you know, they had liver cancer.

You know, they had cancer. That's what they died from. Because you couldn't name it yet. You called it the monster or grid or in another part of town, maybe the gay plague. Mostly, though, you avoided talking about it at all. Until you just couldn't anymore. People just started, like, disappearing. Like, one day they were there, and the next day they were gone.

These 20 people that used to hang out in this building shooting up, they're all gone. You know, like Car Wash, Bopple, Tearsow, you know, Coco Wee. And like all these people, they're all gone. Like, where did they go? That was an excerpt from the new podcast, Blindspot, The Plague in the Shadows, co-hosted by our guest today, Kai Wright. Now in its third season, Blindspot covers overlooked or misunderstood events of our past that continue to shape our present. Kai Wright is also host and managing editor of Notes from America with Kai Wright. Before WNYC, Wright was an editor for The Nation and the editorial director of Color Lines. His writing has appeared in several publications,

including The New York Times, Mother Jones, and Salon. And Kai Wright, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks so much for having me. Blind spot is a concept that is exactly that, the things that we overlook or cannot see. You go to places that we've not heard many stories about when we look back at history during the start of the HIV AIDS crisis, a pediatric ward in Harlem, a drug market in the South Bronx, a woman's prison in upstate New York. And we're going to talk about some of what you illuminate in this podcast. But I first want to know, how did you choose which places to go and to focus on? A lot of the stories are set in New York City because certainly for the early part of the epidemic, New York was an epicenter of the documented epidemic.

But the places that we were particularly interested in talking about are places that allow HIV to teach us about our society. So this has always been, and it remains, HIV, this epidemic, it's a roadmap of our social inequities, you know, and our bigotries, yes, but also our political and economic choices about who is expendable. And that's been true at the majoritarian level as a country, as a globe. But it's also true within communities most affected, often also the people who have been most undocumented in the storytelling and least talked about. And so we wanted to go back. We wanted to tell some of the stories that came out of those communities. And in doing so, help us see more pointedly the ways in which this epidemic really, it's a medical crisis, but really, it's a map of our social inequities.

Well, let's start with the perception of HIV-AIDS as a gay disease early on and how that impacted public messaging about the threat. You interviewed Dr. Lawrence K. Altman. He's a longtime science reporter with The New York Times and a doctor who is credited with writing one of the first mainstream media reports about HIV and AIDS. The date of his first article is July 3rd, 1981. I want to note, you want to make a point that there were other media outlets, smaller outlets, those that were focused on LGBTQ communities that were reporting this out. But this was one of the first mainstream reports. And the title of that article was, Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals. But as you lay out in this podcast, that's not exactly the full scope of what doctors were seeing, even Altman, who also worked at a hospital. What did he share with you?

Yeah, he and many others we've talked to, and this is now well documented, were seeing in public hospitals and in places that served drug users, provide services to drug users, you know, going back as late as the late 70s, we're seeing the same constellation of symptoms that would become known as AIDS and that were first reported in gay and bisexual men, specifically in Los Angeles and then the Bay and then New York City. And so folks were seeing this, but it's hard to answer fully as to why people were unable to connect the dots between what they were seeing in populations of people who were injection drug users in particular and their sexual partners. So we were talking about a lot of women of color and poor women of color and what they were seeing in those gay men.

It was really the first glaring blind spot in this epidemic. And I think there's something interesting in the conversation with Larry Altman. And I want to be very super clear that the goal is not here to blame him for something. He wrestles with it. Sure. He was very reflective in the podcast. Yeah. You know, of what, what, what did we see and why didn't we see it? And he was, you know, he was reporting on it. You know, he was reporting on the epidemic period, which is, you know,

not what most of journalism was doing. So he's, he is to be lauded for that. But what his reporting became part of was, as you say, this larger feedback loop that strongly linked this disease to gay men. You actually asked him, did he wrestle with the limitations of what the CDC had established at the time versus what he was actually seeing? I think he was working at Bellevue Hospital and he was seeing IV drug users, women. What did he say about that? Because I think it was really interesting also. It's a commentary on journalism and its role in disseminating information at that time. Centers for Disease Control. And one of the dynamics of not only this epidemic, but conversations about healthcare period is this notion that the men in white coats at the front of the room are the experts, and their expertise is the beginning and the end a fact about health. And so what the CDC was saying was received wisdom. But the CDC had limited vision. It's funny because what the CDC was reporting, it was a self-reinforcing set

of facts that when the CDC would report on the cases amongst gay men. The purpose of that is to tell the health world, hey, this thing is happening. So people who saw cases among gay men would come back to the CDC and say, yes, I see it. And so that became this self-reinforcing loop about this is about gay men, not about anybody else. You also spoke with Anthony Fauci, who in the early 80s was the director of NIAID, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. What did he say upon reflection on the heavy focus of gay men and maybe discounting or just not including the information on what doctors were seeing and communities were seeing? You know, he said, listen, and I think this is fair and just. He said, listen, it's the same lesson we've learned with COVID, to bring COVID again into the conversation,

is that this was something that was developing rapidly. It was something that we had never seen before. And we didn't know what we didn't know. And that part of science and part of public health is that we are responding to these things in real time and learning things in real time. And what they knew in July of 1981 when Larry Altman published that article in the New York Times or in June of 1981 when the CDC first reported these cases was very different than what they knew even a year later. And that is true. I mean, I think one of the interesting facts here is the rapidity with which the official data did start to catch up with reality. I mean, it was within, by the end of the following year, they were starting to acknowledge, oh, there's an epidemic amongst drug users. There's an epidemic amongst women. There's an epidemic amongst, there's a pediatric AIDS epidemic.

We were starting to see those things as they learned it. But it is so both instructive and sad and frustrating to think about nonetheless, this narrative that locked in at the beginning, how a set of things that aren't true that can lock into our public imagination, that this was just a gay epidemic, could stick with us to today. My guest is Kai Wright, host of Blindspot, The Plague in the Shadows, about the early days of the HIV-AIDS crisis. A podcast produced by the History Channel and WNYC Studios. We'll hear more of our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air Weekend. We're listening to my conversation with Kai Wright, host of Blindspot, The Plague in the Shadows,

which takes us to New York in the mid-80s and 90s when the HIV virus first took root. Kai Wright is also the host and managing editor of Notes from America with Kai Wright. His journalism focuses on social, racial, and economic justice. Previously, he was an editor at The Nation and the editorial director of Color Lines. One of the epicenters during those early days was the Pediatrics Department of Harlem Hospital. It became known worldwide when Princess Diana visited the hospital in the late 80s. Before we listen to a bit from the podcast, remind us of how children with HIV were perceived and really how little information doctors had on the reasons most of these children had the virus.

Well, there are kind of two things going on in the 80s dealing with children with HIV. I mean, on one hand, to the degree that people are talking about the idea that children have HIV, they are the innocent victims of the epidemic. And people will remember the name Ryan White, perhaps, who was the 13-year-old boy who was contracted HIV through a blood transfusion in Indiana and in 1985 was barred from going to his school because he had AIDS and became kind of the face of young people, innocent people with AIDS. And so that's one conversation that's happening. is there are people who are being born with it, and they're being born with it because, in many cases,

their mothers were injection drug users or had sexual relationships with injection drug users and were HIV positive. They were poor women of color, and this was the height of the crack epidemic, we have to remember. And those infants who were being born with HIV were being separated from their parents and were living and dying their whole lives on hospital wards. And Harlem Hospital is one place where that was happening more so than anywhere else in the country.

Right. I mean, you talked with Dr. Stephen Nicholas, who was a pediatrician there. He told you that Harlem had the highest rate of mother-baby AIDS. I want to play a clip from your conversation with him. He's one of many who told you about a four-year-old child named James who was a patient there. In this clip I'm about to play, Dr. Nichols is talking about those last days of James' life. Let's listen. I suppose we all felt that he was our child because we were all part of the family. But death was never far away.

HIV affects the brain, can affect the brain, and he lost his developmental milestones. So he lost the ability to walk, and then he lost the ability to talk. What did he end up passing, though? Because I know... Pneumonia, I believe. Ten level F, right? Yeah, that would make sense, because at the time of his passing,

treatments were so, we didn't know. We really didn't, they were just being put together, and so he probably, you know, wasn't on the standard, because there wasn't a standard. Two months before his fourth birthday, James died in Harlem Hospital. And I realized that I had to hold a funeral and that the family was, in fact, the Harlem Hospital, and virtually the entire hospital knew about James.

That was a clip from the new WNYC and History Channel podcast, Blindspot, which looks at the realities of the HIV-AIDS crisis during those early days of the epidemic. Kai, James, as you lay out beautifully in this podcast, really stole everyone's heart. He was one of those kids, as you mentioned, who spent his whole life there. There was actually a name for these kids.

Yeah, they were called border babies as in boarding at the hospital. You know, this was one of the provocations for this project in general. My reporting partner, Lizzie Ratner, who is from New York, spent her whole life here watching the epidemic and learned about the idea of border babies. And it was one of the things where she said, well, I've never heard of that. Why haven't I heard of that? And wanted to learn more. And we talked for years about it before we started reporting on it. And this story, this piece of the story is both really hard when you think about kids like James, who, as you said, he lived, he was born in Harlem Hospital. He lived his entire life, all four years of his life on that ward.

He only left the hospital once. One time he managed to go outside and he died there. These are really difficult stories. But honestly, also, Tanya, I have to say, it's one of the more uplifting stories also for me because the people at Harlem Hospital, and this is one of the real, when you ask why I report this podcast, why I tell this story now, is no matter where you enter into this history, you find these incredible human beings who just

did above and beyond to take care of human, who led with love to take care of other human beings who just did above and beyond to take care of human, who led with love to take care of other human beings when institutions were failing. And Harlem Hospital is, the Pediatric Ward of Harlem Hospital is exhibit A of that. This is a place where we had seen enormous public divestment from that hospital and from that neighborhood period since the fiscal crisis in New York City in the 70s through to when the epidemic emerged and in the time when they were caring for these children. They had very few resources. The stigma was out of control. People did not want to have anything to do with people with AIDS, including these kids. And the nurses and doctors on that ward

used their own money, their own time to literally create a home for kids like James. There's a nurse we meet. She recurs in the podcast. I have fallen in love with this woman, Maxine Frere. Yeah. And she was one of the lead nurses on that floor. She worked at Harlem Hospital for 40 years and she spent her whole life in Harlem. So her family lived nearby. And when she would come home, her family would ask her to take off all of her clothes at the front door because she was working with AIDS. I just can't help but think about also the nurses and doctors during COVID who had these same types of relationships with their patients.

That's right. These nurses and doctors did something, as you say, that at the time was not happening. They would touch these children. Even that basic human instinct of touching someone who had HIV and AIDS during that time was a big deal. And they tried to treat these children. That's right. And they were not considered essential workers. They were not considered heroes at the time.

They were considered pariahs, the healthcare workers, to their families and to their communities, if they were thought about at all. They did this work without any of the applause. I mean, that's another thing that has just been so clear as we've reported this is just the wounds are fresh still 40 years later. Let's play a clip from Maxine and Monica. They both were longtime nurses at Harlem Hospital.

And in this clip, Maxine describes the relationships they had with the parents and the children. We lost so many kids. It was completely mind-numbing. We actually had set up a bereavement clinic where the kids would tell us what they wanted to have when they died. How did they want to die? What clothes they want to have on, you know? One little boy wanted me to be in his bed with him and his mother and his grandmother.

And so we did. We knew so little in the beginning. It was really like walking through a minefield. The death was hard. It was hard on all of us. But I think the preparation helped us get through a lot of it. You know, being able to talk about it amongst ourselves, because we needed to have a little counseling sometime ourselves,

crying all the time, was very difficult. They trusted us. They trusted us emphatically. I think most of them... I remember one little boy said, if I didn't have HIV, I wouldn't have met you guys. He said, I wouldn't have met you. That was a clip from the new WNYC and History Channel podcast, Blind Spot, which looks at the realities of the HIV AIDS crisis during those early days of the epidemic. Kai, in your reporting, you highlight the explosion of activism that happened towards the latter half of the 80s and into the 90s. And one of those activists was Dr. Margaret Haggerty, who ran the pediatric ward at Harlem Hospital.

She helped turn the tide of public sentiment by sharing publicly what they were seeing there. But then there was this somewhat painful part of all of this, because there had to be a label of innocence, as one of the folks you talked to said, for the tides to turn, for the public to have compassion for those suffering from HIV and AIDS, there was the Ryan White Care Act. What's the promise of the Ryan White Care Act fulfilled, or how did that change and shift our understanding of the needs of HIV and AIDS patients at the time? Well, there are a few things happening. On know, on one level, because of a range of activism, some of which is familiar to people, ACT UP was founded in 1987. And that kind of very

public pressuring of the federal government, but also the people like Margaret Haggerty, who were, I mean, she's literally throwing these, the deaths on her pediatric ward in the face of federal officials, you know, and saying, you don't, you never cared about public hospitals. You've never cared about poor people. And so now we're seeing the outcome of that as you don't care about these children dying. That kind of activism is happening. And then there's also an activism that's happening in the black community at that time that's exploding, where we're starting to see black gay men convince members of Congress and other important civil rights leaders to care about HIV. So there's this convergence of activism that starts to turn the tide in 87 to force the federal government, at least, and some state governments to snap to and say,

oh yeah, there is a crisis here and we are going to have to do something. And so you start to see policy. And one of those really important pieces of policy is the Ryan White Care Act that's passed in 1990. And it remains a really important part of the American response to HIV. It funds care and treatment for poor people, essentially. And it is notable that that law is named after Ryan White, a 13-year-old boy who got HIV through a blood transfusion. And he is really the epitome of innocence in this epidemic, right? He is the person that people can say, he's the type of person to say, you didn't do anything to bring this on yourself. And that framework, as from 87 forward, I would argue we're still struggling with it today, the idea that, okay, we can start to respond to this, but only for the people who didn't deserve it. For these drug users, for these promiscuous gay men, for people who brought this on themselves, for the mothers of those children at Harlem Hospital,

they are considered vectors of disease as opposed to victims. And to put this into perspective, this was also during the time of the war on drugs. So there was a vilification of people who were drug users. I mean, even at Harlem Hospital,

parents separated from their children immediately once they were admitted and tested positive. where child welfare agencies were stepping into hospitals and saying, we have to separate this child from that parent, not only that parent, but that family, without a real meaningful conversation about what could happen to this child other than being separated from their family. Are there other family members who might care for them? And so they had developed this idea of a social hold, which I think is really instructive to how the drug war shaped this epidemic, where if a mother was flagged as someone that the state did not trust to take care of her child, then a social hold was put on the newly born child to not be allowed to leave the hospital. And that's how you ended up with border babies in the first place. And you certainly cannot

separate this epidemic from the fact of the drug epidemic of the 80s and the political response to the drug epidemic of the 80s and the criminalization response of the drug epidemic of the 80s and the criminalization response of the drug epidemic of the 80s. It worsened the reality for individual families, and it got in the way of all kinds of responses that could have shortened this epidemic, quite frankly. I mean, one of the things that I think people don't wrap their heads around is there's a part of this epidemic that didn't need to happen at all. You know, the drug war is directly responsible for the epidemic amongst injection drug users. At one point, half of all the injection drug users in New York City were HIV positive. Wow. Half.

Half. Yeah. And that is a direct consequence of the fact that during the 70s, there was a shift to saying okay we're going to have a policing response to the heroin crisis and we in a number of states including new york outlawed the possession of syringes you weren't allowed to have works in your possession and what that led to was the creation of shooting galleries that we now think of as like this organic thing where a bunch of people got together and abandoned. The idea of shooting was a response to the fact that it was illegal to have works. And so cops could stop you on the street.

And if you had works, they'd put you in jail. And so people would get together and share the same needle in these shooting galleries. And it became one of the most efficient ways that HIV spread on this planet was in those shooting galleries. And it led to those kind of alarming numbers. That is the drug war and the choices we made about how to deal with drugs directly causing huge amounts of death. And then when public health started to come up with the idea of, okay, well, there's no reason for these needles to be the vector for people getting infected, and came up with

the notion of syringe exchange, which is something we have now, it took so long for that to actually become legal because of the mentality about those people are bringing it on themselves. And so we can't have a public health intervention. We can't treat drug use as a public health problem. And just simply allow them to have clean needles. And once we did that, it went from 50% to 3% infection rate. Wow. I mean, that's astounding. There are particular lessons like that where our bigotries, our punitive attitude towards people who are in need have caused disease in this country. And HIV is a sadly excellent example

for us to look at to see that process. Kai Wright, thank you so much for this conversation. Thank you so much for it. Kai Wright is the co-host of Blindspot, The Plague in the Shadows. He's also host and managing editor of Notes from America with Kai Wright. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey

Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Sallet, Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelly, and Susan Yakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. For Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.