Transcript
Index
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Mika Pagani: I’m going to begin recording now. Do I have your consent?
OmiSoore Dryden: Absolutely. You have my consent.
Mika: Thank you so much, and thank you for being here. So, my name is Mika
Pagani. I am interviewing OmiSoore Dryden via Zoom for the Black Excellence in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] oral history project. Today is June 19, 2021. It is 10:08 a.m. Eastern time. So thank you for being here; can you start off by stating your full name and date of birth for the record, please?OmiSoore: Sure. Date of birth, really?
Mika: If you’re comfortable.
OmiSoore: Totally good. OmiSoore Dryden. May 8, 1965.
Mika: Thank you. Thank you so much. And if you’re comfortable, can you state
your parents’ names?OmiSoore: Sure. My mom’s name is Oileen Veronica Dryden, and my dad’s name is
Norman Nelson Dryden.Mika: Okay, thank you so much. So, I believe I would just like to start off in a
very comfortable way of asking an early memory 00:01:00of your education and a joyful memory of when you first found your path of your social science, maybe the earliest memory of that. And that does not have to be a juvenile memory but maybe the first memory where you were like, this is the work I wanna do.OmiSoore: So, there’s two moments. My mom was a teacher; my dad was, too. He was
a psychiatric nurse, and my mom was a primary school teacher. I think I was in grade five when she was teaching grade five. And it was just a house where I had homework in the summer, but I never really thought of it as homework because it was things like reading comprehension or math problems or writing or things like that. So pre-internet! But when I’m thinking about 00:02:00where I came into my passion in social science, I have to connect it to the work my mom did with me over those summers when we would do work on reading comprehension. So it’s not a thing that happens now in public schools. I don’t think it’s a way in which we are able to measure if somebody read something and then understood what they read. As a professor, when I first started teaching in university courses, I realized the importance of including that in my lectures. Like, this is what you read, and this is what it meant, and measuring for reading comprehension and reflections and things like that. But it helped me because my mom’s like, what did you read; what did it mean? Things like that. All of my degrees are in social sciences--political science, sociology, 00:03:00women and gender studies, and sociology of equity study or social justice education. So in my undergraduate, I really focused on racial social justice in seemingly objective, justice spaces. So human rights commissions; in Canada, we have their Charter of Rights and Freedoms as part of our Constitution, so what does that mean? You have these things in writing, but what is the application and implementation of that? And then in my M.A. [Master of Arts degree], I really furthered that looking at Black queer women in an intersectional way, 00:04:00again, in these kinds of social, quasi-governmental equity human rights agencies. So if a Black woman or Black queer woman wants to go and have a harassment case dealt with, are they able to engage the intersecting realities of her life? So very much engaging with the provocations, at the time, of Kimberlé Crenshaw; this is the 1990s. And then while I was working as an administrator in one of these kinds of offices is where I came to really think about blood donation. It kind of just fell on my lap. What does it mean, who gets to donate blood, and who doesn’t get to donate blood? And then my Ph.D., I wanted to return to this 00:05:00text analysis around what do these seemingly objective protocols mean in real life and in real time? So it seems innocuous, but what’s the actual effect of protocols? And this is really what led me into--because my focus really has been on blood donation--but led me into really thinking through health inequities and disparities, through health policy and practices. And doing that by really interrogating the practices and protocols, the things that are written. This is how people are supposed to behave; this is why they behave in this way. Or, this is why it’s open and welcome to everybody. But then to identify how that language tells on itself to actually not be 00:06:00welcoming to everybody and to really be embedded with systemic racism, colonialism, and things like that. And so then to bring that to the science and health and medicine realm, you really come up against this barrier of these beliefs that science and medicine are objective and colorblind disciplines. When in fact, these very institutions have caused and perpetrated great harm to Black and indigenous and racialized communities and queer and trans people whilst claiming that they’re being colorblind and objective. And so this is where I really started to get into these conversations with scientists who were writing 00:07:00about what it was like to be in the lab, what was it like to do these experiments, and how even the language in science -- you know, the masculine and feminine tool or the ways in which these social understandings of gender are written into our understandings of biological functions. And I get really excited, as you could tell, but all of it really came from…I’m thinking about it now…sitting at the kitchen table while my mom was cooking, and her saying to me, read this and then tell me what you read. And then she really worked to strengthen my reading comprehension. She’d say to me, but is that what you read? So really working to strengthen that. And that’s carried me through all the kinds of text analysis and discourse analysis that I engage 00:08:00in, because there’s a way in which we need to out and identify how the discourse used also shapes the science that’s being performed and engaged. So, I hope that answered your question.Mika: Yes, it did. And I found myself wanting to snap as you were talking. Yes.
Thank you. Thank you so much. I think you said a lot of wonderful points. And I think I just want to backtrack and maybe flesh out more details, specifically on the narrative of your life. I wanna go back to the research, but I feel like maybe just to start, we can go back to those college days. And in your undergraduate, I believe you said Kimberlé Crenshaw was a really big figure; was that an influential kind of person when you were getting into your studies at first? Would you like to speak more on what that 00:09:00undergraduate experience was like and how you came to be?OmiSoore: Yeah. I was raised in London, Ontario, which is about two hours west
of Toronto. So if you know anything about southern Ontario at that time, as much as there are historical Black communities in and around London, Ontario--so communities that were formed at the end of slavery in Canada, Black-formed communities for protection. And these communities are a little younger than the historical African communities in Nova Scotia. The oldest Black communities in Canada are in Nova Scotia. 00:10:00So when I got to Toronto, it changed my dynamics in university because it meant that there were a lot more Black students in university as opposed to London, Ontario, that is predominantly white, back in the day, home of the Ku Klux Klan. To be in classes -- so I was doing my political science degree and some sociology courses -- to really get engaged again, as is reading comprehension through theory. But then to be in these vibrant discussions around, what does this mean for Black people; where are we in the text; where are we as part of our studies? And I didn’t have my first Black professor until I was in my Ph.D., right? Like, this is very much a Canadian dynamic. So really relying on other Black 00:11:00students that -- we were all going for our B.A.s [bachelor of arts degrees], our M.A.s, and our Ph.D.s together. So I remember I was just finishing my undergraduate, and it was my teaching assistant who was a sessional instructor on a gender and justice course -- one of the reading texts was This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. I was like, oh, my gosh! I read that book, and it changed my life. And I was like, yes. Yes to all of this. It was also around the time that my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. So we reached out to Black queer women, Black women, [and asked,] what books do you have about Black women and health? And this is where I came across Evelyn C. White’s book. I got Audre Lorde’s cancer journals, A Burst of Light: and Other Essays. Just all of these texts--and 00:12:00Honor Ford-Smith’s Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women. So I really just dove into -- more purposefully -- Black women and Black queer women literature texts, essayists. So when I started my M.A., which I was doing part time, this is where Crenshaw -- her first article came out around intersectionality and the intersections. So I felt like I was reading, in real time, all of her work on structural intersectionality, political intersectionality. And I was like, okay; this is totally what I need to do. I just really am going to engage Black women and Black queer women. So my M.A. is just like Black women, Black queer women, some women of color. But it really was this kind of confluence, right? All of a sudden, bop! Here is your canon. 00:13:00And I’m sure that was around the time I shaved my head; I came out; I got Dr. Martens -- I was like, I need wool gray work socks and Dr. Martens and my cute dress and big earrings! And bald. That’s when I started to do that. But it really was, like any good text -- it was like finding yourself in that text. All of a sudden, you’re like, oh, my gosh this is me; they’re talking to me. That’s where that happened.Mika: Thank you. What a wonderful story to listen in on. It sounded to me, at
least, that a lot of your identity and the location that you were in really informed the work that you were doing as well as just all of the tools 00:14:00and books that you were picking up along the way. That’s wonderful.OmiSoore: Yeah, moving from London to Toronto -- so moving away from my family
-- which wasn’t necessarily the problem; I just needed to get out of London, Ontario. So moving to Toronto where, in essence, nobody really knew me: I was like, I get to be whoever I want. And then I’d go home for the weekend and be the kid they all saw me as, but I’d get on the bus, change, do all those things. And then just a really great cohort of friends and colleagues at university that we were like, oh, we need to occupy this, or we need to protest this, or we need to write that. Just really driving ourselves to be the scholars and activists that we wanted to be. But there 00:15:00was something to be said about moving to a city as large as Toronto and not being bound by any pre-existing understandings of who I was supposed to be. And then these texts and the people I was hanging out with really was just like…it’s like some of the videos you see on TikTok now where people are like busting the door open; they’re like, here I am. It was that moment before TikTok.Mika: No, wonderful; I completely understand. So, now you’ve spoken more to your
M.A., would you like to speak to your doctoral experience and what that was like for you? Was it the same kind of TikTok run out of the door or…?OmiSoore: I worked between all of my degrees. I worked during my undergraduate.
I was working full time when I was doing my M.A., so I did my M.A. part 00:16:00time and then worked again when I went west to Vancouver, British Columbia, and did some work out there. And I came back to Toronto, specifically, to do my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. I knew I wanted to work on something Black and queer; I knew I wanted to work on some kind of Black queer discourse or analytics. And it was full time, so it was really one of the most beautiful experiences because I’d worked enough that I had saved enough to supplement what scholarship I was getting for studying that for most of my Ph.D., I could just be a student. And it was actually in the same department my mom was in where she was working on her doctorate of education, but she passed away before she could complete it. So I remember starting and going, oh, my God; I used to meet her here. 00:17:00I’d show up in the city and say, c’mon, Mom; we’re going for breakfast, dinner because she’d come and do classes, and then she’d go back to London, Ontario. So I was in this department--and she was such a live, vibrant ghost in the department at the beginning. Our projects were so very, very different. I was taking a Michel Foucault and education course and a race and the production of knowledge course. In the Michel Foucault course, we were reading The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, and in the race in the production of knowledge course, we were reading Ann Laura Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire, I think it is. I would need to look at the title again. And so Stoler is referencing Foucault 00:18:00and talking about where race shows up, and I’m reading Foucault, and I’m like, what is all this stuff about blood and the science of blood? And then Stoler is like, well, how do we understand blood through the bourgeoisie and understanding pure ruling class, tainted underclass? And I had to present, as you do in Ph.D.s, and it was the kind of course that’s like, you need to read both of these really dense, hundreds-of-pages texts for the next class. It was like a Ph.D. boot camp, so when I was doing that, I thought, I think I wanna speak about blood donation, because I had done work on that when I was working at university while I was doing my M.A. part time. And I thought, okay; let me go back to that documentation because I was really just doing some activism 00:19:00around it and trying to understand the bifurcated understanding of deferring people born in or living in Africa from donating blood and men who have sex with men from donating blood and how these were seen as not intersecting. What would it mean if the main subject was a Black queer man, so then how do we understand these notions of blood and identity? And so I was like, okay, Foucault says this; Stoler says this. And I did that, and both professors were like, oh, you really should do more on that, and I was like, oh, I really should do more on this and then really started to do this deep dive into what I would know -- I don’t think at the time I really knew it concretely as medical humanities or health humanities 00:20:00-- but really took this deep dive into what is blood; what are its properties; how, in even discussing its properties, are we infusing cultural interpretation of wellness and illness -- disease and health? And then in transfusion, how that started -- so transfusing animal blood into humans -- what it did; what it didn’t do, and then, again, this understanding of who was human, and therefore could be used as appropriate blood transfusions and who was not and then could be used as experimentation. And so that took a deep dive into that. But, again, this is where reading comprehension 00:21:00came in because I was like, I know this is what they’re saying, but do they understand what they’ve said, right? Like, this piece? I know that’s what you wrote, but do you understand all of what you just revealed about yourself? There’s a way that our words betray ourselves. We say something, and everyone’s like, whew, you just told me a whole lot about you; are you even aware of that? And so then that became my work. And at the time, I really didn’t wanna talk to anybody. I don’t wanna do interviews; I don’t wanna talk to you. There was enough text -- so we just came out of the tainted blood crisis; we created Canadian Blood Services in 1998, so there was this, who was considered the tainted other that tainted the blood and therefore caused this health crisis. And then who wasn’t, right? HIV [human immunodeficiency virus] and AIDS [acquired immunodeficiency syndrome], who were considered high risk groups, and why were they considered high risk groups? 00:22:00The vectors, the carriers of the virus, the creators of the disease. And then this whole language--this is where Cindy Patton was really good to talk about how we created African AIDS. Scientists created African AIDS because they couldn’t think about sexuality in queer ways, so they created this thing, a new virus, a new way -- what all of those creations and racial stereotypes, how that changed the trajectory of scientific experimentation. Then I was like, oh, I’m all about this; I was like, I’m in it. What happened; how do we figure this out, and how do we identify and let everybody know? That was all of my work. That was all of it. 00:23:00And it is to this day.Mika: And important work that is. Oh, my goodness. Thank you for shedding light
on that. So, it sounds like really that the historical inner-workings around you really motivated your work then?OmiSoore: Yeah. Yeah, it does. At the time, I was also doing -- Crohn’s disease.
My Crohn’s is really active, and I was really quite ill, so I was getting blood transfusions. And I would hear them say, oh, no, no; the blood is safe. And I was like, okay? And I remember my mom asking is the blood safe? And they’re like, no, it’s safe. And, again, this is around the tainted blood crisis which I only kind of backdated to. It really made me kind of think, well, if blood is medicine, we need to also think about its regulation and who are the regulatory bodies 00:24:00and what biases do they come with in creating those regulations? And that’s really where my work is now.Mika: Thank you, and thank you for sharing those vulnerabilities; I had no idea.
Would you like to speak more to the experience of being ill at the same time? Would you be comfortable?OmiSoore: Yeah, it was so hard because I was sick in my twenties. People always
like commenting on bodies which is why I’m just like, y’all need to stop, which is a whole other kind of focus on TikTok, too. Everyone with their pandemic bodies; it’s like, don’t say shit, right? Just because I ate cookies for eighteen months doesn’t mean anything. I’m gonna put my bikini on. I remember there was this ice storm in London, Ontario -- so I’m early twenties -- and I was trying to get someplace, and the wind was blowing me back right on 00:25:00the ice. It just blew my feet out from underneath me. And this white guy walked by; he didn’t offer to help me up. He was like, you need to eat more; you’re a little too skinny; you don’t have enough girth on you to hold you down. I was like, yeah; I wish I could eat more. Crohn’s is a terrible disease. People can be thoughtless. They’re like, I wish I had Crohn’s; I could lose ten pounds. And I was like, you’re emaciated, and you’re malnourished; this isn’t anything. This is not something to covet. And the racial understandings of disease as well. So, when I first was going to be diagnosed, they were either like, you’re just seeking attention; it’s psychosomatic; university’s stressful. Or it was, well, we don’t understand; we think it’s sickle 00:26:00cell anemia; we can’t find any sickle cell trait, but you’re Black, so it has to be sickle cell. I was always so doubled over in pain and all of the things that Crohn’s can cause in a body. And I diagnosed myself. I saw this billboard on a bus -- those little ads on a bus -- that had this little white guy sitting on the edge of the bed bent over with a rope tied in a knot that said, The Pain Is Real, Colitis and Ileitis. And I got off the bus and went to my general practitioner, and I was like, I need to see him now, and I was like, I have Colitis and Ileitis because I didn’t know the difference. And he literally was like, oh, yeah -- this white guy, right? Of course -- oh, yeah. He then sent me to a gastroenterologist -- which I was surprised he was even able to be licensed in this field because he was like, it’s psychosomatic; here’s some 00:27:00steroids; good luck. And it wasn’t until, again, I got to Toronto, the first time that I had any kind of physician physically examine me. Like, lay hands on me, kind of feel around. I was like, what are you doing? And he’s like, no; this is what we do. And I was like, no one has ever done this; why are you touching me; what is happening? That taught me, in a firsthand experience, the ways in which, as a young Black woman, I literally had to fight for myself just for care and had to be disruptive at the threat of being arrested or being kicked out or being told, whatever. So it really revealed for me, in a way -- because I didn’t really have anyone in my family that had regular 00:28:00interactions with hospitals, and I was the first person with a chronic illness that had to be like, oh, you’re being admitted again, or you have to go to the hospital. But really identified for me that healthcare is for white people, and Black people are thought of as disposable bodies. That our care is -- when we are sick, it’s like an afterthought; there wasn’t really this, I’m gonna do whatever I can to figure out what is happening to you, so we can get you better. It was just like, go home and die. And so, again, all of these kinds of things came together because it was shortly after that, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and then I got all these books around Black women and health, and I was finishing my M.A. at that time; she died just before 00:29:00I finished my M.A.. And then when I went in to do my Ph.D., I had these texts and these experiences with Black women who weren’t physicians but were intimately researching and engaged in health, medical education, and science. And I was like, oh, they’re not scientists; they’re not doctors. They are researchers, scholars, and activists who are doing work to change the trajectory of science studies, medical studies, and implementation. And I was like, yeah, I wanna be all about that.Mika: Yeah, wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. And how powerful it is. I just
wanna go back to the moment of you taking your own agency in diagnosing yourself and taking hold of your own health; that’s incredible, and it’s sad that it’s necessary. But that being said, 00:30:00I think it’s probably more of a talking point of how you hold that perspective of having felt all of that firsthand. And now being a social scientist that is in the health field, would you like to speak on how that affects your work; how that influences your work, holding that perspective, that identity that intersects now with your own science?OmiSoore: Beginning May 1, 2019, I became the James R. Johnston Chair in Black
Canadian Studies in the Faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University. Mr. Johnston was an African Nova Scotian man from the oldest Black communities in Canada, African Nova Scotians. He was the first African Nova Scotian person to graduate from any university, and he graduated from Dalhousie in 1896 with a degree in law and went on to practice law in 00:31:00Nova Scotia, so became the first Black practicing lawyer in Nova Scotia, and died tragically just before, I think, his thirty-ninth birthday. But a hundred years after he graduated, around 1995, 1994, community members mostly made up of his descendants and some faculty at Dalhousie said, we should do an endowment in his name to create a chair in Black Canadian studies. That was completed, and the first chair was appointed in 1996, and Dalhousie was the first university, at that time, to create a chair in Black studies, a national senior scholar chair in Black studies. There’s more now in other Canadian universities, more Black studies chairs, but what’s interesting about this is, 00:32:00at Dalhousie, the appointment in the chair is for six years. It comes with tenure, so you become a faculty member at the university, and then it changes faculties. So it started in the Faculty of Law where Mr. Johnson graduated. Then it went to, what was then called, the Faculty of Health Professions, so social work, nursing. And then it went to the Faculty of Arts, and now it’s in the Faculty of Medicine, and I’m the first queer person to hold the chair now, so I’m the fourth chair. But in moving that around, what it did was demonstrate the interdisciplinarity of Black Studies. So people always think, at least in Canada, that Black Studies is a narrow field. It’s just about racism, just about Black people. Like, how is it even rigorous? But to know that it’s in law, social work, history, medicine, community health and epidemiology speaks to its interdisciplinarity. So, when I started in May 00:33:002019, I couldn’t get anyone to meet with me. They were just like, but what does Black studies have to do with medicine? Okay, whatever, who are you; what is this; what’s happening? And I was like, no, no; my project is to go through the records from 1896--I’m not a historian, but I’m a researcher -- 1896 to 1930 or 1940 -- so 1888 is when the medical school at Dalhousie opened up -- until, I don’t know, a hundred years. Just let me go through whatever records you have, so I can identify Blackness whenever it shows up -- in terms of student body, in terms of protocols and regulations, did -- like, other universities, if you say that you’re Black you cannot be a medical student, like what happened in Canada. It was opened just shortly after the end of slavery, so do we see that -- were there 00:34:00yearbooks? How do we know what happened? So, I wanted to do that, and I wanted to also explore doctors’ records and patient records through that time. What was Black medical practice like? What was it like for Black people? I was really just running around doing as many talks as possible. It’d be like, no, no; I’m here; I’m the James R. Johnson Chair in Black Studies and Faculty of Medicine. This is what it means. This is why I’m doing this. We need to talk about these things right now. And then the pandemic hit. So I wasn’t even in the position for a full year before the pandemic hit, and immediately, we started to see the health disparities around COVID and Black communities. So then people were like, OmiSoore, what’s happening; what are you doing? So, now I’m writing; 00:35:00I’m tweeting; I’m writing op-eds. I’m saying, we need an African Nova Scotian protocol for the pandemic. That addresses social determinants of health; that looks at housing, access to paid sick leave, food deserts or food apartheid. We need to look at these things. Like, is there a way to get groceries delivered to people that’s not costing them more money, that’s not inflated prices? So I started doing this. And then Mr. George Floyd was murdered. And then Regis Korchinski-Paquette in Toronto whose mother’s African Nova Scotian, as a result of a wellness call, fell to her death. And then Tony McDade was murdered, a Black transgender man in the U.S. So then people were like -- ‘cause everyone was sheltering in place -- they were like, what is this? Like, they’d just discovered police brutality! They’d just discovered it! 00:36:00And now everyone was taking a knee. I was like, why are you taking a knee? Why are we recreating this violence? Why are we doing this? So I was tweeting about that; I was writing articles about that. I was writing articles about the hyper-surveillance of Black communities in the Atlantic, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, about the ways in which Black people were being targeted, under surveillance around COVID. You brought COVID here; you lose your thing. You did this; you’re being jailed. The way that it started to be racialized around Blackness; it was clearly racialized around Asian communities at large. You don’t look white; you must be Asian, therefore, we hate you; it was that kind of thing that was happening and things that were coming out of people’s mouths. But there was a lot also happening for Black communities in the Atlantic that needed to be addressed. And then the push 00:37:00to, one, reckon with the data that had already been collected from many research projects around what Black people have documented about their experiences in public health, in healthcare, in medical systems. To pair that with collecting disaggregated data which does not happen anywhere in Canada but has started to happen in little pockets in direct relation to COVID. And then to make sure that that data was being analyzed through a critical race theoretical lens, an anti-racist lens. That it was not gonna be used to perpetuate any kind of race biology or race medicine. Then people were like, oh, we should probably talk to OmiSoore. And this wasn’t my original research project, but we’re scholars, and it’s a crisis, so you really step into things. It 00:38:00brought a lot to bear, and I had to step into -- it’s a thing that I think some scholars hate; I was a person that didn’t want to talk to anybody. When I was doing my Ph.D., I just wanted to be in the musty papers with the gloves reading stuff. I received a really large grant to look at the donor practices of Canadian Blood Services; part of the grant allowed me to hire research assistants, so they could talk to people, and then I could analyze the data, implementation science projects, 00:39:00surveys, testing, all of these things. But the pandemic and the police violence meant that many of us had to respond quickly and be able to pull facts out of our brains in a moment because we were now speaking on the news or speaking with decision makers or picking up the phone because people are like, I don’t know; I don’t feel well, and I wanna go to the doctor, and I need help. So having to kind of respond in real time. And that’s hard because we like sitting in dusty rooms thinking a long time before we’re like, maybe I’ll commit this sentence to paper. We like to really reflect on what we’re gonna do. So, it’s helped kind of clarify 00:40:00what the project is, and the last year and a half really has been around COVID-19, Black communities addressing and confronting anti-Black racism in intersectional ways, so what does this mean for Black queer and trans people and Black gender non-conforming people. And health protocols. Health disparities, health inequities. Meeting with medical students, meeting with medical councils -- provincial and national -- meetings with ministers of health, meeting with premiers of provinces. It really required these kinds of immediate things. And there seems to be some kind of acknowledgment that more needs to be done to confront systemic racism in the machine and disrupt that. Some of it’s performative as it always is, but we were having 00:41:00conversations with people who never really wanted to speak to us. Now it was like, oh, we should, at least, be seen to be doing something. And more of the data came out about who vaccines were benefiting -- primarily-white communities with low risk, as opposed to Black and indigenous communities and communities of color in high risk. And so just really using that data to shame people into realizing that they’re still marketing off of Black death without any kind of shame. Yeah, we’re marketing off of Black death. So now I think my projects are looking a bit different. I am still really committed to this work on blood donation and thinking about that and thinking about blood diseases and how they tend to be racialized, 00:42:00the technologies around blood transfusions but also the social science part of it or the humanities part of it -- how we understand our identities through blood discourse because those things inform all the other pieces. So my work is there. And then my other work is really pulling together Black queer and trans researchers across the country for us to focus more on, perhaps, Black queer women or Black trans women’s health, or lack thereof. So Black queer women and Black cisgender, transgender, and lesbian health where we really just don’t have a lot of information about what are the experiences with Black lesbians and Black trans people when it comes to health in Canada and what that means. Getting back to that kind of work 00:43:00which is, once again, about community activism, communities of care, but also documenting and identifying what’s already been documented because the things that we’re seeing is that the numbers of Black students going into medicine, going into epidemiology, will continue to increase. And there should be data for them to engage and encounter to help with their own projects, so we can continue to identify that we, as a community, should be working with us, as a community, not only to call on systems to be accountable, but also as a way to strategize for ourselves for our own care.Mika: Yes, yes, yes. Thank you. Thank you. That
00:44:00is something I was gonna ask. Thank you so much for speaking to the experience of not only living through a pandemic that is disproportionately affecting the Black community, but also living in an era of constant state violence against bodies that look like us, so thank you. Thank you so much -- and how that affects your work. I really appreciate listening to you speak on that. And I think you just touched upon communities of care and the forward direction of what you want. Do you want to speak to that again and flesh that out more -- of what is the future of your work and what you want to accomplish with that? What is the future and what do you want out of what you’re doing?OmiSoore: Yes, I do want to speak more to that. I just wanna do a time check as
well. Did you have other questions for me? Sorry, I have a Canadian Blood Services meeting that I need to go to for my time. So, I just wanted to make sure that 00:45:00I didn’t miss any other questions you might have.Mika: Oh, no, you’re fine. We’ve been doing perfect.
OmiSoore: Are you sure?
Mika: You’ve answered all of my questions as we’ve gone.
OmiSoore: Oh, okay. All right. Good.
Mika: You’ve been doing wonderful. We started at 10:08 a.m., we can end at the
10 of whatever the hour is if you’d like?OmiSoore: Yeah, that works.
Mika: Feel free to talk; I have a lot of time.
OmiSoore: So the future of my work in communities of care. You know, the thing I
really appreciated about the pandemic right off the bat were a lot of fundraising happening to help communities that did not have access to government programs, specifically targeted around COVID. So in Canada that was called Canada Recovery Benefit but not everyone had access to that. So in Nova Scotia 00:46:00and Ontario and British Columbia, Black groups -- Black Lives Matter groups, Not Another Black Life groups -- they set up fundraising, so that they could give $100 honorariums or $100 gift cards to Black communities in need. And you didn’t need to justify your need; you just needed to reach out to the fund, and you’d receive some money. And that could help with bills; it could help with groceries. That happened right away. And then people were like, well, what do you need? Do you need us to drop off food or pick up the kid? Can we bubble in a way that we can support one another? That was phenomenal. There were responses to folks who had to shelter in place in families or dwellings that weren’t always safe for them, wanting to make sure we responded to that. 00:47:00And really agitating and confronting public health that were just so heteropatriarchal, so white, so normative, that they just couldn’t think that people couldn’t play in the backyard because they lived in a high-rise, so they got to go out to the basketball court and play by themselves. Like, that was okay. No sense telling people to stay inside and not have access to liquor stores, not have access to safe drug supply, to be in dwellings that weren’t necessarily good for their physical and mental well-being. And then not to go outside. They created a new pandemic because they could not think; they so separated themselves from even engaging in what the social determinants of health are. They couldn’t think, well, how does poverty work for this? How does colonialism work for this, not indigeneity? 00:48:00How does heteropatriarchal work with sexism, misogyny, homophobia, ableism? What does it mean? I need a care worker; I need a personal support person -- what do you mean, they can’t -- how am I supposed to care for myself without the support? So, we really had to, again, call on white men and women who are in these positions to say, what are you doing? How is this -- ? How are you not -- ? They’re like, we’re doing this for population health, but Black and indigenous people are not part of that population they envision. So having communities of care really shifts this focus from we wanna be included in all systems to how do we care for ourselves, in spite of the systems. This is where communities, African Nova Scotian communities, 00:49:00really stepped into -- and be like, public health doesn’t give a shit about us, so how are we going to take care of ourselves. So they’re the ones that went door to door to make sure the elders had what they needed, families had what they needed. Community health organizations set up town halls with Black doctors, Black statisticians, Black public health people to say, this is what the pandemic is about, and this is what’s going on because they knew the levels of trust between African Nova Scotian and Black communities with public health was so low and so eroded. That’s well-formed mistrust; that comes out of a history of being treated poorly and stigmatized greatly. So, for the future pieces around my work, I really do wanna sit in communication with other Black LGBTQI [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex] folks 00:50:00in Canada to think through what would be the best health practices and wellness structures that we could develop for ourselves, and what would that look like. And that would bring in everyone, citizen scientists and citizen researchers, all of that. And that’s what I really wanna do.Mika: Thank you. And I hope that for you; I really do. Sounds very tangible, and
I very much believe in you. I think to, perhaps, end our interview today--which I don’t want to sound; it sounds sad now that I say it. Maybe if you’d like to speak--this is titled Black excellence, right? So maybe if you’d like to speak to a joyful moment or a moment in your field that brought you joy? I know you spoke about becoming a chair of medicine. Is there another joyful 00:51:00experience you’d like to share and end on?OmiSoore: Another joyful experience. You know, being held by African Nova
Scotian and Black communities -- cisgender, transgender, queer, heterosexual -- has been a humbling honor. Folks have really been supportive and have believed in my research and have advocated for me and spoken highly of me. I’m thoroughly grateful for that, and I don’t take it lightly. So I feel the responsibility of that, and it’s not a burden. It’s exciting. And the chair really kind of helped facilitate that and solidify my voice and how I wanna move forward in that. Yeah, I feel very blessed. 00:52:00I do…I do. Very, very, very blessed.Mika: Thank you so much. And yes, yes, yes. Thank you for sharing that. I guess
I’ll say, for the end, is there anything else you’d like to share? Is there, perhaps, a mantra or something that you’d like to end on that you feel is important to share? I wanna give you the platform to do so. 00:53:00OmiSoore: Anything that I’d like to end by sharing? So this is a thing. I think we do some really fantastic work -- Black researchers, scholars, scientists -- we do really fantastic work. And we need to continue doing that work without apology. And having the difficult conversations and naming the difficult things when they need to be named and how they need to be named. I think of Sarah Ahmed’s work -- like, the feminist killjoy. We’re always bringing people down in the room; we’re always naming the problem. That’s okay. When we have to do that work with decision makers, who are predominantly white and don’t really see the value of Black life, then we get to be as much of a killjoy as we need to be. But that can’t be our only focus. This is where we really need to make sure that we continue to be grounded in our communities 00:54:00and that the work we do in our communities is one about joy and life and creating for ourselves without depending on a system that’s corrupt. That’s what I would say; keep doing the hard work. Keep doing the challenging, difficult work.Mika: Yes, thank you. And not to be scared of taking up the space to do so.
OmiSoore: Exactly.
Mika: I appreciate that.
OmiSoore: Exactly.
Mika: I appreciate that. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Dryden. I believe we can
end there unless there’s truly anything else you’d like to share.OmiSoore: Thank you. Thank you so so much. I totally appreciate it. Keep me posted.
Mika: Yes, I will stop the recording now. [End of Interview]
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