This interview, conducted by by Nat Thomson, Simmons MSW Candidate, runs abridged in the February 2024 issue of the MPH Monthly.  Dawna Thomas, Ph.D is a Simmons Professor and the Chair of Critical Race, Gender, and Cultural Studies, as well as the Chair of Public Health.

To start, we were wondering if you might be able to talk a bit about the ways your roots as an African American of Cabo Verdean heritage has shaped your work around disparities in health that stem from ethnicity and identity?

It's a foundational piece to my work. I grew up in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, which has a large Cabo Verdean population. My mother is Cabo Verdean while my father is African American, from a very small Southern town in Georgia, who came up North. This background has shaped a lot of things for me as a person of color. Growing up, you experience different things and you begin to see how the healthcare systems work differently for many communities of color than how it works for white people. Recently, I've experienced this difference first hand in dealing with my mother, who has been a very healthy person until she got into her late eighties and then I saw other disparities first hand, in how they treated an older black woman, seeing her in that way as a caregiver. All this has been there as a way for me to ask questions. 

I also worked at the Umass affiliated Institute for Community Inclusion here in Boston, with my focus being on disability issues. I was very struck by this exposure to the disabled community and the disability paradigm around independent living, where it’s more of an interdependent focus instead of this American perspective defined “independent living.” This is something I’ve written about; how we [as people of color] see disability differently and how the disability rights movement really changed the US and was right at the forefront of getting the Americans With Disabilities Act passed. One area that legislation was getting people out of institutions; in the past your family could just institutionalize you if they were having problems with you. The passage of the ADA helped change this type of abuse that was happening in the disability community. Today you see more and more people shifting their view, saying “this is great!” but at the same time there’s this notion that you do it all by yourself, and in reality, nobody does it all by themselves.

Chris Bell's article "Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal" at time raised awareness about race and disability. He is well known for how Disability Studies ignored race in their analysis.

Not to say that this happens in all families of color and not to say that disability stigma does not exist, but there’s a difference [between the way white people and people of color tend to think about disability]. Just experiencing racism shapes you, or for myself as a light skinned black woman, experiencing colorism, this shaped me and so it’s where I started to think about what to write about, what to research and what to study.

Sometimes in the literature or in the discourse, African Americans can tend to be discussed as a singular population. Which in some instances can be very productive but in others might lose some of the nuances of different Black cultures and perspectives.  As I understand it, the path to The States for Cabo Verdeans is different from the path and experience of African American populations whose history is having come here as slaves. Would you mind tracing this from your perspective and talking a bit about some of the possible nuances present?

Well, they didn't arrive as enslaved people like African American/Blacks did. We think about the Cabo Verdean immigration journey as starting in the late 1800s. My great grandmother came during what we call “the first wave” or “the whaling era.” My great grandfather was a whaler, and I can't imagine them on that little boat, but they came across the ocean on a boat. So my great grandmother came to the United States in the late 1800s. Cabo Verde is a set of islands off of West Africa and the islands were colonized by the Portuguese and the inhabitants then participated in this whaling industry. Cabo Verdeans who came here to the states came here with this colonized identity, using Portuguese passports in the late 1800s [differently than people of color who came here in the slave trade]. Cabo Verde gained its independence from Portugal on July 5th of 1975, so right now they are a very young country, having gained their independence and now have an identity as Cabo Verdeans as opposed to living under the Portuguese flag as a colonized country. So that is my mothers side while my father’s ancestors probably came as enslaved people down in the South.

With these differences in mind, how would you characterize any different perspectives or differences in ways of experiencing culture here?

I think, like lots of immigrants who come to this country, their experiences particularly are centered within their timeframe [of coming to The US]. Coming during one particular past time frame versus coming right now is very different. When we think about identity around Cabo Verdeans, it’s very diverse in some ways. Cabo Verdeans see themselves as Africans and as black people. Coming here to southern New England, which [in the past] was one of the most prominent places where Cabo Verdean immigration journeys would end, they were part of the workers at the cranberry bogs and the factories of the time. They were part of those early migrant workers. In some ways there was a rift between the Black community and the Cabo Verdean community; they spoke a different language but were still part of the African diaspora and saw themselves as such. I think people who come today are very different in their identity than the people who came with my grandmother. Timeframe leads to a very different identity. People who come today have a great and very deep sense of being Cabo Verdean, whereas my grandmother came from a colonized Cabo Verde. Different social and political journeys and experiences. 

You’ve been with Simmons now for two decades, so I’d be curious to hear any of your thoughts about your journey here at Simmons, any university shifts, or even things you feel are fundamental to Simmons that have been preserved as the guard changes over the years.

We are a women-centered university, so when I came here, people said “oh, that’s the women’s college.” I was very happy to get the job and was jointly appointed to Africana studies and women and gender studies. We still have Africana Studies and Women's and Gender studies, which are now programs in the Critical Race, Gender and Cultural Studies Department that I currently chair as well as being the chair of Public Health. A few of them, not all of them. I missed the revolution of the sixties as a child at the time, so I couldn’t go and fight for feminist rights, but [eventually] coming to Simmons, I was really ready to burn my bra, burn this, burn everything and I was shocked to find that the student body on campus was kind of conservative. I was wondering where the rebels were. But today we do have a very nice radical student population, which I like. I don’t think I’m really that radical, but I’ve been told I’m kind of more left, which is OK with me. 

But, I think the foundation of Simmons remains; to give students their voice to go out and do the missions that they want to. Simmons still has the social justice philosophy and vision, which I’m happy about. As much as things have changed, some have stayed the same. I still find the students very dedicated. Our students are very dedicated. They study hard. They ask good questions in the class rooms. They’re very serious students and that’s fun as a professor, you get to sit and do a lot of interesting things.

Would you say that, in your view, the faculty and student body has remained somewhat conservative?

It’s not that I thought all the students were conservative [when I arrived], I was just surprised to encounter the few that I had, at the time. It’s never really been conservative as a whole, because it’s an innovative idea for the school to start up as a women’s school at the time that it was founded. To have women’s education, at the time, that was a man’s job. And so I think that innovation is foundational to Simmons. We have some great radical students and we have the spectrum of those views, so that has stayed the same. We’re definitely gender diverse in some places. I think gender-diverse students who come to Simmons can feel comfortable. It’s important to me in my classes [for students] to be themselves and to be comfortable in this diversity. I want our classes to be diverse and for us to embrace that. The differences don’t divide us, they can unite us and I am really passionate about that. We  need difference in the world and I think Simmons [encourages that].

Do you have any thoughts on sustaining and increasing this diversity of students at the school?

It can come down to answering the question of “how do you get diversity into your university?” Access to an understanding of how to go to college and how to pay for college [isn’t evenly distributed]. This can often go back to what our high schools are doing in each neighborhood or community across the US. Answering the questions of ‘how do we go about finding students?” and “how do students find us?” is key.

As you described it, your path to the public health department today involved studies in adjacent ways of looking at what’s going on in the world. For example, you started in women and Africana studies versus public health as we think about it today.

My dissertation was on disability in the Cabo Verdean community and Simmons was where the job was and I said “OK, I think I could do my work in both these departments.” I embrace both of those disciplines and intersectional spaces. I like being in Africana studies. That’s where my heart is and my work then focuses on health and disability disparities. But, at the time for me, this was where the job opening was, so I jumped at that chance. My thinking is always in public health. I guess you could say I’m “new” to public health this year, as a part of our redesign. We just went through a structural redesign. I teach a course called Race, Gender and Health. I also teach Health, Illness and Society and I teach a disability course. So, my work, even though it could be categorized under Africana studies, is grounded in healthcare disability services. I also teach intro to Africana Studies and intro to Women and Gender Studies. I focus on women and people with disabilities. Based on that and the redesign, that’s what has gotten me into the public health department.

What might you want someone to know about the intersection of being Black and disabled if they’re just starting out in learning about these challenges and solutions?

We sometimes call it “double jeopardy”; that a black person with a disability experiences both racism and ableism. Or “triple jeopardy” if you’re a woman, as you can also experience sexism. This is a population that experiences discrimination on multiple levels instead of just one. These experiences can compound their experience with their disability and this is important to understand. A person who needs access to disability services may not be able to access those services for multiple reasons or resource limits. Structural racism plays a role in the experience. There’s some work from The National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research, from the late '90s, around African Americans and disabilities that showed how this population didn’t know where the resources could be found and that the disability providers  were also not reaching out to them, either. As part of The Rehab Act, a mandate was established for providers to do more outreach to the community, in service of the community's understanding of what it is to be African American or Black and have a disability, along with another mandate to hire more diverse providers.

So the ADA was passed in 1990, and then reauthorized and amended in 2008. Here we are in early 2024; how do you tend to feel about the progress being made, policy-wise or otherwise?

For multiple and complex reasons, I think the progress is mixed. Anyone born after 1990 is accustomed to seeing sidewalk cutouts for wheelchairs and handicapped accessible parking. That’s their norm. Before 1990 that was not the norm. So that gets taken for granted. Accessibility has become a huge thing, from when you get in the elevator and it can call out the floor for the hearing impaired. We see sign language interpreters for government speeches and presentations. These are all things from the ADA. It has become second nature, along with disallowing employers from disability discrimination, but we still know that many people with disabilities live in poverty, are under-employed or [comparatively] under-educated. In the Rehab Act of the ‘90s there was some legislation passed that helped disabled students get to school. So from the ADA act we have a lot of great things, but we always need more things done, right?

Finally, we’re here in February, it’s Black History Month, which can mean different things to different people, but I was curious what a public health view on Black History Month might be, including the opportunities that may be present there?

[There is an opportunity] to really focus on health equity and to look at where we've arrived today, [but also] where we've stalled and what we need to improve next. That [involves] looking at access to patient care, looking at access for more providers to be diverse and [for them to be] like the population they're serving. Looking at unconscious bias for everyone. Some [might think] that unconscious bias is just for white providers. It's for us all. We all have unconscious bias growing up in the United States. Some think that science equalizes everything; if we focus on the body and the science, we can't discriminate or be biased. And that's not true, there's racism in medicine. So I think Black History Month is a time to step back and take account and look at what's missing and think about moving forward.