Read some highlights from our interview with Leigh Haynes below or find the complete interview conversation here.

We’ve talked a little bit in the past about how we both lived in southeast Texas in the ‘80s, although I was just passing through for a few years as a 4th grader, while you were born and raised there. I’d be curious to hear you talk a bit about how that might have influenced your career, your POV, and such.

Well, I was born in Jasper, Texas, which was a very segregated town in a very segregated part of the country. De facto segregation, not the same as what was happening during Jim Crow. My family and I experienced racism because we were Black. In school I had to work a lot harder than my white counterparts...working against this idea that as a black child, you’re just not as good at things. In 1998, our town became nationally known because of a violent and greusome hate crime, the lynching of James Byrd Jr. by a group of white supremacists. This led to significant protesting in our town, which brought both the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers. My mother was involved with the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power activism movement, so she took me to those protests. She took me to the Klan rally, so I could see first hand the hate in the world towards us as Black people. A visceral experience like this allowed me to know first hand the nature of hate that people can receive but also what it means to keep moving and keep working to overcome. Today, this experience plays a central role in my work and advocacy, carrying these stories and the pain of the community with me, along with my own experiences. It’s a perspective I try to bring to my classes. 

Could you talk a bit more about how this manifests itself in your classes and in the program?

Storytelling can really be an important piece of social justice work. So, highlighting stories that convey things like how racism manifests itself beyond mere ideology, whether it’s James Byrd, Jr. or other significant tipping points in combating racist acts, violent or otherwise. In the program, the students go on two immersions, one in Arizona, one in Boston. I think students being able to see and experience firsthand the systems and structures at play goes a long way towards shaping thought processes around the subject matter. With the Boston immersion, which I organize, I think it’s important to bring to life the history of colonization and oppression central to the region’s past. 

What are you working on right now?

One of my big projects is with PHM on topic of financialization in health care. We call it The Mapping Privatization Project, but it focuses on privatization, commercialization, and financialization in health. Prior to starting the project, me and and a colleague from PHM in Canada had been collecting stories about successful resistance to privatization of health services around the world. All over the globe we found stories of people fighting against private companies taking over any aspect of their health care, from India to Canada to Spain. After hearing these stories, we felt like it was important to figure out and understand the forces and players associated with this trend. In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic when we were doing some digging, we saw that some of the hardest hit nursing homes and longterm care facilities were owned by private equity. Huge private equity firms like BlackRock come in and purchase these places as part of a growing portfolio health portfolio and start stripping the facilities–staffing cuts and resource reductions–to increase profitability. On further research, we saw how pervasive this type of financial activity had become. It’s important to know who is making decisions about your health care, beyond just who your doctor is, especially if you want to demand change. For private equity, these are investments, meant to reap profits.