Duane Reynolds of the Just Health Collective reflects on a layered approach to combating racism. Individuals drive organizations that live within systems.

Proem

In 1960 I discovered that I didn’t belong. I was eight. My parents supported Kennedy for President. Everyone else’s parents supported Nixon. My eyes opened. My family was different. My parents were active in the Fair Housing Movement. They hosted businesspeople of color from Africa. No one else knew anyone of color who wasn’t a maid or landscaper. Boys carried sweaty, folded-up pictures of scantily dressed girls they got from their older brothers and giggled about them in the restroom. My mom had introduced my sister and me to the Invisible Woman, a plastic model of the human body with a removable pregnant abdomen. I didn’t get the attraction to those nudie pictures. I remember our Unitarian minister, Russell Bletzer, talking to us kids about belonging. That strange, lonely feeling had a name. My parents were holocaust survivors. They never mentioned belonging. Not until high school did I meet a crew where I felt I belonged — what a relief.

I didn’t realize I was a white person of privilege until I was in nursing school. More about that later in the episode. The recognition of my privilege led to my embarrassment of that privilege. I hid it for forty years by saying I grew up in Chicago and Detroit rather than the tony suburbs of Highland Park and Grosse…