Note: The Nocturnists is created primarily as a listening experience. The audio contains emotion, emphasis, and soundscapes that are not easily transcribed. We encourage you to listen to the episode if at all possible. Our transcripts are produced using both speech recognition software and human copy editors, and may not be 100% accurate. Thank you for consulting the audio before quoting in print.

Ashley McMullen

Hey everyone, this is Ashley McMullen, your host of Black Voices in Healthcare, a new project from The Nocturnists. So the way this all unfolded was a couple of weeks ago, several days after George Floyd was killed, I was getting all these messages from a lot of non-Black friends telling me that they love me, that they were thinking about me–a lot of words of affirmation. But it was hard because I remember what I needed in that moment was so much more than words. I just needed change.And then I got this message from Emily that was different. She brought up this idea of doing a collaboration with The Nocturnists, using stories as a platform to elevate Black voices in healthcare. And I gotta say I was all for it. I love stories in medicine, because stories are the main modality in which we connect to each other as human beings. So we decided to do this series. And from there, things got moving really fast. We got my personal hero, Kimberly Manning, onboard as the executive producer. We've got 160 of you all signed up to add your voices to this project. And, now, here we are about to drop this first episode. And I have to say, being Black in healthcare can be hard sometimes. We're up against some unique challenges. And being Black in healthcare is amazing. We do incredible work. We're intelligent, we're beautiful, we're just dope. And this series is about to highlight all of it. Let's go.I was in clinic when I heard about the murder of George Floyd. I checked my phone. And I saw the face of a person in uniform as he slowly, callously took the life of another Black person that could have been me, or someone that I love. And then I did what we all do so well. I tucked those feelings away and went back to work. There's so much to explore about what it means to be Black in health care. But for our first episode, we wanted to take a moment to sit with the grief of the event that set this whole project into motion. This is Episode One: Again.

Kimberly Manning

I know exactly where I was when I heard about Mr. George Floyd. I was sitting at my kitchen table and I was writing. And I was actually very upset in the moment that I was writing, along with the added terror that I've been feeling for weeks about COVID-19 and Black people–not just for my patients, but for myself, too. So I'm sitting at my table and I'm writing about all this, when my husband calls out to me from the other room: "Baby, did you hear about this dude in Minnesota?" I look up and I say, “No.” So he starts walking toward me, and the truth is I wasn't even alarmed yet. Because we share stuff with each other all the time. And, I mean, it could have been anything, right? Like, I mean, a brother could have won the lottery. But he showed me the video. And he didn't give me, you know, the warning that you give people. And that is because we have an understanding. We look. I looked and saw a grown man with his entire weight on another man's neck, with his hands in his pockets, his brow furrowed and a snarl on his face, and a little tiny smirk. And I even heard him utter the words, "Don't do drugs," as another dude stood by with his hands in his pockets. And that isn't the kind of fine detail that just being told about it would give me. I needed to see that. So, yeah, we agree to honor your life and acknowledge what happened to you and the atrocity of what you dealt with by looking.I remember when I was in college, and I watched that grainy video of Mr. Rodney King being beat with billy clubs by a pack of police officers. They beat the shit out of Rodney King. He was down already. And I'm glad I saw that video. Because seeing that video, it helped me reconcile coming back to Los Angeles, my hometown of Inglewood, and seeing things burn to the ground. Because if you saw that video, and you saw the way they whooped his behind, and he was defenseless, and you heard that verdict and saw that nobody went to jail–oh, you would have been mad too. So I watched the video. And, no, I didn't feel particularly despondent or anything. I just felt mad. I'm just tired, man, like damn, we stay losing. Again? I will always look.

Dee, Ophthalmology resident

I learned about George Floyd's murder almost four or five days after it occurred. I remember it was a Friday evening. I remember it because it was a golden weekend that I've been looking forward to for a while. I was really just mindlessly scrolling. And I remember seeing this video, and the caption was detailing what was carried out in the video. I remember debating whether I should play it or not. And I decided to put my phone down and ask my sister, who's in the next room—we live together—whether she's heard about this or not. And she, she said, “Yes.” And I asked her if she thinks I should watch it. And she answered, “No, it's too much.” So I decided against watching the video. I think reading the caption was more than enough to make this weekend one of the most anxiety-inducing weekends.Also happened to be the weekend that I had to take my internal examination for ophthalmology residency. And I just remember the whole experience feeling very out of touch, you know. Giving myself a very definitive timeline, with a very rigid deadline, on when and how to consume this anti-Black news and unpack it and mourn. And then consciously put it to the side, or try to. And then pick up this other part of my life and then take this exam, and then show up to work the next day where it was not addressed. Nobody spoke about what was going on for another week. It was only until people started to visibly protest that people started talking about it, and only in the context of the looting that was happening around the neighborhood the residency program was in. I remember feeling like all of my worlds will not peacefully come together.

Marshall Fleurant

I've been thinking a lot about my time in New York, particularly in regard to protests. There was the Haitian March in 1990 when they said all Haitians, like myself being Haitian American, have AIDS. So we marched across the Brooklyn Bridge. I remember the treatment of the Central Park Five clearly, when I was little, and thinking to myself how those young men were kind of kids that were just a little bit older than I was. And I couldn't believe that they were gonna go to jail. To be quite honest with you, I don't remember many other people besides Black people being in those protests. I mean, at least that's my memory of that. I'm sure sprinkled in the crowd here or there, there were some people who were not Black, but in my memory, I could only remember Black people. But now in the protests that I've seen and been a part of, I've seen a lot more different kinds of people in these protests–Black, Asian, Hispanic, Latinx, whatever you want to call it, speaking against racial injustice. To be honest, it's given me a little bit of hope. You know, in the back of my mind, I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much. Not to get my heart broken. But I'm feeling a little bit of hope today. Right? I think this is an inflection point. I sure hope it is.I think a lot about my kids, like everybody else. I have a son. Hopefully, I don't have to get the call if something happened to him. I hope I never have to have my wife get a call, or something happened to me because my blinker was going off. You know, the funny thing is that one of the few times I've been stopped, living here in Georgia, it was a white police officer that pulled me over. He showed his badge. He was very clear about why he was pulling me over. He, he, you know, said, “Have a nice day, Sir.” Even apologized for inconveniencing me. Usually, my interaction with police officers is I'm getting yelled at. I'm getting accused of something. I've even had a gun pointed to me at least two times in my youth. But I think what happened with that police officer’s stop is he saw the car seat in the back. That's when my son was just born. Maybe he had a young child too. And he's, like, oh, he's a dad. I don't know. But I wish interactions were so much more like that.

Omoyeni Animashaun

My name is Yeni. I'm a medical social worker. And I'm Black. I see racism everywhere. I see it in the hospital. The patients are so mean. “I don't want this Black lady to touch me.” The patient refused my help due to the color of my skin. I really do not care sometimes because I see it as ignorance. However, right now, I feel angry for taking that for so long from some people. Why do we have to go through this? Why is this a thing to be Black in America? Why? I don't understand why somebody will look at another person that bleeds the same way as you, and feel like just because she's Black then she's beneath you. Now the police feel like it's okay to kill somebody and then they can just get away with it. The kind of leadership that we have right now does not make me feel comfortable as an African American lady. It does not make me feel comfortable. It does not make me feel safe. I find it so hard to go to sleep. I am so scared. My children–I have to call my twenty-three-year-old daughter every night to hear her voice to make sure she's okay. I have to worry about my six-year-old son growing up in this environment, growing up in this country. My son loves the policemen. I took my son out, and he wants to talk to a policeman. I pulled him back. I did that subconsciously. It's not deliberate. It was just, I was just scared. What are they going to do to him when I'm not there to protect him?

Anonymous, Resident physician

I learned about the murder of Mr. George Floyd the day after it had occurred. I was watching the nightly news. It was unfortunate that the media played a clip of his asphyxiation. There was no warning and I, I really wasn't, I wasn't prepared to see that. And, especially, to see the utter lack of emotion on his murderer's face. The day before, I had watched a report where there was some type of "open up the country" uprising. And this group had hung a prop that was dressed and looked like the governor of Kentucky, and had hung it from a tree outside the governor's mansion to mimic an active lynching. Knowing that lynching is still not deemed as a hate crime and crimes that are perpetrated due to racism don't carry the same penalties, it's hard to see and know that fact when, when you're aware that literally your community as a Black community–Black men, Black women–are consistently under attack. Sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, cousins. It's hard to grapple with, especially when you are living and working in a place where the emotional impact is not the same for everyone.

Bookie, Wound care and vascular medicine specialist

When I watched the video of Eric Garner's murder, I cried like a baby. I was, even now, talking about it, I immediately start to cry. And I watched George Floyd's murder. And I didn't cry. But I didn't watch it to the end. I couldn't. It's the callousness of it. You know, when that officer looked at the camera and knew he was being recorded, and didn't care. That, to me, showed how dehumanized we have become. And there's video, so I now, you know, focus on the fact that no one would have believed this possible if there were no video. Not only did George beg for his life, beg for his mother, witnesses begged for his life. And the three co-conspirators did nothing but watch a life go away. I had trouble working for several days after that. I just didn't know what to do. To think that we're still at this position, that this could happen. But Reverend Al did a good job of putting it into context. I just want the knee off my neck. That's all. That's all I've ever, I've ever wanted. Just get out of my way. Stop putting up barriers. Stop pretending you're good. Just leave me alone. And let me do my thing. Just leave me alone. And I realized that the only way that I got here to this position, made it through to have multiple board certifications and do a lot of good to help people is because of faith. Just like Al said. We've come this far by faith. But that doesn't mean I'm not tired of this, cuz I am.

Lawren Wooten

Today, I, um, am not feeling great. I really didn't sleep at all. I had, like, three episodes of sleep paralysis and nightmares that the police were coming in and shooting me, and I don't know if any one has ever had sleep paralysis before but it is terrifying. Your mind is awake and your body can't move. And now I'm out walking and almost no one is wearing masks. Like, people have just forgotten that freaking pandemic is happening. I did at least get to participate in this “Black Only” space online, run by a social worker. And it ended up just being women. And it was really incredibly healing just to talk about how we're feeling–how we're experiencing the pandemic, if we've lost anyone. The collective grief that we're experiencing, having to see people murdered over and over and over again–what that causes us to feel in our bodies. I mean, honestly, it felt good to know that I wasn't the only one experiencing some of those things. It was definitely a bit depressing, though, to be honest, that other people are experiencing what I'm experiencing. People are tired. Some people aren't sleeping, some people are sleeping constantly. Some people can't eat, other people are eating too much. It's just a lot.

Ekene Onwuka

Usually, with these episodes of police brutality, I see it, I'm outraged, but I just do what, you know, Black people in this country have been doing for years, right? You compartmentalize it, you are pretty much just, like, “Here we go again.” We know how the story ends already. But for some reason this one was just different. I usually don't watch the videos, but this one I watched. And, man, did it just, you know, it's just so crazy. I think for me, you know, the surgeon, like we take care of traumas, right? And go through the ABCs. And first thing we do is airway, right? And we say if somebody is talking, their airway is clear. And so I hear him crying out, and I heard him saying, "Oh, I can't breathe, I can't breathe!" Like, my first thought is, "Airways—clear." And then I saw the guy pass out. And yet still nothing. Still no, sort of, just recognition that this guy is just unconscious now, not moving, not saying anything. And I just, I just closed it, you know.And then over the next couple days, you know, you just kind of feel this, like, restlessness, right? So what do you do with this, like, pent-up energy and emotion? And I remember going for a run one day, like after one of those days where I'm just kind of sitting in my office just, like, wallowing in it. And I decide to go out for a run. And I ran downtown where I knew, you know, the protests were happening. And I told myself I was just going for a run, right? But I also put a mask in my pocket, you know. It's, like, get downtown. And it just felt so good, I think, to be in an area where everyone was just as angry and frustrated as I was. I think when I'm around people and I'm doing my job–I'm talking, I'm in the OR–I'm fine. But it's when I get to my office and I'm sitting here and the emotion just gets to me and it's just so overwhelming.We've been having, like, these weekly meetings with our program director and residents since COVID started, and so we actually, like, thought about, like, making a statement. And so we arranged to meet, like, one Wednesday. And during this residents meeting with the program director, we're trying to figure out what we would say in a statement. And I remember I started just, like, saying, "Hey, I," you know, “I'll just tell my story,” and how I'm going through the whole thing and just to kind of shed some light on what we could potentially say. And I knew it was gonna happen, right? It happened every time I sat in my office. I, like, became overwhelmed with emotion. But there I was, I was talking and then I knew it, you know, I felt that come in, I choked up. And I'm sitting on this call with my, like, program director, in my chair, and I'm sitting here crying, you know, and it's just not what I wanted in the last three weeks of my residency. But you know, it is what it is.Melissa Ross
This week, I spoke in front of my colleagues and my hospital in Northern California, about my experiences being a Black doctor and a Black mother. There were over 350 people on the call. And, you know, I try not to prepare too much. I just want it to flow from my heart. But I talked about my three children and the impact that racism has had on me as their mother. And my fears and all the anxiety that I've had since the day I've had my sons. I spoke for thirty minutes and I willed myself not to cry. Someone asked me what I wanted to get through to people listening to my call. And I just remember saying that I wanted them to feel my pain as being a Black mother. I love my kids, I love my kids to death. And I shared with them that everything that I do has always been for them. Even in this, sharing my story with 300-plus colleagues, I do it for my kids. And I hope one day they look back and say, “My mom really loved me.”After my talk was over the camera shut off. And I put my head down and I just started crying. One of my co-workers sitting next to me, she said, "Can I hug you?" And I said, "Please put your mask on, I don't want to get COVID." But she hugged me and I said, "I'm so tired. I am so, so tired." She said, "I'm gonna hold you up." She's, like, "This is not your burden to carry, I'm gonna help you." She's not a Black woman. And that feeling of being hugged, especially in the time of COVID, I think, is what I remember the most out of that whole talk–is that I was finally being touched by someone outside of my kids and my husband. She held me up. I was literally weak in my knees. I wanted to fall down. But she held me up. And I hope and I pray that the line of people that will hold me up is long.

Tseganesh, Primary care physician

It's Sunday afternoon in St. Paul, a beautiful summer day. And the parks in St. Paul have finally opened. And so me and my children are at a local playground where they're the only ones playing on the playground. And it's pretty amazing. Just the restorative nature of weekends, and getting to hang out and be with my kids, and getting to stop being a doctor, is life-giving.This morning I saw the upcoming cover for The New Yorker magazine that shows a picture of George Floyd with his head, just his face. And then underneath him where his body was, was really this underlying history of uprisings from which the Black Lives protests have come from. And it was so moving and beautiful. As we go protest for Black Lives Matter, it is not just about George Floyd. We're not saying his name, “George Floyd,” just for George, but for all the hundreds of unnamed and unseen people that have brought us to this moment. And it ends with George Floyd’s face. And that’s the hope–that there are, that this is a seismic shift, that there’s this recognition of Black people’s humanity, Black people’s worth. As I said at his funeral, you know, George has changed the world and I do think his name is not going to be forgotten. And he will represent so many people whose names we either don't know or have been forgotten. And I love how things like that give us hope.And I love how being at the playground on Sunday gives us hope that for my children, my hope is that they'll roll their eyes at me as I talk about these times. And they'll be, like, "Oh, enough of talking about the old times." I hope they don't even recognize this world. And I just hope in twenty years that we're not having this conversation with my daughter, but instead that she's able to look at this time as foreign and unrecognizable, because the world has shifted so much for her and her sisters.(SPEAKING TO HER CHILD) “I did, Boo Boo!”

Kimberly Manning

I'm sitting outside on my porch. And I'm just watching cars go by and thinking and getting lost in my head. And often what I do in times like this is that I turn to music. And sometimes, I think, so today is one of those days, so I'm thinking about this song. And it goes... (SINGING) “And I hope that you are having the time of your life. Think twice. That's my only advice. Mhm. Come on now, who do you, who do you, who do you, who do you think you are? Ha ha ha. Bless your soul. You really think you're in control? Well, I think you're crazy. I think you're crazy. I think you're crazy. Just like me. My heroes had the heart to lose their lives out on a limb. And all I remember is thinking, I want to be like them. Mhm. Ever since I was little, ever since I was little, they look like fun. And it's no coincidence I've come, and I can die when I'm done.”Music also makes me cry. And smile. I feel brave. So that's what I'm thinking about today.