ゲノミクス、NFL選手、公衆衛生――チェルシー・カーターと考える「良い技術」

I'm Dr. Eleanor Drage, the host of the Good Robot podcast. Join me as I ask the experts, what is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminism and other justice-seeking movements help us work towards it? If you want to learn more about today's topic, there's a full transcript of the episode at thegoodrobot.co.uk, along with an especially curated reading list by every guest. I love hearing from listeners, so feel free to reach out on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, or through my Cambridge email address. And don't forget to leave a review on whichever platform you're listening from. But for now, sit back, relax, and enjoy the episode. I'm thrilled to be here today with Chelsea Arcata, who is an assistant professor of public health in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences

at Yale School of Public Health with a secondary appointment in the Department of Anthropology. She's also founder and director of The LEAF, which is the Lived Experiences Igniting Transformations and Health Lab, a hub that addresses the social and structural determinants of health in rare neurodegenerative and genetic diseases. Her first book project, Witnessing ALS, Anti-Blackness, Race and Care in the World of Rare Disease is out next year and we've just been discussing the possibility of having you back to talk about it when it comes out. So welcome Chelsea. Thank you so much Eleanor, I appreciate that very warm introduction. Can you help us kick off this episode by just telling us what you do and what brings you to the topic of feminism, race, and technology. Absolutely. Well, I am just honored to be on your podcast. I think that the work that you do is really cool. And I think even when I first got your email, I was like, the good robot. I don't

do technology. I don't think about my work in that way. And then the more that I've been working on my book project and other work around genomics, I'm like, oh, yeah, I guess I am talking about technology. And so I think the primary thing that brings me to the work is always first, like I kind of joke with people that I'm a black girl from St. Louis, Missouri. And so that is a place in the United States that is, you know, rich with a cultural history, but also is rich with lots of cultural histories that have been very divisive and incisive. And so I think that when I think about the work that I do, I'm always thinking about my local community and the ways in which the topics of gender and race and equity show up in people's everyday lives. And I think that at first, a lot of that work that I've been doing has focused around the neurodegenerative disease, ALS, and wanting to understand how people from different backgrounds and cultures and identities have certain lived experiences.

And then really learning, I think, after that, how then the medical system and the biomedical system specifically then shapes those experiences. And so during my ethnographic fieldwork, when I was in graduate school in St. Louis, Missouri, as well, I started realizing that, sure, people are absolutely having these unique experiences of living with the disease at their home, with their families, with their people. But also it gets really interesting when they start thinking about clinical trials and going to talk to the doctor in different durable medical equipment devices that they're going to be using that could potentially bank their voice for them in the future. And I really got interested in questions on who has access to those things. You know, in the ALS space specifically, you know, one of the progressive symptoms is that a lot of people lose their voice. And so there are technologies that allow for people to then be able to, while they still have their voice, record themselves so that if they ever have to use an eye gaze machine or a device, it's not just, you know, the automated Siri voice, but really their voice that has been transposed for the people that will eventually listen to them.

And I think that that is such a beautiful and accessible technology, but it's only accessible and beautiful if everyone has access to it. And so, you know, in my work, I think a lot about the fact that, you know, a lot of black people in the United States that are diagnosed with ALS are diagnosed very late if they get a diagnosis. And so do they have access to certain of these technologies? And then I think, you know, for me, when I think about the feminism aspects of this, you know, I think being a black feminist and always thinking about how we understand how black people and especially black women move through the world is really important because of the ways that oppression has impacted our lives. And so I think that focusing my work as a black feminist inherently supports every other marginalized or underrepresented communities because we're starting with a group of people that have not had their lived experience always validated. And yet we still have to interact with these biomedical systems, interact with these technologies and resist in whatever ways that we can.

And so all of that to say that even though I don't really see myself as like a technologist, my work clearly interfaces with so many questions about how do we use good technology and is there a good technology? And so I think for that, I really appreciate being able to even think with you in these intersecting ideas. The podcast understands technology quite generously. And even even feminism, I'm always sort of opting people in as feminist when they may have never considered their work in that kind of way, which, you know, it's a mixed bag. Oh, yeah, I love that, though. Yeah, I think it's a nice way to get people thinking about their work in a different way. And feminism is very complex, but it can really enhance a lot of the great pro-justice work that's out there. So, you know, whether it's some like 3D printed microscope that's open licensed and redistributes economic value that I'm like, this is feminist.

And the guy who made it was like, OK, sure. You know, why not? Can you tell us then? So with our second good robot question, you know, what is good technology? We ask people and how do we work towards it? You mentioned some of these technologies used by people living with ALS, like eye gaze. Is eye gaze, what is it for a start? And is it a good technology? and if not can you think of something else that explores what might be useful to lots of people and when it's not useful because of course nothing is good all the time what is good technology to you absolutely I love that question and I love the challenge as a non-technology person to now explain to your audience Eleanor what an eye gaze is so bear with me audience how I understand an eye gaze machine is that it is a little computer often that people attach to their motorized

wheelchair. And that technology has been, they've worked with both a specialist and also a speech pathologist to basically use a little sensor that's on the top of this little computer and it's tracking your eye. And so because as a person with ALS may begin to deteriorate, they might not be able to use their hands or they might not be able to, of course, use their voice. And so what this technology does is it quite literally allows them to look at letters and then select the letters that they need to communicate to then put together a sentence or a response to someone that they're communicating with, a caregiver, a provider, and allows them to continue to have that autonomous voice while they're battling this terrible illness. Is that a good technology? Well, in the way that I just described it definitionally, absolutely.

I think that there are a lot of really positive benefits to not even just people in the ALS space. I think people across the disability, the disability kind of spectrum that I think could use it for a variety of illnesses and conditions. And so but I think, as I said in my earlier response, the issue kind of of is it good gets a little muddled if, you know, it's not accessible to everyone. And so I think about someone who was in my book project, and I don't talk about them. I don't talk about this particular scene in the book, but I have a vivid memory of going to visit him at assisted living facility that he was in towards the end of his ALS. And he was so excited to share with me because he was now on a ventilator that has a whole entire story that the ALS Association of the greater St. Louis area brought him an eye gaze. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is great. Where's it at? And he's like, in the closet over there. And I like then go walk over and then here sits

a multi-thousand dollar device just collecting dust. And why? Because nobody had been by to set it up for him, to train him in it. And it came from, in this really positive way, It came from the ALS Association's loaner closet. And so the intent is that someone who was able to afford it, after they transitioned and passed, passed this down to the association and said, hey, share it to someone that could use it. But after you share it with someone that can use it, you have to then make sure you're doing the thing so that that person can have all the benefits of the good technology. And so, unfortunately, this individual lived in that nursing home for about a year before he transitioned, and that eye gaze machine never got up and running. And because of how late he was diagnosed and also because he was not offered the option to bank his voice he didn have some of the preparatory things necessary to be able to use the eye gaze at its best potential And so when I think about your question of like is it good Like sure that technology itself is great And I think that the people the engineers and brilliant humans

that created it, I hope had very good intentions. But what we see in society, which I think is oftentimes the intersection or the complication of whether or not something is good, is like, are, is it being, is it accessible to everyone equitably? Is everyone able to use it the same? Can everyone actually take, get the full benefits of something? And I think about this wonderful individual and he wasn't able to use the full benefits. And so if I were to categorize it for him, then no, the eye gaze was not a good technology. And so I think it's really complicated. And I think that there are so many other examples, even in my precision medicine work, I think that precision medicine and what is going to come from that can be absolutely fantastic when we think about some of these future gene therapies or even the new gene therapy, thinking about sickle cell disease. That is a revolutionary technology that now is going to give people not only a different quality of life, but also change the trajectory of their illness and lived experience with sickle cell.

However, will it be good for everyone? Does everyone want that technology? Will it be affordable to everyone so people can access it? And I think those are some of the questions that we have to keep asking and thinking about constantly if we really want technology to be ethical, just and good. Absolutely. And I might just add that I think some variation of an eye gaze technology is used to track and monitor workers and truckers, as Karen Levy, I think, documented in her book, Data Driven, so that they know where someone is looking, if the trucker is looking at the road or elsewhere. So, of course, you know, variations of these technologies are used with very different ends and technology is only as good as its implementation and deployment. Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing that with me. I did not know that, so I'm learning something new.

And so that also gives me a different perspective on the eye gaze technology and what I also wasn't going to share. but now you've kind of, you've opened the floodgates, Eleanor, of I think that there's also, there's now like a new step of the eye gaze technology. And so now it's kind of using these neural pathways to almost predict what you're going to say. Because one of the things that is happening in the ALS space and a lot of diseases where there is a speech delay, people assume that people that live with motor neuron disease slash ALS are, their brains are not still fully working. And for most people, if they don't have frontal temporal dementia, they're still fully active in their brain and can communicate and have cognition. And so what does it look like when instead of using an eye gaze, we're now using something that required a very intensive surgery, but also now is a device planted in your head. And now it's also using a technology that is not only speaking for you, but also predicting what you were going

to say through your neural pathways. And so your example thinking about Carolyn Levy's work made me think of this example too of like, well, it started off as maybe having really good intentions, but how do those intentions then continue to bubble as more people remix them, if you will? Exactly. My mum and I talk about this all the time because she has Parkinson's. And, you know, if there was something on offer that was a little chip in the brain that would prevent the shaking and the speech impediments, we'd take it. But we know the cost. You know, we know that someone will try and fiddle around with it and make money from predicting your speech patterns or prompting you to say stuff. This is the world. So the next thing I want to ask you is about the pandemic, because you looked at COVID-19 and you've written about how historian Alison Bashford calls the pandemic a public health crisis and a technology of power.

public health was a technology of power during the pandemic. Whether we bought into it or not, how we moved, where we moved varied in the US from state to state, and certainly in Europe from nation to nation. We've also seen this play out recently in funding regimes following not just the pandemic, but the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the widespread rise of fascism. So tell us, how has public health been a technology of power in these events? Oh, such a thoughtful question. And I love how you connected some of these very U.S.-centric things to these global rises of fascism and even how public health globally operates as a technology of power. I just think that this is a really thoughtful question. I think we have to start kind of, and you intimated in your question around this quite a bit, that, you know, we witnessed around the world from the beginning, what was it, February, March of 2020 through, I would say, the rise of the pandemic continued until at least the end of 2022.

We watched kind of different groups receive access, receive masks, receive access to vaccinations, receive protective measures. And I think that what that quickly did was galvanize public health to say, hey, how do we use our systems for good? This is now not just a, hey, we need to monitor something that's happening. This is a thing that's happening now and it's impacting people worldwide. And so we saw public health do a lot of really good. But I think in the United States, one of the things that was also happening at the same time were these murders of Black people. And one of the things I was quite heartened by, and writers have talked about it as kind of these dual pandemics of the rise of state-sanctioned police violence and also the rise of this awful COVID-19 pandemic. Yet people both were attuned to the fact that this was so serious and this was so bad that we need to go put our bodies out on the streets globally and protest this as an issue.

Which also means that you are, despite public health suggestion that is saying, actually, you should stay inside and stay six feet away from people. People are saying, we're going to have a mask on and we're going to have our protective equipment on. but we're still going to be within six feet of each other so that we can protest this really big issue. What I then saw as a medical anthropologist and a public health scientist is not only kind of public health take on this, like, power of trying to mitigate and understand the disease. I also saw it have a real reckoning for the first time that everything that is a health issue is not just physiological and it's not just biological. It has so much to do with where we are and structures of oppression. Here in the United States, we saw our largest government organization that runs public health, the National Institute of Health or the NIH, decide and galvanize around the idea of you're right.

Everything that's public health related is not just about a biological causal pathway. It also has all of these social and structural issues. And so what you then saw was this wave of grants by the NIH and not just small seed grants of here's $10,000, here's $50,000. Here are millions of dollars to start centers around racism, to do R01 research studies about what are the causal factors for different diseases because of structural racism. And the National Institute of Health was naming that in their calls for applications. They were saying, we know that structural racism impacts health. So if we know that that is a fact and that's our beginning hypothesis, we now need to test it. And so we then watched from 2020 till 2024, millions of dollars begin to support these initiatives.

And then 2024 came. And 2024 shifted everything in a significant way where you were seeing this buildup of, okay, structural racism is an actual determinant of health. We're studying it. We now have the data behind it. We now have measures. We now have theory. We now have the things to now start being able to possibly intervene. How can we actually make this better? And 2024, right as we're on that eclipse of trying to make things better, we're talking about it, we're being honest, it's in these government documents. We're starting to get closer to what we would imagine could be a reparative relationship with public health and the people. And we watched public health lose a lot of its power because of the change in politics in the United States, the change in politics globally, and an acceptance of fascist beliefs, an acceptance that genocide isn't a real thing.

If I don't see it, then it's not real. And those have huge ramifications on the health of people, and they also have huge ramifications on our funding mechanisms to get the data to do the interventions to help people thrive. And so what has been extremely disappointing in thinking about and understanding that we had this huge wave of understanding that public health can be a technology of power for good and it can name things to now being on the other swing of that wave and realizing that, oh, actually, the government has the ability to say, you now can't not only can you not study structural racism, You can even touch any of the words adjacent to it You can say woman You can say black you can say indigenous you can say equity you can say transgender and I could go on and on the list is insane but you know what you

can say Eleanor white man white and man are still words that are fully acceptable according to the NIH. And so, like, what does it mean when these large governments then say what we used to validate as valid science is now not valid science? And that has not only a blow, like I said, on the funding structures, it has a huge blow on then the work that we can do as scientists to improve the health of people. Because if there was anything that the COVID-19 pandemic showed us, is that this is not just about a virus that is biological. It has everything to do with environment, with culture, with our society, with where people live, with how much money people make. And it's very disheartening and just simply sad to now be on the other side of that wave and be trying to still do good work and say these same really important concepts, but feeling like you're on a rat wheel working 10 times harder now because now the public health landscape says, hey, actually what you study isn't even, not only is it not even science,

in certain spaces, we're actually deeming it illegal. Exactly. And it makes it really hard to debunk these claims to universality that COVID was bad for everyone or like Madonna said, that COVID was an equalizer. You know, and I rolled my eyes and thought, oh, God, come on, Madonna. You don't need to do that. What are you doing? It's absolutely not. Tell us about genomics, because you wrote a piece called Our Diverse Databases Actually Creating Equity in Genomics. So this is one thing that's being done despite all the crap going on and the inability to speak words that aren't white or man. There are attempts to create equity in genomics. And now I've got lots of friends who work actually for different genomics centers around the UK. and they are exploring the really tricky, complex, difficult work of understanding what equity even means in genomics.

So we could say it's an ambiguous technology. Genomics is both helpful and harmful. What is the Black Genome Project, which is in pursuit of helpful genomics, genomics and how does it grapple with the complete headache of genomics's risks and benefits specifically to people of color? Yeah, thank you for the question. So the Black Genome Project is what me and my research partner, Dr. Brett Merrick, who's a geneticist at Washington University School of Medicine, we came up with back in actually same COVID time period, 2020. We met because I was a phlebotomist on a seroprevalence COVID-19 project in the St. Louis area. And I was a grad student still. And he was a brand new PI that had been tasked to do this community engaged work around COVID-19. And we had never met. We had never met each other because it's COVID. And I just kind of got hired to do for $25 an hour to draw blood from people. But as I was like talking to him

weekly as I was going to these sites to like, because we basically were managing it together. I was like, what is this random geneticist guy doing, like running this project? And what does seropregulants have to do? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I say all that to say is that at the either beginning of 2021 or late 2020, he and I finally met up outside one day to like actually meet each other in person. And he shared what he had been tasked to do as a geneticist. And I shared what I had been, you know, what I was interested in as a, you know, doctoral student finishing up her dissertation. And I was really intrigued by him because I was writing a paper that then ultimately became a dissertation chapter about how I was noticing in the ways in which clinicians were talking about ALS and motor neuron disease, they were acting like there wasn't a 10% genetic aspect of ALS. And then when they were acting like there wasn't a 10%, it was only with

black patients. But when they were talking to white patients, they were like, oh yeah, you could possibly have genetic ALS. We should test you for the genetics. And I was seeing these kind of weird differences, but also I thought we all had the understanding that race is not biological. So why are you assuming based on someone's race where they're slotted? And so I remember at this first meeting with him, I was kind of word vomiting all that I just shared with you. And he was like, we should do a research study. And I was like, okay, we should do a research study. He was like, but like, we're not going to do a research study where we just like go out and swab black people's mouths in the St. Louis area to create our own database. But what if we take that same idea, but we do it around lived experience and how people are relating to and understanding genomics. So, like, let's still get a really big sample. And also let's name our project in, like, a fun, quirky way, like the Human Genome Project. Like, let's just, like, give it back to people.

Instead of being, you know, the Human Genome Project, let's allow it to be the Black Genome Project so people see themselves as a part of this and not as this kind of distant, distrustworthy entity. And so what he and I did was we spent, we call it community-based participatory research or CBPR meets ethnography. So what was really important to us is that we wanted to be deeply engaged in community. And we also wanted to do long-term engagement with people. We didn't want to just drop in and say, hey, do a survey. Here's a gift card. So we spent a lot of time deeply engaged in community wanting to return to talking to people again and again. So we did multiple interviews. We did multiple focus groups. And so after about 18 months of this process of CBPR meets ethnography, we got so much rich data. Because our thing was, do people want to be a part of these databases? The way in which the literature reads right now, it suggests that if we want better representation of African ancestry or Asian ancestry, basically any non-European group that hasn't been represented in these large studies and databases, we need to just go sequence all of their genes.

And we were like, that doesn't feel like the right thing to do, because not only is that also, even if it's not intentional, falling into this racist biological idea, it's also not honoring the legitimate reasons why people might not want to be a part of these databases. Because these databases are not just, you know, hey, here's a sample of my blood that you'll use in perpetuity. This is like my literal genetic code that I'm giving you to do whatever you want with AI-wise, storage-wise, et cetera. And so we really wanted to ask people what they believed and what they wanted from these future technologies. Because what our fear, our hypothesis as a medical anthropologist and a geneticist was that if we keep zooming towards precision medicine as the answer, similar in a very Madonna way, precision medicine has been argued to be, it's going to be the great equalizer.

It's going to be the thing. Once we get precision medicine, it's going to solve all diseases. We're going to be able to make something personalized just for you. And the question is, how? And also, how are we going to do that if we're also using the same logic that we've unfortunately seen with some of the National Institute of Health, all of us studies, where you're making these arguments about ancestry, but still slipping into assumptions about biological essentialism in race. And so our project is really trying to kind of intervene in that issue and say, hey, we believe precision medicine is actually really powerful. We also really know that we've done a lot of harm to communities that have been underrepresented. And if we want increased representation, we can't just the only solution can't be swabbing people's cheeks and adding them to the databases. there has to be a lot more thought and care and empowerment behind that if we're hoping

for it to be the great equalizer that it could potentially be. What is neuro-racism? Does it relate to anything you've just been saying? And I know that you think that documentary film is a good technology that can bring the issue to wider attention. Can you tell us about that? I do. I do. I have nerdily become a documentarian in my work in the last couple of years because I think that, you know, us academics, we are trained in a way to just write and produce in these fancy journals and even in these niche books that everyone doesn't read. But the reality is that that's not the only way that we consume information. People assume on awesome podcasts like The Good Robot. People consume through listening to the radio. People consume by listening and watching documentaries. And so I really wanted to enter into that space so that even if someone couldn't read from a literacy perspective, they could still engage with and watch a documentary.

And so I think that when I think about these questions about precision medicine and neuroracism, neuroracism for me was a concept that I really developed in my book project. And it came from a American activist, science activist group called Black and Neuro. They first used it as a hashtag to acknowledge and identify the ways that neuroscience as a field writ large had a representation problem and did not was not training people was not engaging with scientists that basically were not white men And so when I remember seeing that hashtag also around this same 2020 period and I was like yes neuroracism that what I feel like is also happening Yeah, it's happening in the ALS space with clinicians and clinician scientists that are studying the disease. But neuroracism is also happening with the people living and their caregivers living with these different diseases.

And so I think how I define it is as the racialized and differential diagnosis of lived experience in any type of neurological and neurodegenerative disease. And I think that it's a vestige of structural racism in that it allows us to name more specifically what's happening in these unique technological and biomedical spaces that for most people are these kind of weird, opaque spaces. But these weirdos take spaces are not just these objective vehicles that are, you know, looking under microscopes and creating new technologies like eye gaze machines. They also have the ability to leave people out, to invisibilize people, to differentially offer care, offer diagnosis, offer clinical trials. And so the concept of neuroracism that, you know, I hint at in the documentary witnessing that I developed with my co-producer and co-director, Mr. Michael Tyner, but also in my book project where I talk a lot about how marginal is marginalization is created through exclusion.

And when that happens, it's not just, oh, this is medical racism. It's like, no, this is a very unique thing that's happening in the neurological space. So let's identify it there because then someone else might be able to take up the term in a different space, like anthropologist Donna Aene Davis, who really studies obstetric racism. And it's like, hey, cool, we could call this medical racism. But when we're even more specific about the histories and cultures around what made obstetrics unique, that then helps us explain the different rates of infant mortality and maternal mortality in black and brown communities. And I see the term neuroracism doing something really, really unique, but also very similar to that and really helping us see in these neurodegenerative diseases that we're hoping are going to be cured through precision medicine. How is neuroracism operating that that occludes people from being not only identified, but also receiving the care and the technologies that they deserve?

How is the indifference of neuroracism been playing out in American football? which is only newly coming to terms with the fact that neurological conditions are really undertreated amongst African-American players. You wrote two amazing pieces with Tracy Canada on race norming in the NFL and brain trauma and neurodegeneration. Can you tell us more about this extremely important topic? Absolutely. I have to start by giving Professor Tracy Canada her flowers because this was absolutely her area of research. And I remember back in 2021, the news broke that the NFL has stopped using racism for their settlement deals with NFL players. And I get a text message from Tracy sending me this news article, and she's like, what? And I was also kind of responding, what?

Like, who knew that this was even happening? And so for Tracy, she has the expertise already of thinking about how anti-Blackness and structural racism in American football shapes these different everyday experiences of young Black football players. But she also wasn't a medical anthropologist. She was like, can you help me understand this race norming thing? Like, what does this mean? Because I think the headline did a really good job, as most sexy journalistic practices do, of really just kind of getting you to bite in and really just think about the fact that people are losing out on money. But we really wanted to get to a deeper issue. It's not just that people are losing money. What are the logics that are then being deployed for people to lose money? And what we then learned while we were researching and writing that first piece for the Scientific American was that the belief system was that in cognitive screenings, inherently, psychological testing for cognitive screening tests have a norming factor,

basically statistically in the metric that has a belief that if you have a white football player and a black football player, that the black football player is inherently cognitively lower than the white football player. So when you put in all of their other data through kind of this cognitive testing, the black player, they might have had the exact same experiences, the same amount of tackles, the same amount of concussions. But when you get to the end of that race norming test, it is going to say that black NFL player didn't experience cognitive trauma at the same level. And so then, therefore, they're not going to get the financial payout. So when we started there, Eleanor, that's when we first realized like, oh, wow, this is not just a vestige of bad science, this is a vestige of slavery. This comes from, you know, Enlightenment-era craniometry,

that, like, Black individuals are somehow, have smaller brains, are not as intelligent, cannot rise to the cognitive level of a white person, and that got baked in to this cognitive testing in the NFL in 2021. Not 1970, Eleanor, 2021. They just casually announced, like, oh, yeah, we're not doing that anymore because we realized it was wrong. Oh, you realized it was wrong because you got sued. Because people were like, hey, where's my money? But I think that Tracy and I realized after writing that piece that we wanted to say so much more about this deterioration and neuroracism that's happening to these players because it's not just the concussions and the race storming. It's also the concussions that lead to other neurodegenerative and brain trauma-related conditions like Parkinson's, like ALS, like frontal temporal dementia, like Alzheimer's, this weird, opaque neurological space.

And unfortunately, the NFL has not done a good job of, to your point and your question, taking accountability for the ways that they've known for years, decades, that football play can increase your risk of some sort of brain trauma just inherently because of the violence of the game. And so then you also have an American sport that is disproportionately made up of black players, but they are also the individuals that are having the highest rates of these neurological conditions, but then also not receiving the payout that they're owed because of these logics of racism, neuro-racism that are embedded into the system. And so in that second article that Tracy and I write about, about brain trauma and neurodegeneration, we really kind of tried to set up the theoretical framing of this concept of weathering and sport. So thinking about Arlene Geronimus' work on weathering and then also bringing in Black

studies scholar Christina Sharpe's work on the weathering of anti-blackness, and we brought those two together to say, this is what's happening. The next step is starting to create a scale to think about how do we test this, but we have enough ethnographic, journalistic, lived experience data to support that, like, there is a weathering that is happening by these players, not just inherently from the sport, but also a sport that is inherently imbued in these logics that Black people and Black men specifically are less than. And so I'm really excited about, I think, the swell around this that is starting to grow. In the United States, we just had, unfortunately, a very well-known NFL player whose last name is slipping me right now. But Chris, I want to say Chris Stevenson, but I know it's Chris, who also just announced his ALS diagnosis. And he doesn't say it. directly, but he does intimate that, like, he believes that it came from his play in American

football. And so we want to, we need to, and we have to sit with all of these tensions. And I think that naming weathering in sport, naming neural racism in the ways that we can, you know, to our earlier conversation about the ways that these fascist regimes are trying to get us to not use certain words, use certain languages. I think it is us as scholars finding inventive and creative ways to say these same things so that people understand that this is not all determined by our biology. This is also determined by these social and systemic structures like racism, like anti-Blackness, like gender, and hoping that we can create more equitable technologies and treatments that allow for people to all be treated and cared for equitably which is why we absolutely need critical race studies and people who really understand the relationship between race and racism intervening in science absolutely we have to have it thank you so much chelsea i could

talk to you for hours about this so i've got to stick to my 35 minutes otherwise my editor i want I want to hear more about what you and your mom talk about because I feel like we could wax poetic about that for hours. It was so lovely. Thank you so much for joining us on the show today. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Eleanor. Looking forward to our next chat. This episode was made possible thanks to Stifton McCartell and the Leverhorn Trust. It was written and produced by me, Dr. Eleanor Drage, and the editor of this week's episode is credited in the episode description. Thanks for listening.