Kazi Stanton-Thomas: Can you tell me your name, pronouns and about your background?

Linda Villarosa: I am Linda Villarosa, she/her, and I am professor of the graduate school of journalism at the City University of New York and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine.

Stanton-Thomas: Can you explain the way you became interested in those fields and what journey you took to get to those cross sections. 

Villarosa: I grew up in Denver, I ran track in high school and college, I played soccer in college, I was an athlete. And I was injured. So I learned about the body and anatomy because of my problems such as shin splints, sprained ankles, and a wrecked knee. When I started working, I was a health journalist working on self health, injury prevention and personal health, at Essence magazine. Then I had a bit of a turnaround when I went to public health school. I went to public health school as a fellow at what was then the Harvard School of Public Health and I learned less about personal health which I knew so much about and more about public health. I learned that institutions and structures get in the way of good health and it’s not all about personal responsibility. That was my first change.

My second change was when my father was ill and I saw how he was being treated. He did everything right, the rest of us did everything right. He had medical coverage and he was being treated at a veteran’s hospital which is part of the country. He was a veteran. To see him treated badly, it seemed ridiculous for me to be telling people, “Just trust your doctor. Just go into the health care system educated and you’ll be fine. “ But then I thought no, that is not true. If someone like my father can get bad treatment then anyone can. 

Then I got pregnant with my first child, I did everything right. I was working at Essence magazine. I had a rough pregnancy and my daughter was low birth weight. Even though I had done everything right. Then I learned about Dr. Areline Geronimous’s theory of weathering. That being a Black American can prematurely age the human body. The theory is that it leads to poor birth outcomes. 

Then I completely shifted and realized that the environment can cause you to have not great health outcomes. The way you are treated in the health care system can cause you to have poor birth outcomes and poor health outcomes. So that shifted away from thinking you are in complete control of your body and that was a different lens for me.

Stanton-Thomas: That’s fascinating. It reminds me of one of my roommates. Her thesis is on Boston’s morbidity rate for Black mothers and how often class is not as much of a predictor of morbidity rates. For example, Serena Williams, being a wealthy person but having post birth complications.

Villarosa: That was the most shocking thing for me. That education and even wealth don’t protect you if you are a Black birthing person. They don’t protect you and they don’t protect your baby fully. Even if you have a college degree or a master’s degree, a J.D. or a Ph.D., or an MD, you still are not fully protected. That is something that is not known and is a problem for us as Black people.

Stanton-Thomas:That leads me to segway into your 2021 writing “Black Lives are Shorter in Chicago.” My family history shows why.I’m from Chicago and when I was reading this I was very connected to it. I’m from the South Side.I wanted to know what processes you go through to write in a way that connects your personal history, public health investigation and journalism. How are you able to connect your personal history to this investigation?

Villarosa: What I usually do, and I did for this story, is I looked at a story and saw Chicago has the greatest gap of life expectancy by race and by neighborhood. The Black neighborhood where my family is from, and where you’re from, Englewood where my mom is from, people lived to age sixty. Nine miles north, they lived to age ninety. So why is there a thirty year life expectancy gap? Because my mom is from there, I wanted to go there and understand why there is this gap. My mom came with me. My mom also did not understand why there was this gap. We moved away from there when I was about nine and she doesn’t always go back. So she told me she’d show me around. 

We started at her elementary school and she was so proud–Betsy Ross Elementary School. She went there, Lorraine Hansberry went there, Gwendolyn Brooks went there, famous people went there. I have friends with parents that went there. We used the GPS and found the school boarded up and a dead tree in the front.  My mom was shocked. Then we went to all the other places that my mom remembered. She remembered Mr. Bryce’s store. He was my dad’s best friend. She would go every Saturday to Mr. Bryce’s liquor and candy store. There was nothing there–it was like a drug bazaar out front. 

I live in New York City and my mom lives in Harlem. We’re not really scared of anything but I told my mom to get back in the car because it was not safe. 

What was still there was the house that my grandparents had bought. It was two homes and my grandfather had saved up all of his money to buy it. What we realized was my grandfather’s home still standing were outliers because we were in a community, like all of Black Chicago, that had been redlined. That meant people couldn’t get mortgages and it was hard to buy a home because of racism.

I remember asking my mom “what happened here, how did grandfather have a home in an area that was redlined?” And my mom said he paid in cash and he was terrified they would take it away from him. So if you’re in a community that has a racial gap certainly something happened which was redlining and disinvestment. So if you live in an area like that you have bad health, that’s what I got out of it. 

Stanton-Thomas: My father worked in Chicago public schools so he was there when all the store closings happened. Seeing these connections you make is beautiful because it not only validates what we see but also communicates to people who might not be able to relate to it. So thank you.

My next question is about Chicago. Being such a powerful center for Black women in general, something you mentioned in the article was Ida B. Wells being taught in public schools. Are there any other Black women journalists that inspired your work or that you think should be spotlighted in our curricula for AP Women’s History?

Villarosa: That’s a really great question. I am inspired by Ida B. Wells and there are people that are more current. One who comes to mind is Isabelle Wilkerson. She wrote about Chicago and was the bureau chief there. She has several books out–The Warmth of Other Suns is one that comes to mind. Her book Caste was made into a movie. I love Ida B. Wells–everyhing about her and all that she did. Gwen Ifill is another one, maybe you have heard of her. She’s an inspiring person. I have friends that I love like Soledad O’Brien. She has done very well linking history to the current day. Certainly my colleague Nikole Hannah-Jones who was the editor on the 1619 Project.

Stanton-Thomas: Those are great suggestions, thank you. I wanted to ask you about your journey because you went to CUNY as a student and now you are a professor there. Have you seen changes in academia going from being a student to a professor? 

Villarosa: It’s interesting because I was already an educator when I went. It was my second career and I didn’t have a master’s degree so I asked if I could get the degree from the university where I was teaching. That was in 2013 so it’s been 13 years since I graduated. I think the students are much more savvy, they come in a little bit more prepared then my class came in. They are certainly more digital and better at social media. When I was in grad school we had a class teach us how to use social media. Many of us, now I was older when I went back, did not know exactly how to use it for journalism. So the digital and social media are very different.

Many of my classmates were unfamiliar with how to get around New York City if you came from out of state and how our political system works. It’s a boost if you are from the city and go to school in the city because you already know how to navigate the boroughs and the subway. But I got such a good education at CUNY. At graduation on the state–one of my colleagues at the New York Times Magazine walked by and asked what I was doing there and if I was a graduation speaker. I said “No, I’m graduating.” He was so surprised that I was going back. I was the second oldest in the class but it was a very important experience.

Stanton-Thomas: Do you support the creation of an AP Women’s History course?

Villarosa: I completely support it. I think it’s really important. History is so important. At a time right now when people have forgotten history or reimagine it in a false way, it’s really important to study history. For me, in my articles I always have a history section. For my journalism students they ask me to please show them how I format my stories. So it made me go back and go through and format a number of my stories. And there is always a history component. 

In my book Under the Skin, it was really fun because there’s a history section in each chapter. You can see it behind me, it says “Who dies” and it was about the Welch sisters in America. That was fresh for me. I hadn’t written about that for the magazine, I’d mostly written about it for the book. I did this fascinating research for it. Between that and doing research on the 1619 Project I always put history in my stories and how important and enjoyable it is. When the 1619 Project went from an article to a book, we expanded each of our chapters. Mine was expanded with the help of a historian. I had a historian assigned to me and I was so happy to make sure I did not get anything wrong. She encouraged me to push myself more and get grounded. I really appreciated that and I took that away and remembered that in my work.