Good afternoon. Good afternoon. On behalf of the McLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and the Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence, I welcome you to the first lecture in our 2016-17 series on reproductive ethics. During this academic year, we will present 25 lectures on reproductive ethics, half of them from nationally known figures, and half from nationally known figures in the Chicago area. If you've not picked up a copy of the brochure, the brochure is available in the back. Julie Korr, who is Julie Korr. Julie Korr was the principal organizer of this great program. Reproductive ethics frequently engages social, political, and clinical issues. This series will explore controversies at the intersection of scientific advances, reproductive decision-making, and many ethical and legal considerations. While reproductive ethics encompasses a broad spectrum of topics, this series is organized around three principal themes, obstetrical ethics, assisted reproduction, and family planning and abortion. This year's speakers reflect a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives and include, as I've said, national experts in the fields of medicine, law, and the social sciences. It is now my absolute pleasure to introduce today's distinguished speaker, Professor Dorothy Roberts. Professor Roberts, who was born in Hyde Park and went to the Shoe Smith School through the eighth grade, is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and also the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Moselle Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. Professor Roberts directs the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, Professor Roberts has written and lectured extensively on the intersection of gender, race, and class in legal issues and has been a leader in transforming our thinking on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. Professor Roberts is the author of the award-winning book Killing the Black Body, Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. Another book, Shattered Bonds, The Color of Child Welfare, as well as a co-editor of six books on constitutional law and gender. Professor Roberts has also published more than 100 articles and essays in journals, including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Review, the Stanford Law Review. Her latest book is entitled Fatal Invention, How Science, Politics, and Big Business Recreate Race in the 21st Century. Professor Roberts has won many honors, including very recent honors in 2016, such as the 2016 Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Harvard Women's Law Association 2016 Award, called Women Inspiring Change, and a 2015 Award from the American Psychiatric Association, the Solomon Carter Fuller Award. In about a month, Professor Roberts will deliver this year's invited Tanner Lectures at Harvard on human values. Professor Roberts' talk to us today is entitled The Racial Gap in Maternal Morbidity, Mortality, Why Reproductive Justice Matters. I hope you will join me in giving a warm welcome home, in fact, to Hyde Park to Professor Dorothy Roberts. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for that warm welcome. A lot of those tidbits came from dinner last night. They were not on my bio. And it is really great to be back in Chicago, University of Chicago in particular, where I was born. I was born and lying in hospital. And I do credit growing up in Hyde Park in the 1960s for my interest in social justice and applying that perspective to my work and my life. And so it's always wonderful to be back in this part of the country. Well, many of you probably know the absolutely atrocious record that the United States has when it comes to maternal deaths. The World Health Organization, a recent report looking at changes in the maternal mortality rate between 1990 and 2013 discovered the astonishing fact that the rate in the United States is increasing, whereas it is decreasing virtually in every other country in the world in both the developing and developed world. There's certainly no place like the United States among Western industrialized nations. And it is not only increasing, it's just a deplorable rate of deaths of women from complications of pregnancy. It was the highest rate that they found of any country, the highest rate of increase of any country they surveyed. And most of the reasons for these deaths are preventable ones. So that makes it not only a tragic fact of pregnancy in the United States, but also an injustice, a human rights violation. Now, another astounding and deplorable aspect of the high rates of maternal mortality in the United States is the fact that there is a huge gap between the rate of death of black women and white women in this country. And it's a gap that has existed for at least five decades. I would believe that if we had data from the time of slavery to today, we would find that it's a gap that has persisted over the entire history of the United States.   Washington, DC, about 50% black. You see has almost double the US rate, which is 28 per 100,000 life births. Fulton County, where Atlanta is situated, triple the rate. And then there are these pockets of really just almost unbelievable, unbelievable death rates, like this county in Mississippi, where now the HWO report referred to women of color instead of black women. But I'm sure that black women make up the bulk of these deaths. The maternal mortality rate is 595 out of 100,000 life births. It's almost incredible. This is kind of statistic you look at and you think you've misplaced a decimal point or something. It just cannot possibly be that. And as the report points out, that is worse than in some countries in sub-Saharan Africa. So this is a persistent, abominable, and inexcusable crisis. It's almost an oxymoron to talk about a persistent crisis, but it is. It's continued for so long and at with such a large gap in outcomes that, of course, we have to ask what can we do about it and what is the cause for these horrible statistics or it's more than these horrible deaths and injuries to women who survived them and what's the solution. And this isn't a clear cut answer. I would argue that the answer depends on your approach to this problem, whether you see it as a problem that has to do with something wrong with the women who are dying or whether you see it as something wrong with our society which is causing these women to die at these high rates. And this is why I think that a reproductive justice approach matters because it matters to whether you think this is an important problem. One immediate reaction I have to reading these horrifying statistics is why don't we hear more about it? We hear about all sorts of gaps along racial lines or gender lines in the United States. Most people I talk to have no idea that in some parts of the United States, women are dying from pregnancy-related causes at higher rates than in sub-Saharan Africa or that the gap between black and white women is fourfold. We're talking about people who are dying from preventable causes. So you would think it would receive more attention. So even the question, why hasn't it gotten more attention? That's not a question of approach what we're concerned about in this country. And then what's the cause of it is also a question of perspective and approach to the problem as I'll talk about some more. And of course, figuring out a solution to any problem depends on what you think is the cause of the problem. So the fact that this has been a crisis for at least five decades that we know about, that it's getting worse, that whatever the US health care system has been doing isn't working, we know that the current approach is a bad one. Again, unless you think it's just naturally supposed to be this way, which many people do think. So I want to talk about that as well. What do I mean by reproductive justice approach? Well, it is an approach to reproductive health and rights that looks at the full scope of women's and men's sexual and reproductive lives. In other words, it doesn't just focus on a decision to terminate a pregnancy, which for many Americans is what reproductive rights means. Many, many people, I would venture to say if we took a poll of Americans, most would equate reproductive rights with the right to abortion. It's certainly the reproductive health issue that's gotten the most attention in the United States. It deserves a lot of attention, but it certainly isn't the only aspect of women's reproductive lives. So reproductive justice looks at the full scope of women's reproductive health and the decisions that they make that affect their health, and then just as important, what affects the decisions that women make about their reproductive health? In other words, not seeing those decisions as choices that they make in a vacuum, but looking at how the way our society is structured shapes how women make decisions about their health or aren't even able to make decisions about their reproductive health. It includes the right both to have or not have a child. So very importantly, it has to do with women's ability to have children if they want to have children, not just the decision not to have a child. And so for many people, the reason why maternal mortality wouldn't even register as a reproductive rights issue is because these are women who, by and large, wanted to have children. They were planning to have children and died as a result of it. So it doesn't fit into a framework that just looks at the decision to terminate a pregnancy as the full extent of what reproductive rights cover. And also important, it covers the right to parent a child. So policies that would either lead to the death of a woman after she has her child or that removed that child from her unnecessarily as soon as the child is born, those would be concerns of reproductive justice, violations of reproductive justice, as well as what is the environment in which women are raising their children. If it's an environment where you have to be afraid that your 12-year-old is going to be shot for playing in a playground with a toy gun, that's a matter of reproductive justice. It's not just being able to make the decision to have a child, it's the experience of raising your child as well without violence against you or your children because you have become a mother. And it's part then recognizing that all of this is profoundly shaped by social inequality, social structures that value certain women's childbearing and devalue others. And that is embedded in laws and policies that perpetuate generation after generation after generation in new iterations to prevent in a racialized way women from being able, some women from being able to exercise these rights, recognizing all of that, reproductive justice understands that you cannot protect these women's rights without linking it to a broader struggle for justice and human rights in this country and around the world. So that's the framework. Well, what does that then lead to if we have that framework, what does that mean for how we might approach these atrocious rates of maternal mortality and morbidity? I mean, first of all, just at the start, it means that we would recognize now that these are justice issues. Again, the statistics I cited, the deaths of these women, don't even register at all for many Americans as reproductive freedom issues. So at least with the very get-go, one advantage is that we can recognize them and start to think about them as a question of justice and not just as a question of a health problem that has to do with something wrong with the women who are dying at higher rates. Now, this perspective is grounded in black feminist intersectionality. It was black feminists who coined the term reproductive justice and who have been the chief champions and developers of this point of view. It's now, 20 years ago, no one was talking about reproductive justice. Now, it's much more common to hear the term and to have it applied to various programs and scholarly agendas and organizations. But I suppose we forget where it came from. And very often, the women who are the originators and key developers of this way of thinking get completely left out of the discussion with some even mainstream, predominantly white organizations claiming that they discovered it in the New York Times. No, this was a part of black women's organizing that comes out of a particular perspective about inequality. And that perspective, which the Kambahee River Collective talked about in 1977, it recognizes that black women in particular, but this is just true of how politics operates in the United States and globally in general. But black women have a particular perspective on this because we are at the intersection of racism, sexism, and often class inequality as well. And so they recognize that they were committed to struggling against all of these oppressions that intersect into major interlocking forms and systems, structures of disadvantage and privilege. Now, before I get to a reproductive justice approach to this topic, I think it's important to highlight that it is competing with other approaches which are very popular in the United States. So for example, when NIH just launched its largest ever study of breast cancer genetics in black women, the acting director in the press release stated that the purpose of this study was to address the unique breast cancer profiles of African-American women and learning about the origin of cancer disparities. Now, I don't have time to go into the implications of a study to look at breast cancer genetics. I am not saying that genetics don't play a role in breast cancer and perhaps even in disparities in breast cancer. But the idea that the reason for the gap in breast cancer mortality in the United States is because of a unique genetic profile of African-American women focusing on genetics as opposed to all the structural inequalities that contribute to the racial gap is, I think it's problematic. I think that it would have been far better to explain what this study was doing, even conceive of the study in a way that focused more on the structural inequities that certainly play a significant role in the racial gap. It is simply not the case that race creates unique genetic profiles. Race is a political invention to divide human beings and it's not true that a particular race of women have a unique genetic profile. I'm not even sure what that means to say that African-American women have a unique genetic profile. Which ones? How much African ancestry do you have to have to have a unique genetic profile? Certainly given the vast genetic variation among people in Africa, let alone those who are mixed with other ancestries to be African-American women, the fact that they suffer from such huge gaps in deaths from breast cancer, deaths from pregnancy-related causes is far more likely to come from social inequities than from something unique about their genes. But this idea also is very prominent in other kinds of studies like this one published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology that tested the hypotheses that black race independent of other factors increases the risk of extreme preterm birth and its frequency of recurrence. Again, I would ask, what does black race even mean? Are they hypothesizing that there's some kind of essence in black people that you can separate from all the social inequalities black people experience? How could you possibly do that? And in the study, they did control for a few variables, but they certainly didn't control for every single possible factor that could affect the higher rates of extreme preterm birth among African-American women. And so they conclude a probable genetic component that may underlie the public health problem presented by the racial disparity in preterm birth. So I'm looking at other kinds of studies that ask questions about similar problems, higher rates of reproductive health-related bad outcomes for African-American women. And is this the approach that we should take to dealing with the staggering gap in maternal mortality? Another approach looks at what is wrong, maybe not genetically, with African-American women that cause these horrible gaps in reproductive health outcomes, but whether there's something wrong with black mothers in how they're raising their children that produces these harms. So when Newsweek reviewed how poverty affects the brain, studies that are looking at how poverty has a material impact on the brains of poor children, many of these studies involving African-American children in particular. Newsweek summed up the policy implications that programs wouldn't focus just on the children, but on the mother who grew up in poverty and as a result hasn't developed coping skills and is therefore highly unlikely to be passing them on to her children. The idea that there is a neurological effect from poverty, especially in African-American children, and the responsibility should be on the mother to help children cope with this problem. So here we have two approaches, both of which look at what's wrong with black women, either innately or in their behaviors that result from their disadvantage in our society. Now, another approach, and some of you may know these Chicago researcher physicians. I love their work. They are constantly fighting against those approaches and looking at what it could be in the inequities, social inequities that produce these gaps. Not what is wrong with the women, but what is wrong with our society. And this fairly recent study found a very striking association between the amount of time African-American women grow up in poverty and birth outcomes. And they concluded that relatively small improvements in the economic environment of African-American women across the life course would translate into beneficial birth outcomes and narrow the racial disparity in infant mortality rates. So this is an aspect of structural inequality that is very racialized in the United States, which is that black people are much more likely to spend their entire lives in poverty than white people are, than even poor white people are. And it's something that is often omitted from studies that control for the current socioeconomic status of women in the study and then conclude, oh, there's got to be something innate in black women that's causing this. They never look at the impact of the length of time over an entire life course of living in poverty. So that's one simple variable that's often not controlled for that is a problem with many of these studies that conclude that genetics is the primary reason for these gaps in reproductive health outcomes. And so instead of thinking about race as naturally producing these reproductive health disparities like gaps, differences in preterm birth and infant mortality, in maternal mortality and morbidity, another approach, which researchers like Collins and the others are looking at and many others, which is more in line with reproductive justice, is looking at the way that racism gets embodied, recognizing that race isn't a natural category that produces these outcomes, but it is a political or social category that has biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people's health. And in the case of maternal morbidity and mortality, we could point to a number of structural inequities that probably contribute to these gaps. Black women are less likely to be insured, more likely to be uninsured. They have less access to high quality health care, including reproductive health care, access to abortion, access to family planning, prenatal care, and also postpartum care, which is very important to this issue with the studies that have looked at this like the World Health Organization report finding that, as I mentioned at the end, that in many of these cases, white women may have the same complications from birth as the black women, but they're more likely to get medical care that avoids a death. So it's also the postpartum care that's important. And African-American women are more likely to have chronic health conditions that are risk factors for maternal morbidity and mortality, like diabetes and heart disease. Again, though, going back to what I was saying, why? Why do they have those chronic health problems? Because of the kinds of factors that Collins and the others found, because of a whole slew of ways that racism is embodied that aren't even being studied yet, just the stress from experiencing discrimination. There are more and more studies finding that that is a chief contributor to health inequities. But what about the higher rates of incarceration of black women, which doesn't just start in adulthood? We know that black girls are more likely to be expelled from school, more likely to be arrested in school, more likely to be assaulted by police officers in school.  All you have to do is read the newspaper every day. You could see all the stresses that black girls and young women are under. And many of those stresses that haven't even been studied yet, certainly aren't controlled for yet in many, many of these studies that claim that there is something innate that's causing the problem. You all recognize Dr. Steve Whitman, who passed away recently from Mount Sinai, another wonderful physician researcher trying to explain the health inequities in Chicago in this study, finding with his collaborators that breast cancer deaths for black women are twice that of white women in Chicago. And looking at the question of why this finding gives us some clue, because in 1980, black and white women died at the same rate from breast cancer.  And the two groups died at the same. Over the course of the next two decades, this gap emerged. And it wasn't because black women's health got worse. It was because white women's survival rates were double. Their deaths were cut in half. And the researchers concluded from that. And there could be lots of different explanations for why this would happen. But it's very unlikely that it happened because of something innate in black women. It's much more likely the most plausible explanation, as Dr. Whitman said to me when I spoke with him about it, that there were amazing advances in breast cancer detection and treatment over the course of those 20 years. And white women got the advantage of it. And black women got absolutely no advantage from it in Chicago. Now, another aspect of reproductive justice, besides focusing our attention more on the structural inequities that produce these gaps in death from pregnancy-related causes, is to think about the way in which this country has approached these deaths to ask, why has this injustice continued for so long? And to think about it in the context of a long history of devaluation of black women's childbearing and motherhood in America. Now, we don't look at the problem as just a medical issue that emerged out of the blue in 2016. We have to understand, why did it emerge at all? And again, if we're asking, what is it about our society that allows this horrific difference in death and injury to occur, why is it that black women are dying at such high rates? It's not just a statistical association. There's something that's producing this in our society. And so one aspect of reproductive justice is to look at the history of injustice against black women in America and understand that that legacy shapes the way that policymakers, the medical profession, those who are creating our health structures in the United States, approach childbearing by women of different races in America. You can't isolate the question of who dies in childbirth from the question of, how has America as a nation and the policies and laws that created and supported it treated the childbearing of black women? And as I point out in my book, Killing the Black Body, there is a consistent, intense, and deplorable history in the United States stretching from slavery all the way to today of devaluing black women's childbearing. Beginning in slavery where black women's reproductive labor was profitable for slaveholders. And therefore, it was important to control their reproductive labor. After all, their babies belonged to the slaveholder. And black women's reproduction was a form of generating more enslaved laborers for the nation, which is connected to the idea that race is inherited because it was important for black women to produce more slaves. In other words, the idea that black women naturally produced children who could be enslaved, that that's a biological process instead of a social, political, created process. This takes maybe a lot to explain it, but I hope you get the idea. I think this is really profound.  Do you see what I mean? OK. Oh, I've lost my. OK, well, I'll do this. Oh, it's back. OK. So that was written into US law and policy from the time of slavery. And it had multiple implications for how black women's reproductive decisions and childbearing were treated, including an approach to black women by the medical profession during slavery that they could be experimented on, including these gynecological experiments by J. Marion Sims without anesthesia, because they were property.  But there are many, many examples of black women being devalued still by the medical profession. One example just very recently, last December, Barbara Dawson, 57-year-old woman goes to the emergency room. She's saying she can't breathe. They won't treat her. She begins to scream that she can't breathe. What's the answer? Arrest her. They call the police on her. She is dragged at the hospital into the parking lot. You can hear the audio of this with hospital staff and the police trying to drag her off the ground into the police car. And one of them, we don't know if it's the hospital, the police saying, you're going to jail no matter what.  The idea that, well, this isn't the only example of collaborations between police and hospitals in South Carolina, Medical University of South Carolina the police and hospital staff collaborated to drug test the black women in the hospital and have them arrested if they tested, pregnant women have them arrested if they tested positive for drugs. The collaboration between police and hospital staff to arrest black women I think is just one but very striking illustration of the devaluation of black women patients. And in this country, I in one of the important reports on maternal mortality and morbidity conducted by the Center for Reproductive Rights, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health and Sister Song women of color reproductive justice collective in their interviews of black women across the country they found frequent complaints that these women felt that they were being devalued and dehumanized when they went to the hospital, especially public hospitals for labor and delivery care. For example, Tiffany describing the scene when she was 17 years old of the delivery ward in the basement of the hospital in Jackson, Mississippi just crowded with women who were in pain and just being left there to suffer until the baby was about to come out. And others feeling that because they were uninsured, they were treated with less respect. So this devaluation of black mothers again, stemming from slavery produced a number of stereotypes about black women that I think are very powerful to this day in U.S. thinking people, Americans thinking about black motherhood and policy and then that affects policies that then affect the outcomes for black women giving birth in hospitals in the United States. One of the stereotypes that originated in slavery still circulating today is that black women are hypersexual and therefore hyperfertile and that this is a problem for policymakers. In other words, black women's childbearing seen not as something that they should have control of that's something that should be fostered and supported, but as a problem that needs to be controlled.  Again, that's a legal definition. They could have been defined as white. So right there is a problem with talking about African-American women having a unique genetic profile because they could have been these most of the African-Americans in this country could be defined as white because or many of us because we have African ancestry.  That stereotype that black women are hyperfertile circulates in the United States today. Along with it was the mammy who was seen as asexual, safe, but a good caretaker of white people's children as long as she was supervised by the white mistress, but what was her relationship to her own children?   This idea that black mothers don't really care about their children, it is very present to this day. I could give another talk on the child welfare system and the high rates of removal of black children from their mothers and studies that show that it's much easier for social workers to remove black children from their homes than white children for the exact same risks and the comments that have been collected by researchers about this lack of caring and connection. Surely that has an impact on why this country has not done something about the high rates of maternal mortality among black women in the nation. Another common stereotype, this has extended into the 1980s, this became very popular in the 1980s under the Reagan administration to support abolishing the welfare system. What was that all about? That was about the myth that black women had babies just to get a welfare check and then they didn't care about the children afterward. Again, these have real implications. That was the stereotype, the welfare queen that was circulated and it worked. In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the law that abolished the entitlement to welfare in this country. And if you read the preamble to that law, it's all about how to keep, they don't necessarily say African American, but how to keep women on welfare from having so many children. And so this idea that black women are having too many children and that is a public policy problem is very, very embedded in US policy decision making. I think we can move on to the 1990s and the myth of the pregnant black crack addict who nurses reported and this was reported in major newspapers like the New York Times, the LA Times, Wall Street Journal that it deprived black women of maternal instinct. For some reason, it was assumed there was something about black women in particular and the chemical effect of crack cocaine in particular was not said about any other women who use drugs during pregnancy that it deprived them of maternal instinct. Again, gross devaluation of the mothering of black women attributed to some kind of biological, innate biological trait that black women have. And the crack baby, she was supposed to give birth to the so-called crack baby which was described in medical journals and in the media as children who were permanently damaged from crack use during pregnancy, a particular kind of damage that caused them not only to have health problems but to lack social consciousness and so they were predicted to all become criminals, drug addicts and welfare dependent. You all remember this literature, right? Okay, now these children have grown up and some researchers are finding they did not turn into a horde of monsters. Not only that, their health problems are no different from the health problems of other children in their neighborhood, neighborhoods whose mothers did not smoke crack cocaine. So now it's clear that whatever problems these children had as newborns was either completely attributed to or largely attributed to other structural inequalities that they faced in their neighborhoods. But again, another example, recent example where it's attributed to some kind of innate defect that black women have that causes them to produce problems in their offspring. Again, could that very common influential view have something to do with why this nation hasn't taken greater steps to end the racial gap in maternal mortality? I think we would be foolish to think it doesn't have an effect. At least we have to think about the racial gap in maternal mortality and mortality in the context of this long history and present, is I don't want to put it off on slavery. It continues to this day of devaluing black women's childbearing. It did have an effect, long lasting effect in policy of promoting massive sterilization of black women. Just one example is the operation of the North Carolina Eugenics Board into the 1970s where at that point its main victims were black women who relied on welfare. It has been suggested, this is just one example, but legislators have suggested this, other policy makers have suggested this, that the reason why black children are in poverty and have other forms of disadvantage is again because of their mothers having too many children, with the inquirers suggesting that Norplant was the answer to black poverty. And a recent revelation that in California, black and Latina women were subjected to a program of sterilization that sterilized at least 148 women, I would say unethically because they were incarcerated women, but at least we know that the doctors were violating California state law in performing these sterilizations without the proper ethical review. What we're seeing in this country arise in what was already happening as a result of these myths about crack babies, of prosecutions of black women, now it's spreading to women of other groups as well for fetal abuse, which I call punishing women for having children, blaming them for the horrendous rates of stillbirth and infant mortality by making them the scapegoats incarcerating women for giving birth. And all of this linked again, this is part of reproductive justice perspective that links all of these reproductive violations against black women in a single approach that this is a form of racial social injustice. The high rates of abortion among black women as well, which stem from higher rates of unwanted pregnancy, which stem from structural inequities in availability of contraception, also availability of sex education and other inequalities. At a time when we are seeing an assault on women's access to abortion in this country, who will be most affected by that? Again, the women who have higher rates and who are less likely to be able to get around all the state-imposed roadblocks to access. This is certainly going to lead to more maternal mortality. And there was a recent study that showed that Texas has had this huge leap. Now it's not clear that it comes from the abortion restrictions in Texas, but certainly they contribute to the increasing rates of maternal mortality in this country. Even though advocates against abortion use this very well-known image of black women as dangerous reproducers in their campaign. So across the country, billboards go up, this one was in Soho against a building in Soho, proclaiming the message that the most dangerous place for an African-American is in the womb.  They are dangerous reproducers. But let's look at the family planning community as well. That as I just said, access to abortion and contraception, other forms of family planning, absolutely essential and life-saving and human right. But it is a human right because of the value of the women who should have access to, at all women, regardless of race and class, should have access to that. The idea that access to abortion is important because it saves America money by not having to support unwanted children is an unjust way of thinking about why there should be access. And it supports coercive family planning programs, which this country has had a long history of. Reproductive justice recognizes the injustice of population control policies, policies that advocate birth control for certain people because it benefits society versus birth control family planning policies that advocate equal access to all men and women because they are valuable human beings. They have a human right to control their reproductive lives. Do you see the difference between those two approaches? I hope you do. Because this kind of message is a dangerous one that has been used to control African-American women for centuries. Also, let me mention the recent advocacy for larks to be the first line, birth control for at-risk teens. Again, teenagers should have access to all forms of family planning. But to advocate that certain teenagers, Black and Latina teenagers, should be somehow encouraged, pressured only given this option because this is the solution to their lack of opportunities makes it seem as if the reason why they have lack of opportunities is because they're having children. Just like what has been revealed about the myth of the crack baby, it is a myth that teenagers who have children are so much, have so fewer opportunities than the same teenagers in their neighborhood who don't have children. None of them have equal opportunities. It's not because they're having children. It's because of structural inequities that are denying them opportunities, opportunities to go to college, opportunities to go to a high quality school, opportunities to stay out of juvenile detention. All of that isn't because they're having children. So yes, they're better off having access to contraception but don't blame their lack of opportunities on their bad reproductive decisions. That's not what's causing it. Okay, I'm gonna move ahead. Well, maybe I'll just add that another example because I was gonna say more about incarcerated women, another aspect of reproductive injustice that affects disproportionately black mothers. They are the highest, the fastest growing group incarcerated in the United States today and they are treated also in most states in the most dehumanizing way when they give birth, shackling them to the bed in the delivery room which I think all the OBGYNs here would know that that is a form and mothers in the room would know that is a form of torture and it causes physical injury, distress, trauma and is a emotionally dehumanizing way of treating a woman giving birth to a child, totally unnecessary. I could see of no purpose for it other than to dehumanize incarcerated women again to punish them for having children. So black women have been advocating for reproductive justice as I pointed out for decades using that term since 1994 but advocating the meaning of it for far longer and calling for all of us to change the perspective in the way we deal with these persistent, abominable gaps in health including maternal mortality and morbidity demanding that black women's dignity and humanity be recognized in protests that are calling out the United States' history and current practice of state violence against black people and issuing a counter message. This is a counter message specifically to those billboards that say the most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb but it speaks more broadly that black women should be trusted to make decisions for themselves, their families and their communities and it is essential not to treat black women's childbirth as a problem but to understand the structural inequities that are causing the problem is too mild a word of higher rates of death among black women for multiple outcomes but especially tragic and appalling deaths from pregnancy related causes. So I'll end there. I know I went a little bit over but I'm happy to engage in discussion with you. First of all, thank you so much for giving the talk today. I'm here. Oh, there you are. Okay. My name is Rachel Newhouse. I'm a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I'm also a nurse midwife and my research is focused on disparities in maternal mortality for black women. But something that I've looked at that I just wonder how much you know about because I've been looking into it is the similarities and disparities in maternal mortality for Native American women and black women because they have very similar rates and I mean when I look at those two communities and look at the history, they're communities that have been systematically deconstructed over and over again and systematically disadvantaged and I feel like there's something to gain from I know that it's an African American problem but I think we're adding another variable to it to say that when we do this to a group of people this is what will happen and we've seen repeated examples. Yeah, yeah, I think that's absolutely right. My work focuses on African American women. I think there is that African American women have a particular position, political position in US structures of inequality so I think it's important to focus on black women but for me to focus, for many people to focus, we have certain ways of advocating for justice and there is a particular history of devaluation of black women in this country that shapes policy and law and practice institutions that's very important to recognize. It's also the case that other women of color have been subjected to state violence and structural inequities that produce similar kinds of horrible outcomes for them and certainly Native American women, many of the things I talked about, the statistics, the institutional devaluation. I mentioned the child welfare system. Native American children and black children have the highest rates of foster care placement in this country. Now that comes from a different kind of history, enslavement versus conquest, but both are histories of devaluation of the people, their families, the bonds between their families. There are differences I don't have time to go into but you're absolutely right, it's they're both examples of how state violence, structural inequality produce these very negative outcomes for health and other aspects of welfare and I think it also supports the view that this is not something innate that naturally produces these problems. It comes from these forms of inequality and so at some point, unless you believe that white people evolved to have superior genes to predispose them to better health, better education, lower rates of incarceration, unless you believe that, how do you explain that everybody else is these big groups of people have such negative outcomes? How do you explain it? And to me it's much more plausible to say it's because of structural inequality and that's what we need to focus on, that's what we need to end in order to solve these problems. And it's not to say this happened hundreds of years ago and the problems are just persisting. No, there are forms of structural inequality and violence that continue century after century, decade after decade, generation after generation, that's what we have to look at. And it's also not to say, I've heard these counter arguments so that's why I get so easily to spin them out. It's also not to say, oh, we have to end poverty, we have to end racism before we can do anything about the problem. No, there are ways in which very concretely today in policies and practices that are perpetuating these problems and we can address them if we have the desire to do it. But it requires a certain way of thinking about the problem. And this is why I think it's so important for people in biomedical research, in medical practice to engage with people who are in political activism and sociology and the humanities because often none of us has an unbiased perspective. We have to, it's important. I love being here to talk to you all as someone whose work is in sociology and law. And I hope I've shown you how my work relates to what you're doing. We need another way of approaching this. The way that these issues have been approached is fail, it's getting worse. It's getting worse so something has to change. You showed in one of your early slides that in 1980 the rate of maternal mortality was not very different between African-Americans and whites. Just that that slide was for breast cancer. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But you did show that the doubling of maternal mortality in the last 23 years. Exactly, exactly. Which of these many aspects of social and racial inequality do you think contribute to that change? I think it's hard to say. I think that I guess the way I'd rather approach it is we know that there are many factors that do contribute. So because sometimes there's a, when not to say that people with certain interests and specialties shouldn't focus on particular aspects of it, but sometimes the focus, if it's too monolithic on one particular aspect of the structural inequality it ignores others. So one example is surely this has a lot to do with being able to access advances in medicine. I think Steve Whitman's explanation for why the gap increased white women's survival rate doubling but black women's remaining the same that has to have something to do with the fact that white women were able to take advantage of the advances in breast cancer detection and treatment. And similarly, the reason for the gaps in infant mortality, I mean, well, infant mortality too, but maternal mortality and morbidity surely have a lot to do, and this is demonstrated in the reports by the World Health Organization, others who've looked at this, lack of access to high quality care at various levels. But research is showing more and more that it's not just access to healthcare, it's also living conditions from birth to the time of giving birth and that these studies that are looking at maternal, the increase in maternal mortality and morbidity attribute at least some of it, a significant amount of it, to health related, poor health related complications. So the women's health when they become pregnant is important, it's not just whether they have access to prenatal care, their health is important. If you're already unhealthy and have a complicated pregnancy, that's a problem before you seek prenatal care. I mean, I know when I've had four children, my goal was to stay, no offense to the doctors here, stay away from the doctors as much as possible, I didn't want to be constantly going to the doctor and I had, my first three children, I had attended by midwives and I only saw midwives infrequently. I had problem free pregnancies. I'm not saying that to boast about it, but I think that was because I was privileged to grow up in a middle class home and to have access to good nutrition and low amounts of stress. My parents were teachers and I was privileged to be able to be pregnant in a healthy state. That's what you want. Now, yes, of course it's also important that if you are unhealthy, if you have complications, you have access to high quality medical care and as I pointed out, the report found that even when black and white women had similar complications, black women were more likely to survive if that's an important aspect, which also has to do with health, pre-existing health status, but again, if we just focus on access to healthcare, which believe me, I support universal, high quality healthcare for everybody. So I'm not saying it's not important, but if we just focus on that and don't also realize how racism is embodied throughout the life course, then we won't solve the problem that way either. I think we'll take, oh my gosh. It's all my fault. I think we'll take two more questions. Yes, and then we'll have in the back. Cindy. Hi, my name's Kudziah Sharif. I'm a second year in the college. My question is kind of, I guess like wondering what your opinion is on how like RJ movement can continue to be inclusive of like trans folks, gender non-conforming folks and also like sex workers. They're often not included in a movement that where we talk about women and like how to be inclusive in like a healthcare environment, but also in like more political settings. Like how, I guess like what your opinion is on how effective that is or if it is, I know some people might say it's distracting from like we just need to focus on black women or like how, I guess like yeah, what you're taking on that. So again, as I explained to the question about Native American women, my focus is on black women sort of broadly and on race and gender, the intersection of race, gender and class. But again, I am speaking from a reproductive justice approach which is an intersectional approach and that's why I always like to refer to the Combahee River Collective which their statement recognizes that race, gender, class aren't the only systems of oppression. So I think we need a way to, and maybe I don't do it perfectly either, but we need a way to be able to sometimes focus on particular forms of oppression, recognizing that they're all intersecting and also to be inclusive of the whole range of people in whatever category you're talking about. So if I talk about black women, I'm including trans women, including women who are sex workers, I'm including other groups who are marginalized in mainstream ways of thinking and also often in the black community as well. So I think that's a good point. I think that's important to state and to point out. I think that reproductive justice groups have been more inclusive than mainstream reproductive rights groups, but there's still work to be done and not every organization is as important as inclusive as others. Also, it's also important for queer trans people to have their own advocacy as well and for there to be collaborations across movements. This is another aspect of reproductive justice that because it's intersectional and you recognize that these are social justice issues, you have to also recognize that to achieve anything, you have to have movement intersectionality as well. So you see the even just reproductive justice, either it has to collaborate with advocates for economic justice, criminal justice, environmental justice, or somehow bring those issues within reproductive justice. I think there's a question of strategy of what's the better way to do it, but it's essential for advocacy, activism to see that the activism itself has to be intersectional. Reproductive justice isn't just about intersecting identities. It's about an approach to how to make the world a more just place. And so it's not just about recognizing, oh, these are my different identities. It's what does that mean for how I am gonna work to end injustice? And that has to include working with people who might be focusing on some other aspect of the interlocking systems, but all along recognizing that they are all interlocking, you can't separate one from the other. I think everything I've been thinking about answering the answer to your question about what's the main cause, well, they're all important. Now, obviously we can't all, no human being can work on every single issue and every single cause, but we can, as we're working, recognize that we are linked in values, in mission, in worldview to others who are also working for the similar end of ending these oppressive hierarchies, ending state violence, ending unjust institutions in this country and around the world. We could add the whole global question as well, so it could get very complicated, but that's the only way that we're going to make a change. We're gonna take one more brief question. Yes, I already have the microphone. My name is Samantha Liu. I have my master's in public policy and I focused my capstone research on how access to comprehensive sex education could decrease a woman's likelihood to depend on welfare later in life. And so there were a couple things you talked about. I thought your talk was very thought provoking, so thank you for that. I guess it's more commentary, but for instance, when you were talking about when TANF was implemented, signed by Clinton, and there's certain policies in that that just don't make any sense to me and they continue where they're trying to prevent women on welfare from having more children, but they also threw an abstinence-only sex education into that bill. So then if a woman had a child and then was on welfare, then she was provided with useless information that maybe led her to have more unintended pregnancies and then because of other policies, she couldn't do anything but have those children. So it's like these perpetuated things, these policies that don't make any sense and they just actually make issues worse. And so if they actually wanna solve the problem of people not wanting to have, not getting pregnant when they don't intend to get pregnant, then they should approach it differently from the beginning, not just address, well, look at abortion now and how to handle this pregnant woman now. Like how do we help this woman not get pregnant when she didn't mean to? So that's just frustrating to me. Yes, yes, the policies do seem irrational unless you understand them as all being dehumanizing policies that are directed toward controlling these women based on stereotypes, again, devaluing stereotypes about them. I mean, we could add to all that you said, not only do the policies provide useless information and not support a woman's control over her reproductive life, including providing access to abortion and family planning, but they also then punish her when she has a child while on welfare by denying her in many states, it's decreasing in many states, and increase in benefits to help support the child. So, which is also a contradiction between the supposed concern for the fetus and then when the baby's born, you're going to deny the woman any extra money. It's already a piddly amount of money that's inadequate to care for the additional child. So, yes, it seems irrational, except for the logic of not respecting the human dignity of these women, devaluing their bonds with their children, not believing that they should have any control over their lives, reproductive or otherwise, and another thing that all of it pushes women towards sterilization, that would, for many of these legislators, that would be a fine solution, and they in fact said that, many of them said it during the debates about welfare restructuring. The answer is that these women should all be encouraged to be sterilized. So, they're punished for their childbearing, their autonomy, their decision making, their own control of the lives is not being respected, and the upshot of it is, all of this leads to greater rates of maternal mortality and morbidity. So, that's how I look at it. Now, what should our view be? Again, I will reiterate that a reproductive justice view would recognize how this fits into the devaluation of these women into other forms of structural inequality, and how ending those structural inequalities would support these women and children and make their, improve their health, and improve the well-being of their children, give them greater control over their lives, and value them more, but it cannot be, we have to reject, though, the view that the purpose for family planning is to control them because they're problems to society. That is not the answer. That is closer, to me, that's closer to that conservative view. Unfortunately, many liberal people espouse that view, but it's closer to that liberal view, to me, a reproductive justice approach puts aside both the liberal view that supports population control and the conservative view that supports valuing the fetus over.


So, we're continuing our innings with Cricket. The first day of the Cricket-Westernies women's Super 50 Cup took place on Monday in St. Kitts and Nevis, with wins for Jamaica, Winwood Islands and Guyana. Led by Stefani Taylor and Chanel Henry, Jamaica comprehensively beat Barbados, who are without Haley Matthews by 200 runs, here are the scores. Alright, so from round one, we had Jamaica women 293 and 46.5 overs, that 99 coming from Skipper, Stefani Taylor and Chanel Henry of course pitching in with a big 93. Barbados women went on to batten, they were dismissed for 89 all out in 37.4 overs, Najani Cumberbatch 22 and a Sabi calendar 14. What about the bowlers, Stefani Taylor doing the damage for the Jamaican women with 2 for 16, and Vanessa Watts 2 for 24 for the Bayer-Jones, they had Alia Allen 3 for 24 and Allison Gordon 2 for 35. Do we have any more scorecards? Alright, well, let's welcome Vernon Springer, who joins us for the review. Good afternoon Vernon, how are you? Good afternoon, not good news for you, you're getting bigger going down the way you are. Yeah, it was a really tough one for me to watch Vernon, of course, you know, a bit of disappointment, but we're gonna look now at the other scores from day one and we'll get to them, so we'll have a good bit of time to discuss what went wrong, what went right and hopefully they can rectify those errors moving forward. So the Jamaica Barbados match first Vernon, Stefani Taylor reminding us of why we loved her so so much, 99, it's unfortunate she didn't get that 100 and of course the Skipper grabbing two wickets as well. Alright, Vernon, one second please, we're having a bit of audio issues, so we're gonna try to rectify that and in the meantime I'm going to turn to my trusted Lance Whitaker, who's with me on set, Lance Stefani Taylor, just giving us a taste of you know who she is. Stefani Taylor is somebody who, once she picks up a bat or a ball, she has been very dominant, it's just sad that due to injuries we would have missed out on some of that from her, it was good to see her back. Yes, she has laboured a bit in the past couple of years, Stefani Taylor with her injury issue, but judging from the performance yesterday along with Chanel Henry, because not only that they got 90s but they scored them briskly, which is what you want to see in white ball cricket and at 32 years old if we think as we really do that Stefani is in the twilight of her career, maybe she's using this CWI Super 50 tournament just to remind the fans and maybe even global franchises around the world that she's still got it because I see where you know with like the 100 and the big bash and you know even the IPL, the WPL that is ongoing, she wasn't a part of that, but if Stefani Taylor is on her game, she's still one of the best players in the world, both with bat and ball, so I think yesterday was a statement that Stefani still has more shots to fire. Yeah, and what about the Barbados team, I know you touched on Chanel Henry from Jamaica, so she got her flowers, the Barbados team would feel you know a bit hard down because one there the defending champions in the Super 50 and the T20 lands, they were without their regular skipper Haley Matthews, but they still have the rest of their squad and Barbados you know being dismissed not even batting out the 50 overs. Yeah hugely disappointing start there for the Barbadians and I would have considered yesterday's result an upset result with Jamaica winning given the fact that the Jamaican team last year performed really really badly and I know that the Barbados team without Haley Matthews isn't the same and I also recognize that coming from like even 2019 when Barbados were double champions as well, a Barbados team without Matthews and the Deandre Dottin who would have been part of their setup for many years isn't the same as the one that we saw yesterday, but I still think there is enough quality in this Barbados team that would have made them hugely disappointed with what happened yesterday because to lose a 50 overmatch by 200 runs is unforgivable and I'm pretty certain that the coaching staff would be getting to work with the Barbadian girls to ensure that they can lift themselves from that result. Yeah Vernon Springer is back with us, Vernon can you hear me? Yeah I'm hearing your Lord and Clay Mariah. Yeah Lance and I was just discussing you know how disappointing it is for the defending champions to be defeated against Jamaica. Yesterday we were also speaking about you know Stefani Taylor looking like the Stefani Taylor we know. Well I think the first of all you would have to look at the Barbados bowling attack and they only they use something they use like six bowlers and they had a pretty off day and when you say off day you're talking about 15 wides and eight no balls, eight buys, nine leg buys a total of some 40 extras so they really were off the boiler but I think they ran into a Taylor and Henry who on any given day can be able to take a game away from anyone and Taylor looks like she's on a mission to be able to make a statement and as Lance said recovering back from some injuries we hope that she can be able to you know stay fit and stay on the park long enough that you can be able to take it to a next level but there must be some major concern as I was speaking to you guys before about how we are seriously dealing with women's cricket in the Caribbean and in terms of the preparation of coming into a tournament you would look and you would recognize for Barbados the defending champions yes there without their captain Haley Mathews but to lose by 200 runs it's almost like a wake-up call to find out what is happening with women's cricket in Barbados. Yeah I'm good point there Bruno and I know as the competition goes on we'll be looking at the different points and of course highlighting them but in the meantime let's take a quick look now at the other matches and the results okay so we have this one of course the Guyanese woman defeating Leeward Islands woman Guyanna batted first and of course got a 142 in 36.3 overs then we had from Rilana Griman 37 Shabika Gajinabi 20 and of course to pick up the bowlers for the Leeward Islands woman would be Shanisa Hector 3 for 11 and Rosa Lybird 2 for 17 the Leeward Islands women's they only got to 86 in 36.5 overs among the batters the top batters Divya Saxena 19 and Renees Boyce from Trinidad and Tobago she was able to make 16 pick off the Guyanese bowlers Zafiana Millington 4 for 10 and Nia Luchman 3 for 27 all right and then that final match where the Trinidad and Tobago Divas were defeated they made 185 in 48.2 overs their top scorers were Leanne Kirby with 59 and Samara Ramnaz with 28 who are the pick of the bowlers for the Windward Islands woman Afi Fletcher she got 3 for 40 Karina Noel 2 for 18 the Windward Islands woman who able to make that total 186 for 8 in 49 overs Janila Glasgow picking up 62 runs and Narissa Krafton 45 pick up the bowlers for Trinidad and Tobago woman Karishma Ram Harak with 2 for 19 and the Steffi Sugrim 1 for 16 so Finan is still with us what's going wrong with the TNT Red Force Divas hmm a whole lot I think when you look at the Trinidad and Tobago team yesterday the only one person really turned up I guess the veteran Leanne Kirby at 36 years old 59 hour 40 balls it's 57 minutes so she really was in an attacking mood 8 416 and sort of brought Trinidad and Tobago back into some respect but the Windward Islands they showed their resilience their fighting resilience by getting over the line in the 49th over and I think that would have come down to you know it was nice to see a 20 year old left hander batsman Janila Glasgow scoring 62 she spent some time at the crease 114 balls 139 minutes so that's good and Narissa Krafton scoring 45 or 77 balls also with 4 4s and 86 minutes I think also what would have maybe helped them over the line would we would have somebody like a pearl Etienne the veteran who came in and scored a brisk 23 of 22 balls 34 minutes at the crease so she kind of more or less stabilized the the lower order of the Windward Islands women's team so not all not all out there shouting because Afi Fletcher and the bowling for the Windward Islands she maybe had a half there she picked up three for 40 and so the Trinidad and Tobago I think we'll have to go back to the joint board and I think it's going to boil down to the young batters in the Trinidad and Tobago team stepping up in a very important game tomorrow against Barbados Barbados those have lost and Trinidad would have lost so that that could be a good matchup. Yeah Vernon I wanted to get a quick comment from you because we were talking on Friday when we were previewing the competition that the Windwards preparation has been good because they did have their Windward Islands regional sub-regional championship in Grenada in the weeks leading up and they were in send kits for probably a week and a half playing warm-up matches and so on and we see the performance yesterday because I would think beating Trinidad and Tobago could be regarded as upset and as an upset result but I think it is part of what we were discussing about the Windwards being one of the better prepared teams coming into the tournament. Well they've gone to a notch up the Timelands their backroom staff they've also got a psychologist which they have employed to the team and so you could see that coming out in the Trinidad and Tobago game where you know they came from behind you would have to say from behind because chasing that score it looked as if Trinidad and Tobago was going to give them some problems but like I said they dug deep and they are on a mission and one of them will still just look and see how they are going to match up against Guyana tomorrow. If we're judging from Guyana's performance against the Leeward Islands in the first game then I think it could be the Windward Islands you know maybe pushing Guyana again tomorrow. Yeah I wondered about the Windwards top order batting though because coming from the Windward Islands sub-regional tournament I saw where Narissa Crafton and Janila Glasgow were among the top scorers and even in the warm-up matches but they bat I think six and seven for the Windwards and they got runs again yesterday they were actually the top scorers in the in the batting so maybe the Windwards could have some concern about their their top order because Crafton and Glasgow that pair they've been doing a lot of the scoring for the Windwards in the warm-up game since they've been there and they took that into the opening round of the tournament. Well I think that is going to be the main problem for most of the team's lands. I think some teams going into this competition they're having problems at the top of the order from maybe one to four and so a lot of the coaches in this championship are going to try to keep up most of their better batters lower down in the order to be able to counteract that. They're just hoping that one or two persons can survive at the top and then try and counteract that new ball. So if we check at the scores yesterday almost all of the teams would have lost wickets very early you know who wasn't 24-4 or 45-5 they just lost wickets in clusters until when you know well Jamaica was in a different frame of a different frame of mind even though they got ball out and they would feel very disappointed. 289 and 46.5 overs you don't expect to get ball out but that's that's that's the norm of the day. Yeah well Vernon still a lot of cricket to play and of course we'll be looking at all the matches very very closely and we're hoping to talk to you again really soon. I want to thank you so much for your time. Yes thank you as well too. So tomorrow's games I think it's going to be a match up. We're looking hopefully that we can get a hundred from somebody. The Lee was not won a game at this championship so they are under some real pressure at home. So we're hoping that you know we can see some more young emerging players Rashadah Williams. We see Janela Glasgow sending a message early 20 years old. So we're hoping you know the Zara Claxton and company can come to the party. Yeah well spring off take care and we'll chat again soon. Thanks again. No problem. All right we're going to take a quick commercial break and when we come back maybe it's Champions League time. You'll find out stay with us.


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From VOA Learning English, this is Talk To Us. I'm Avi Ardidi in Washington. Welcome to this week's Google Plus Hangout, and we're trying something a little different this week. We're doing a game show type format, and for that we have a very special guest with us joining us from Los Angeles, Slangman David Burke. Hi, good morning David. Good morning Avi. It's good seeing you after all these years. David used to be a regular contributor on our old Wordmaster series, and was always very popular, so thank you for coming back. David, why don't you introduce yourself to our audience? Well, thanks Avi. I'm known as Slangman, and I've written 60 books on how to speak every day Slang and Idioms, and also every day Business Slang and Idioms. As Avi mentioned, I was on Voice of America for about six years helping the audiences learn how Americans really speak, because what you learn in school typically is academic English, which is fine, but we don't speak like that. So in this segment, we're going to be doing a game show where we're going to be testing our two guests on their knowledge of Slang and Idioms. I think you're going to want to. Well, great. And as David just said, we have two guests with us. We have Hamid and Navid.  Well, first of all, we take several people. I'm glad to see myself here. So tell us about yourself. You told me you were from Afghanistan, but that's not where you're living right now. Hamid, are you there? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, Hamid, you're from Afghanistan originally. Is that correct? Yeah, I'm from Afghanistan originally, living in Saudi Arabia, in Jalal City. What do you do in Saudi Arabia? I'm a programmer for Motorola products, radio communication here. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us. And our other participant is Navid, and Navid is joining us on Skype, the voice of Navid. Hi, Navid. Can you hear me? Whoops, actually. We are trying to get Navid back here. I see our Skype call dropped, and it says it's connecting, and hopefully we'll have him back in just a moment or two. But okay, so we're going to proceed with the game. And David, hi.  I think we're going to call it the Wheel of Slang. So what I'm going to do is this. I'll explain the game, which is a game we've been doing for the longest time. I invented it last night. So Hamid, you're going to be our guinea pig, and that is a slang expression.  So you are our guinea pig for this new game. So in the Wheel of Slang, what we're going to do is I'm going to spin the wheel, and then it's going to stop in a certain category. Animals, insects, sounds, colors, etc. And then I'm going to ask you a question in that category. A slang question, I'm going to test your knowledge. If you don't know the answer, you'll learn some more slang in idiots. The person whom you're trying is currently unavailable. Please leave a message off to the beat. Oh, live TV. We could have left him, yes, we could have left him a prank message. We should have left him a message. I could have left a slang message. You could have left a slang message. Well, we've got the wheel up on the video here. Hamid, are you seeing the video? Hamid. You see the wheel, Hamid? Yeah. And so David, you know, right down below me, right? It's kind of interference coming. Eight toes. What we'll do is, David, why don't you go ahead and spin it. Okay. It's all right, it's all right. Okay, go ahead and spin the wheel. Here we go, spinning. And here it goes, spinning, spinning. And let's see where it stops. Okay, it stopped on, what's stopped on? Colors. Okay, so the expression we're going to give you, having to do with colors. In American slang, we have hundreds of expressions that have colors in them. So, Hamid, what is the answer to this? If someone tells you that something happened out of the blue, does it mean, I'll give you A, B, or C. So something happened out of the blue. Does that mean it happened without warning? Does it mean that it happened very often? Or does it mean that it never happens? So, happened without warning? It happens often, or it never happens? To happen out of the blue, or to come out of the blue? Well, it's a warning, I think. What's that? A warning. It's happening, it's happening, exact. Actually, to happen or to come out of the blue means to happen without warning. For example, you might say, the car crashed into my house and it came out of the blue. It came without warning. So, to come out of the blue? It's happening already. No, it actually means to happen without warning. So when something happens out of the blue, it means that the sky was blue, and all of a sudden, something happened and the sky went from blue to gray, like in the storm. So when something happens out of the blue, it means it happened without warning. A very popular expression that we use. By the way, David, just to cut in for one second here, I think we've got Navid back. I think so. Navid, hi, are you there? Okay, we've got Navid back, but it looks like we've lost the wheel. But hey, listen, this is fun. Okay, Navid, why don't you introduce... As it happened, natural disaster, natural, natural, scientific. Out of the blue, we just lost the wheel on the... Unexpectedly, unexpectedly. You're right, unexpectedly. All right, very good. That's a good way to use it. Something... We dropped him out of the blue. It happened out of the blue without warning. Well, Navid, so now we've got you back on Skype. Tell us a little bit about yourself. I'm Navid Josh from Pakistan, and I'm a student of electronic engineering. I'm in third year. Electronic is my passion. I want to invent something. Connect it to my field in the future. And most probably, I'm a very special worker with that. I love my country. I'm a very patriotic person. I do my best in the future for my country. Well, great, so great. We're really happy to have you, and I want you to know we have so many engineers who call in to talk to us and who write to us that it's really great. And so thank you so much for joining us and a lot of electrical engineers and computer engineers and engineers of specialties I'd never heard of before. So it's great to know we seem to be popular with engineers. Okay, so Navid, we have the wheel back. I'm going to pull the... I know you can't see this, but you'll be able to watch this later on YouTube. David is going to spin this electronic wheel, which has different categories on it of questions. And then what it lands on, he'll ask you, he'll tell you the category, and then read you a question. So, David, go ahead and spin the wheel. Okay, Navid, welcome back. And by the way, it's nice that you are into computers and you're into communications. You may need your help. You dropped another call. Okay, Navid, you can't see this, but as Avi said, you will soon. We're going to spin a wheel for you. So right now the wheel is spinning. The wheel of slang and the wheel will stop the category of business slang and idioms. For anybody who ever comes to America, you need to know your business slang. If you don't, you can get yourself in a lot of trouble. So I'm going to give you, Navid, an expression from the business slang. Okay? So this expression is... Okay, here's a good one for you. To be called on the carpet. To be called on the carpet. A sentence. My boss called me on the carpet for being late. So to be called on the carpet, does that mean A, to be reprimanded, to be yelled at, or does it mean to be celebrated? To be reprimanded or celebrated? What does that mean? To be called on the carpet. Which one? A or B? This is very difficult for me. I never came across with the business English. Right. But in context, if I say to my boss, what's that? I said I never came across with the business English, but I can just give my guess. By the context. In a second. Okay, so let me give you the context again. My boss called me on the carpet for being late. So do you think that means reprimanded or celebrated? It means he yelled. Exactly. To be called on the carpet. And you can say that, not just in business English, you can also use that in everyday American slang. So yes, to be called on the carpet is a very popular expression, meaning to be reprimanded, to be yelled at. So good guess. Wait, I just saw a Hummied waving. Hummied, do you have a comment about to be called on the carpet? Well, that's recommended. First of all, I want to say sorry about my microphone. There was YouTube working. So I got interfering both sides. And now I'm alright, just alright. Let's start again. Okay, so great, you're back. So to be called on the carpet, it's interesting because I'm trying to think when there's another expression, when you say that you roll out the red carpet for someone, that's basically completely the opposite of getting called on the carpet. To have the red carpet rolled out for you is what you do for stars and kings and queens and royalty, you roll out the red carpet for them. And that's also used in a slang sense. Is it not? That's right, in fact... Red carpet many times. You heard that expression. You also say a red carpet event. So if you have a red carpet event, you have an event with lots of very important people there. In fact, I think Academy Awards that you have every year, you'll see the red carpet and the big movie stars will be walking down the red carpet and then afterwards a red carpet event, a big dinner or a big party. Okay, so Naveed, so the question there was about getting called on the carpet. And I think now, so we're going to go back to Hamid for the next question. David, or do you have rules for Wheel of Slang? How does it work? What I'm going to do is this. So Hamid, we're going to see who gets up to a thousand points first. So Hamid, you just got a hundred points for getting the answer right. Okay, now, who answered last? So Naveed answered the last question. So do you want to go back to Hamid now for the last one? Okay, we're going to spin the wheel. Okay, spin the wheel and the wheel is spinning and it's going to land on sounds. This is a really fun one. I'm going to make a sound that is slang. And Hamid, I want you to tell me what you think I'm saying and the sound I'm going to make is a sound that every American understands. All right, you ready? What does this mean? Uh-huh. How do you spell that, David? Yeah, U-U-H-H-H-H. I'm going to do that again, Hamid. This is a sound every American understands. So I'm giving you inside information. Sound again. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Hello. Hello. Oh, that's good too. Actually, that's another one. All right, I'm going to give you an example of what uh-huh means. So somebody asks me a question. And I don't know the answer to it. I say uh-huh. Now do you get it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So let me explain. I'll give you, okay, choose A or B. It means either I don't know or it means I do know. Which one do you think? Uh-huh. Does it mean I do not know? I do know or I don't know? Uh-huh. Probably we give the answer, but the answer is uh-huh, not correct. But we think that that's the correct answer. We understand the review that the answer was incorrect. So the other two persons will give us more patience about this. So it will be shocking. Oh, well, here's the thing. The sound uh-huh it matches a sentence. English is very musical. So when we say, you've heard the sentence, I do not know. Well, Americans don't say I do not know. We start to reduce it. So from I do not know, we say I don't know. From I don't know, we say I don't know. He's that music. So we can take the words away, but we keep the music. Uh-huh.  Well, unless it's your boss or you're in court or something and someone says, you know, what's the answer to this? Then you want to be clear and you say formally, I do not know. Oh, yes, yes. Do understand that slang and idioms are used informally. In other words, you have to be in an informal situation. So yeah, definitely very important that you want to impress. You wouldn't say uh-huh. But you can say I don't know that you can do. And by the way, we have another expression for I don't know. It's a really strange expression. If someone asks you a question and you don't know the answer, you can either say uh-huh or you can say beats me really popular. Beats me. Beats me. It means the question is actually winning because you don't know the answer. Thank you. That's very popular. Hamid, you can use that with anybody. Beats me. With anybody. Okay now, so going back to next up, Navid. 100 points for that one. Okay. Good. Right now, Hamid and Navid, you are both neck and neck. Neck and neck. That means like a horse race. If two horses are neck-in-neck, they're even on the finish line, so you're neck-in-neck. You're even right now. Okay, Navid. You're slaying it. Okay, so we're going to spin the wheel again for Navid. We're pulling up the wheel, and it's spinning. It's spinning, we're spinning, and it's stopping on gestures. Gestures. Okay. Hand gestures. Hand gestures. Yeah. We're getting ready here. Navid. Oh, wait. Oh, yeah. You can't see us right now, can you? We're going to have to, okay, here's the challenge for you, David, for 500 points for Slaying Man. Describe the gesture, since Navid can only hear you. Let's see. That's the challenge, Navid. Navid, you still with us? Yeah, I'm with you, but I lost your words, I didn't get you. Well, we're going to try to describe a gesture that David is going to make. And if we can't, we'll spin the wheel again and come up with a different category, but let's see the gesture, David. I accept this. Okay, first I'll show you the gesture. It's this. Oh, okay. How would you describe that? Okay, you take your, we call it the index finger, your first finger next to your thumb and you stick it straight out at the person you're talking with.  You have any idea? I know this is very difficult, trying to imagine. Isn't this often accompanied by the phrase, Tisk, Tisk? Yeah, right.  Navid, are you sort of seeing in your mind what David is describing or would you like us to spin the wheel one more time and give you a different question? I think it's better to spin the wheel. Okay, okay. But Navid, definitely watch the show afterwards on YouTube and you'll be able to see the gesture I'm doing. And Navid, why don't you explain, actually? Go ahead and give us… All right, people who are watching can see me. This means if someone does something that's really shameful that they just should not have done, you do this for shame. You can either say that shame on you or it means you've done something really bad. Yeah. Okay. Let's spin that wheel and get something… Because we only got a couple more minutes here. Okay. We're spinning the wheel and the wheel is stopping on animals. Animals. Okay. All right. Navid, are you with us? Are you hearing this? Yeah, I'm hearing it. Okay. Okay. So, Navid, the expression is we'll use the animal cat. Okay. So, here's the expression, to let the cat out of the bag. So, I'll give you an example in context. Well, I was trying to keep this a secret, but you let the cat out of the bag. So, does that mean, A, you divulged the secret or does it mean you kept it a secret? You kept the secret. Nope. Actually, it means the opposite. Right.  So, if you say, oh, no, Navid, you let the cat out of the bag. It means you divulged. You took the secret out of the bag and told everyone, which I didn't want you to do. You let the cat out of the bag. A popular expression. Oh, well, gosh, this has been… So, okay, David, so what's your tally there? Between Hamid and Navid and Slangman? Well, clearly, I did not win in my descriptions. I will take away some points from you.  As we say in slang, dead heat, which means your neck and neck, which is also slang for your even. So, it's a dead heat. Well, listen, you know, for this brand new game, Wheel of Slang, I think this is going to be a hit. That's another slang expression. A hit? Yes. And by the way, all the words we use are on our website at slangman.com. They're all in this book. Every expression I use comes from this series. And the book's equal about 20 years of living in America. So, if you want to learn slang and idioms, please visit us at my website here, slangman.com. David, listen, I want to thank you so much. Slangman David Burke joined us from Los Angeles with his brand new game, Wheel of Slang. It was a lot of fun. I want to thank Hamid, originally from Afghanistan, working now in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. And I want to thank Navid from Pakistan, who joined us by Skype. Thank you so much. And, you know, keep the learning going. Visit our website. It's learningenglish.voanews.com. Check out all the many videos we have at the VOA Learning English Channel on YouTube. Thanks so much for joining us. We'll see you next time. Take care. Where's the slang? Slang. Slang. I want to keep slang. Okay. Bye, guys. Bye, everyone.


Climate change is a spiritually urgent matter to me because God's creation, of which we are all apart, is precious. There is a loss of balance. I see the ways in which the changes in the climate are causing extreme and unpredictable weather events, affecting those near and far. On this Earth Day, I grieve that the places I enjoyed as a child may not be there for future generations, that Indigenous peoples' connection with the land is being harmed. That those who most depend on this connection to sustain life will be among the first to lose their homes to rising sea levels. I hope that we continue our tradition of care for one another and for the Earth, to support one another to reduce our use of carbon, and work toward a future that provides good jobs for all based on clean, renewable energy. We commit to making decisions about climate change in a way that respects the human rights of all peoples, particularly Indigenous peoples and all those affected by climate change and the factors that contribute to it. For the love of all creation.