January 24, 2024:Mirrorer

Things can truly change with more and intentional diversity. Take the medical field for example, where only 2.8% of doctors are Black women. A new documentary series is highlighting the stories of that select few and bringing them to a wider audience. Faces of Medicine is showing the first episode of this ongoing journey at several locations across western Massachusetts over the course of February, and we talk with the driving force behind this film, Dr. Khama Ennis, about the importance of seeing oneself in these settings both as patient and as colleague. Then we examine children’s books, where only 1% of the field depicts Indigenous/Native children. Adding to that number is Larry Spotted-Crow Mann’s latest book “The Adventures of Kehteau”. It’s the first in the Native Explorer Series, which will journey across various Native lands, through their customs and cultures teaching folx all the while of the people on whose land we still live. We get into the importance of seeing these cultures, and the ways to teach about them that the book suggests. And we’re being more diverse in our language as well. A question from Mike in Holyoke plunges our resident wordster, Emily Brewster, senior editor at Merriam Webster into a discussion about adjectives and how we qualify their intensity in a battle between “more” and the suffix “-er”.