Over the course of the past year, local 

and state governments have urgently 
declared racism as a public health crisis. 
On Aug. 5, 2020, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer 
signed an executive directive to this 
end and created the Black Leadership 
Advisory Council as an advisory capacity 
to develop and direct racially equitable 
policies and actions in Michigan. These 
declarations were long overdue, and both 
the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge 
in state-sanctioned violence in 2020 
brought to light the historical failures of 
our institutions which serve as a constant 
threat to the health of marginalized 
populations.

Health 
inequities, 
or 
systematic 

differences in the health status of certain 
population groups, are driven by social 
determinants of health. “Healthy People 
2020,” a federally supported prevention 
agenda, describes social determinants of 
health as “conditions in the environments 
in which people are born, live, learn, 
work, play, worship, and age that affect 
a wide range of health … outcomes and 
risks.” In other words, if an individual 
is born into a neighborhood that has 
poor access to health care, they do not 
have the appropriate means to maintain 
their health. These kinds of barriers are 
man-made, enforced by legislation that 
has been historically exclusionary. Thus, 
stark disparities across these factors 
must be traced back to their root cause: 
systemic racism.

Systemic racism is the foundation for 

the nation we live in today, but what does 
this ultimately mean for public health? 
What does this mean for future public 
health professionals as we strive toward 
a more equitable world for all? This 
past weekend, Public Health Awakened 
(PHA)’s Michigan Chapter hosted its 
first-ever public webinar promoting 
community education and engagement 
in a two-part series to discuss “Anti-
Racist Public Health: What it is, What it 
is not, and What it Could/Should be.”

PHA is a grassroots organization 

that came together in response to the 
2016 election. Since then, it has grown 
into a “national network of public 
health professionals organizing for 
health, equity and justice” — all the 
way from California to Washington, 
D.C., to Michigan. As a national project 
of 
Human 
Impact 
Partners, 
PHA 

focuses on incorporating the skills and 

backgrounds of its members as people in 
public health to social justice movements 
across the nation. Locally, the Michigan 
chapter has been actively involved 
in voting initiatives, harm reduction 
programs and the development of 
educational toolkits.

Importantly, PHA practices anti-

racist public health to move beyond 
performative measures and create true, 
lasting change. For the organization, 
this entails an explicitly abolitionist 
agenda, 
which 
involves 
conscious 

re-education and coalition building, as 
well as a transformation of prison and 
policing systems from the inside out. 
Chapter members Jannah Bierens and 
Vanessa Fry kicked off the first part of 
this series by discussing the importance 
of historical context when considering 
health today. By raising awareness of the 
dominant narratives that justify current 
policies, Bierens encouraged attendees 
to dig deeper into the root causes of 
population health.

“History does not end,” Bierens 

reflected, “If we don’t know our history 
… We are missing a large part of our 
narrative.”

Re-education 
demands 
critical 

analysis of past legislation and how 
it 
continues 
to 
affect 
population 

outcomes. For example, FDR’s New 
Deal aimed to stimulate the economy 
through mortgage loans, but this aid 
only extended to the white population. 
Ultimately, 
the 
federal 
program 

legitimized housing segregation and 
left predominantly Black neighborhoods 
divested 
from 
further 
widening 

the racial wealth gap. The policy’s 
aftermath is still present in cities today 
that have poor access to nutritious 
food, high exposure to pollution and 
unsustainable infrastructure for natural 
and man-made disasters. Addressing 
public health is acknowledging racist 
history and power dynamics. At its most 
fundamental level, holistic public health 
must be actively anti-racist.

In the second part of the series, PHA 

invited guest panelists Maria Thomas 
and Jordan X. Evans to speak about their 
fieldwork in a Q&A moderated by Jannah 
Bierens. Thomas is a public health 
activist who works with the Washtenaw 
County-based 
organization 
Liberate 

Don’t Incarcerate, whereas Evans is a 
racial equity consultant and Black Lives 
Matter organizer from Lansing.

It was so dark that I could barely see to 

the end of the driveway. The porch lights 
illuminated the chirping crickets and 
fireflies fluttering around. Eight-year-old me 
had no idea why my mom had interrupted 
my cartoons and dragged me and my brother 
outside in the middle of the night. My dad 
tried to light some candles but the frigid 
autumn wind kept blowing the flame out. 
When he finally managed to light them, 
we put them inside a bright red whale and 
butterfly lantern that dangled on a long 
plastic stick. I quickly forgot about how low 
the temperature outside had dropped as I 
ran around the driveway with the shining 
lantern and playing with sparklers. I still 
remember my mom watching me nervously, 
afraid I would fall and somehow catch on 
fire — which, knowing my klutziness, was, 
and still is, a likely possibility. At the time, 
I assumed that we were playing outside 
because it was Halloween or someone’s 
birthday, but as
 I know now, it was actually 

the Mid-Autumn
 Festival.

This celebration falls on the 15th day 

of the eighth month of the lunar calendar 
(Sept. 21 this year) and is also known as the 
Moon(cake) Festival or Lantern Festival. It is 
celebrated in Northeast Asian countries like 
China and South Korea as well as Southeast 
Asian countries like Malaysia and Singapore, 
where my parents are from. I have heard this 
day be referred to as “Chinese Thanksgiving,” 
but in reality, the two holidays have little 
in common aside from the time of year it is 
celebrated and family reunions.

There are many versions of the story 

behind this day, but the common retelling I 
learned is that the Earth was being scorched 
by 10 suns and no vegetation could grow. 
An archer named Hou Yi saved everyone by 
shooting down nine of the suns with a bow 
and arrow and was rewarded with the elixir 
of immortality. However, he didn’t want to 
live forever without his wife Chang E and 
gave the elixir to her for safekeeping. Hou Yi 
earned many followers for his bravery, but 
one of them found out about the elixir and 
attempted to steal it. Instead of letting him 
take it, Chang E drank the elixir herself and 
flew to the moon, the closest place to Earth 
in heaven. Hoping to someday reunite, he 
would present the moon with mooncakes 
every anniversary of that day. It is said that 
the full moon shines the brightest on this day.

Traditional mooncakes are typically 

round and golden-brown with ornate 

patterns stamped on top of them. During 
the Ming Dynasty in China, secret messages 
were hidden in mooncakes and used to 
pass information between resistance forces 
during an uprising against the royal court. 
Today, these pastries are typically filled with 
dried fruit, nuts, sweet red bean paste, white 
lotus paste or my favorite, green tea paste. 
Since the mooncakes tend to look identical 
from the outside (much to everyone’s 
annoyance), I remember sneakily taking bites 
out of several ones trying to find those filled 
with 
green 
tea 
paste 
and white lotus paste. 

Some mooncakes even have savory fillings 

such as Chinese sausage or radish. Other 
unique flavors I have come across include 
peanut butter, chocolate, ice cream and 
durian. When I was younger, I remember 
being offered ones filled with a salted egg 
yolk. To this day, I’m still not on board with 
this traditional flavor and will eat around the 
yolk when given one, but needless to say, this 
filling remains one of the most iconic today. 

Water caltrops, known as “lihng gok” in 

Chinese, are also associated with the Mid-
Autumn Festival. These bizarre-looking black 
nuts are boiled to become soft and reveal 
a white, slightly sweet nutty interior when 
peeled. This snack resembles a bat, which is 
considered auspicious because the Chinese 
character for the word “bat” is a homonym for 
the character of the word “prosperity.”

My family celebrates this day by enjoying a 

special dinner together. Every year, my mom 
wants family pictures with all the food and 
my dad repeatedly asks, “Can we eat yet?” 
My brother and I sneak food into our mouths 
when my mom isn’t looking. And there’s 
nothing quite like the coziness you get from 
being surrounded by steaming dishes when 
the weather is chilly outside. As far as I know, 
there is no one specific food associated with 
this meal like we would usually associate 
turkey with Thanksgiving. The main 
purpose is to reunite and enjoy each other’s 
company. My family in Malaysia will bring a 
table outside and put joss sticks and candles 
on it and pray to the moon. Neighbors will 
chat, enjoy mooncakes, drink tea and gaze at 
the moon together. Children will play with 
sparklers and bright red lanterns in animal 
shapes after it gets dark. My mom says that 
she remembers bringing in toilet paper rolls 
for arts and crafts time in school to make 
their own lanterns when she was growing 
up. People will barely be able to make each 
other out in the faint moonlight, but you can 
hear laughter and chatter for miles.

6 — Wednesday, September 29, 2021 
Michigan in Color
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com

By August Miller
©2021 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
09/29/21

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

09/29/21

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Wednesday, September 29, 2021

ACROSS

1 A third of XXX, 

maybe?

4 Rorschach image
8 Make oneself 

decent, so to 
speak

13 “That’s rough”
15 Clothing store 

website category

16 Spunk
17 Colombian coin
18 *Steam
20 One in a 

Hollywood crowd

22 Yoko who voiced 

a self-named 
character in 
2018’s “Isle of 
Dogs”

23 Sedate, say
24 *Western capital
28 PC file suffix
29 Skip over
30 Come clean, with 

“up”

32 __ buco
34 Paul who 

founded a pet 
food company

37 Utterly lost
40 *Systematic 

rumor spreading

43 “Buffalo Stance” 

singer Cherry

44 Fail to enunciate
45 Love of money, to 

all evil?

46 Faltering step
48 Condescend
50 “So pretty!”
52 *Wite-Out 

alternative

57 Made fun of
59 Zero-__ game
60 Hyundai sedan 

no longer sold in 
the U.S.

61 Hikers’ starting 

points ... or what 
the ends of 
the answers to 
starred clues can 
be?

65 Work on text, 

maybe

66 They’re rarely 

worth splitting

67 Blue prints, e.g.?
68 Do a fall chore
69 Tear up
70 With everything in 

its place

71 Young guy

DOWN

1 Records, old-

style

2 Siri counterpart
3 Daydreams
4 Munich-based 

automaker

5 Bucolic setting
6 En pointe
7 Taiwanese 

golfer Yani __, 
youngest to win 
five majors

8 It’s known for 

lines, briefly

9 Fork locale

10 Steel guitar 

device

11 Dakota tribe
12 Suit material
14 Postgame griper
19 It may be pitched
21 Provençal pal
25 Dog in the 

comics

26 Raises
27 Half-moon tide
31 Telescope toter
32 Come clean, with 

“up”

33 __-crab soup
35 Commonly 

injured ligament 
for NFLers

36 Riyadh native
38 Freudian focus
39 Carpenter __
41 Singer Collins
42 TV’s talking 

horse

47 “Don’t be silly!”
49 Brewpub initials
50 They’re taken on 

stands

51 Daytime TV 

mogul

53 Knight adventure

54 MSG flavor
55 “Get Out” 

actress 
Alexander

56 Like books on 

goodreads.com

58 Very serious 

indeed

62 Drug whose 

effects are similar 
to psilocybin

63 July 4th letdown
64 Pigs’ digs

SUDOKU

7
3

2

8

5
9
8

3
4
6

5

6
7

2

9

4

3
9

6
7

4

2
3

6

5

4

8
6
3

9
1

7


“How many 
subs?”

“It’s pretty 
siiiiimple, man.”

WHISPER

09/22/21

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

27 How some taxes 

I spent much of my adolescence in a locked-

in, exhausting, clawing, screaming one-sided 
war with Taylor Swift in the same way I had 
spent much of my childhood in the same kind 
of battle with the color pink. Taylor Swift sings 
about boys too much and Taylor Swift lied 
about Kanye West and Taylor Swift makes 
music for little girls and for girls that can’t 
throw and for girls that worry about breaking 
their nails, and I’m just not that kind of girl you 
know? I don’t worry about breaking my nails 
and I wear blue jeans and did you know I don’t 
own even a single dress and I retch and gag 
every single time one of her songs come on the 
radio and scream CHANGE THE STATION 
my EARS are BLEEDING mostly because 
I don’t like myself. And perhaps more than 
anything else, it was a raging, crawling sort of 
sick, a crippling envy, an aggressive jealousy 
that fueled the war I began with myself and 
by extension, Taylor Swift, because I felt like a 
huge, gaping fraud every single time I listened 
to her.

Understand 
that 
when 
you 
have 

never been allowed to be a woman, your 
womanhood is no longer an inherent part of 
yourself, but rather, it becomes a commodity, 
something meant to be bought and traded, 
stolen and taken from you against your 
will. It is put up to trial and dangled in your 
face as an untouchable, convoluted sort of 
construct a million times over, so that in time 
it becomes easier to reject the very notion of 
being a woman rather than dig and dig until 
your palms weather down to the bone, beg 
for penance and sell your dignity in search 
for a reason why. Womanhood no longer 
belongs to you, no longer presents itself as 
immovable, unshakable, tangible, something 
wholly and unequivocally yours in the same 
way you own shoes, or your nose, or your 
work or your words. Know that when you 
take away ownership of womanhood, you 
take everything attached to it, you take 
innocence and care, you take grace and 
love, you take the spine, so that soon you are 
denied existence as any kind of woman, a 
loud-mouthed woman, a stubborn woman, a 
greedy woman, a woman that likes the color 
purple so much she painted the kitchen lilac 
and the living room lavender and the dining 
room violet. Things become harder and 
flawed, infinitely more difficult to navigate 
after the fact — because womanhood has 
never been as simple as a derivation of the 
physical body. To lack in this way, or more 
so, to be made aware of this lack and to be 
treated as if you are a problem for asking 
for more, to be treated as if you are the very 

antithesis of anything feminine and a thorn 
in a million and one sides, a chewed-up pen 
cap underfoot, is to become dead while 
you’re alive. And instead, anger, grief, volatile 
pain are directed at women like Taylor Swift 
because she is everything you have never 
been and everything you have never been 
allowed to be. 

In healing, reckoning and reconciling 

with yourself are perhaps the most difficult 
tasks. You begin to lead a gritty, rock-hard, 
mucky existence fraught with disbelief so 
that livid rage turns spite into grief because 
to heal is to recognize that you were never 
an angry woman but you were a grieving 
woman, in grief over all the things that were 
taken from you, and the kind of woman you 
could’ve been and the kind of woman you 
could be if the way you loved and the way 
you were loved was anything other than 
what it was. And to write about it is the 
most assertive thing one can do and where 
do you go from here after letting the world 
know? Where to start and where to begin 
and how to tie everything back together, and 
do you stitch it up or do you pack it deep in 
a cardboard box and bury it under the time 
capsule in your backyard or do you give it to 
the wind or tie it to the sort of special balloon 
that could break the sky?

And more than anything else, in healing, 

the answer lies with Taylor Swift. 

I didn’t like Taylor Swift for many reasons. 

First, because I didn’t like country music and 
then because I didn’t like pop music and 
then because I didn’t like her Reputation Era 
because who writes an entire album in the 
deep dark sewers of social cancellation after 
being subsequently canceled and Kanye and 
Kim were right and she was wrong. I didn’t 

like Taylor Swift because I thought she didn’t 
make music for women with one foot here 
and the other over there, women who existed 
in the ill-conceived derivation of purgatory 
that comes with feeling not enough of 
something and too much of something else, 
women that wrestled and fought and begged 
for space and understanding and humility 
and to be taken as they were, and mostly, 
for women like me. I didn’t like Taylor Swift 
because I didn’t like me. It’s easier to find 
flaws in a woman like Taylor Swift than to 
ever question why you found them, why 
you picked at them, had your fingers ready 
to unravel snags in every album she had 
ever put forth or her fanbase or her lyrics. 
It’s easy because she’s Taylor Swift and she 
won’t hear a word you say or ever put you in 
your place except she’s Taylor Swift and she’s 
been questioned and ripped apart not just by 
you, but the whole world so much that either 
people rabidly love her or hate her. 

I listened to Taylor Swift for the first 

time in seven years a month before my 
19th birthday. Her lyrical genius was 
mesmerizing, fantastical, so extraordinarily 
well put together that I’d counter Taylor 
Swift is a writer before she ever is a singer. 
 

Her albums are never an “open and shut” 
case, but rather an evergreen testament to 
the sort of love and outrage that we never 
seem to forget because nothing is over until 
it’s really over. I understand now what it 
means to truly listen to Taylor Swift and to 
not feel like a liar or a phony or a fake in doing 
so, in knowing that she too, has had to piece 
herself back together and that to heal is to 
listen to Taylor Swift and feel like enough, 
and mostly, to love yourself to the moon and 
to Saturn.

Taylor Swift as a means of healing

SARAH AKAABOUNE

MiC Columnist

Courtesy of Atiya Safi Farooque

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

The Mid-Autumn Festival

VICTORIA TAN 

MiC Columnist

What is anti-racist public health?

EASHETA SHAH

MiC Columnist

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

