November 12, 2009
New book on poverty and faith was an education in itself for Bothell nursing prof
When Mary Abrums’ book, Moving the Rock: Poverty and Faith in a Black Storefront Church, is released Nov. 15, it will be the culmination of a process that began 25 years ago.
At that time, Abrums had her master’s in nursing and had a faculty position in the UW School of Nursing that included working in a teen pregnancy clinic. Many of her clients were African American, and Abrums became curious about why the infant mortality rate was then (and remains) higher among the black population.
When she decided to get a doctorate, Abrums chose the field of anthropology rather than nursing because she wanted to learn a “different way of looking at things.” She found it through her studies and dissertation.
“In anthropology, you’re asked to move out of your comfort zone,” Abrums said. “I had small children so I couldn’t go to an exotic location [to do research], so I thought maybe I’d be out of my comfort zone just by going to a neighborhood I don’t usually frequent.”
That’s why, in 1995, she found herself attending a small black church in a neighborhood not far from where Seattle Police officer Timothy Brenton was shot recently. Thanks to an introduction by one of her committee members, Abrums was invited to participate in activities of the church, which has only 35 members. She thought that perhaps by learning about the lives of the congregants, she could glean something about the health disparities she had seen as a nurse.
The task turned out to be somewhat more difficult than she had anticipated. Although the people she met were warm and welcoming, they were skittish about being interviewed. It took a year of attending the church and getting to know people before Abrums was able to do any formal interviews. And the interviews were not what she expected, either.
“When I first started interviewing I had a whole long list of questions,” she said. “But my first interview was not very successful, even though it was with [her main contact at the church]. There were things she was willing to share and things that she wasn’t, and some of my interview questions went right up against a wall.”
Abrums realized then that the difficult interview process related to power and control. She had been careful about selecting a research site where her subjects, not she, would have the power. However, by being in charge of the questions, she had changed the power dynamic in their relationship — she had taken away control from the interviewee.
She also found that her manner of phrasing questions was a problem.
“One of the questions I asked that was really offensive was, ‘Why do you think infant mortality rates are so high in the black community?’ They would just flat out deny it,” Abrums said. “What they taught me is that the question is always framed in a very blaming way. That question makes assumptions about people.”
The assumptions, she said, come out of research articles that cite statistics linking high infant mortality rates to poor prenatal care, drugs and alcohol.
“That’s what the women were denying,” Abrums said. “They were denying the way the statistics were framed. They knew what the statistics said and the assumptions that were made about them. So they were denying the statistics because they saw through the framework. They didn’t drink, they didn’t smoke, they took good care of their children, they tried to eat well during pregnancy, they went to the doctor. So none of those things applied, therefore the end result didn’t apply either because of the judgment that came with the question.”
Abrums ended up throwing out her list of questions and approaching interviews in a more open manner. She’d start by asking her subjects to tell the stories of their lives in any manner they wanted to. Then she’d follow up with some general questions — some health related, some not. She interviewed eight women in the church, including three generations of the two main families.
The material went into an ethnographic dissertation, and Abrums went on to teach in the nursing program at UW Bothell as soon as she finished her doctorate. But she kept in touch with her research subjects, always wanting to publish a book because “they really wanted me to tell their stories.”
Finding the time was difficult with her teaching load, but Abrums devoted several summers to it and found AltaMira Press, a division of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., that is devoted to anthropology, archaeology, public history, and museum studies.
What did she learn in her research? She said it’s impossible to make generalizations or comparisons with such a small number of subjects, “but you can learn a lot about racism and poverty and how people manage. You can learn a lot about everyday kindness and everyday support, how people lean on their church community and depend on their faith to get them through hard times.”
One of the families Abrums focused on was poor; the other was a lower middle class working family.
“I think racism is really conflated with poverty,” she said. “When I would go out with the really poor family, they were treated differently and I was too. There were people who didn’t like them to use the restroom. There were people who came up to them in stores and assumed they were shoplifters. Those reactions were extended to me as well because I was with them. I kept thinking that I would provide them with some protection or better treatment, but that’s not the way it works.”
And being lower middle class and having a job wasn’t necessarily a protection either, as the other family found out. One family member, a bus driver, told Abrums a story about going in to a grocery store to buy a snack during her bus run. She came into the same store regularly for months, wearing her Metro uniform. Then one day a clerk noticed her coin purse bulging in a shirt pocket.
“Give me those cigarettes,” she said to the bus driver.
“What cigarettes?” the driver replied.
“The cigarettes you put in your shirt pocket,” the clerk said.
“I don’t have any cigarettes,” the driver said. “I don’t even smoke.”
“She told me she left there so shaken,” Abrums said. “She thought, ‘What is this about? I’m here in my uniform. I’ve been in here every day, and all of a sudden this clerk thinks I’m stealing.’ So things like that were really heartbreaking.”
Perhaps the greatest impact of the research that led to the book is on Abrums’ teaching. She said that when she teaches about health disparities, she focuses on stories as well as statistics. For example, she tells a story about an elderly woman who owned her own home and did not want to end up in a nursing home. But she had little education and was cheated by workmen, ending up with a lien on her house. Then she got sick and went to the hospital. She was labeled as terminal by health professionals when she refused dialysis, which meant she was denied rehabilitation services. Therefore, she couldn’t live at home and was taken to a nursing home, and the nursing home eventually got her home to pay for her treatment.
“It’s a complicated system and it makes it hard on people,” Abrums said. “I don’t have answers, but I use that story a lot to show how she was judged due to factors related to poverty and race, and how our medical/nursing attitude, the ‘we’re always right’ piece, contributed to this problem.”
She said that teaching about disparities and discrimination in health and how those things impact individuals and our society is her passion, and that’s evident in the introduction to her book, where she tells a story first published in the April 1985 issue of Sojourner, a story that gave the book its title:
“A group of Catholic sisters met with a diverse group of women from their community. The panel was scheduled from 9 a.m. until 3:15 p.m. The lone black participant said that she did not know much about Catholic sisters and would just listen. She did so until 3 p.m., when she said the following:
“Well, I don’t know if I can say it too good, ’cause you know I didn’t go to school much. But in my heart I know. I’ll just tell you a little story. Now all you nice ladies imagine that you lived in a house by a road on the top of a mountain. And there’s a big rockslide and a big boulder came down right around the corner on this mountain. And every car that came round that corner hit that boulder and smashed up. Now I can understand what all you’d do. I heard you. You’d run right out and you’d take those people out of that car. You’d bandage them up, and you’d bring them in your house and feed them, and you’d pray with them. And when they got well, you’d send them home. Well, sister, what I think you ought to do is send somebody out to move the rock.”
In the introduction’s close, Abrums wrote, “In doing this research, I have moved myself and that is important, but it still does not move the rock. This book is dedicated to that effort.”
