Dr. Cheryl R. Clark on the pandemic’s impact on Black and Brown communities and the promise of ‘emancipatory research’

You may have seen those “All of Us” research flyers going around Harvey, as of late. The National Institute of Health’s latest initiative aims to gather information about participants’ environmental conditions in hopes of improving healthcare outcomes.

Harvey native Dr. Cheryl R. Clark, MD, co-chaired a task force shepherding that groundbreaking work. Clark, a distinguished internist based in Boston, Massachusetts, boasts over two decades of exemplary service in the medical field. Her professional journey is marked by affiliations with esteemed institutions such as Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital.

A Thornton Township High School alumna, she pursued undergraduate and medical studies at Stanford University School of Medicine before embarking on her career in Boston. Clark holds a doctorate from Harvard School of Public Health.

Dr. Clark’s areas of specialization encompass a wide spectrum of medical conditions, with a notable emphasis on stroke management. As an internist, delivers comprehensive care to adult  patients, prioritizing preventive measures alongside diagnosis and treatment protocols. 

Social science teachers like Dorothy Bryant at Harvey School District 152 and deans at Thornton, she said, pushed her to think globally. “I went to Canada, to Quebec, to learn French and Spanish,” Clark said.

Her family relocated to the city in the 1940s. Decades later, Harvey’s manufacturing jobs disappeared. That history drives her work today. She’s concerned with how the environment—how one lives, works, and their larger social fabric—affects healthcare experiences. “Part of what was just a great experience about being in Harvey was that kind of closeness. All the neighbors knew each other; there was that close-knit thing that was also health-promoting,” she said.

Clark was recently appointed the inaugural director of the Institute for Health Equity Research and Policy, working to develop new research knowledge bases to address healthcare disparities across Massachusetts. In an interview with the HWH, Clark addressed the structural inequities within the healthcare landscape, reflected on how her Harvey upbringing shapes her national work today, and surmised how transformational leadership can help affect positive change in a post-COVID-19 world.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

HWH: What impact do you think the pandemic will have in the long term on many aspects, and how do we address them? 

Dr. Clark: I wound up just out of luck, taking care of COVID patients during the alpha phase at the height of the pandemic in Boston. We didn’t know what was going on, or what to do. When the pandemic hit though, we saw that Black and Brown people were disproportionately impacted and came into our hospitals; it meant that we needed to think differently and that we had people who had preferred languages other than English. We had to figure out how to—when our interpreters couldn’t come in because of the face masks and all these things—even think through language, accessibility and handling those inequities. Many facilities got through in healthcare because of the emergency funding through the pandemic and are now trying to understand how to keep operations up and running. 

The pandemic, in many ways, exposed these underlying structural problems. However, we haven’t yet learned the lessons from that. Part of what we needed to do during the pandemic to ensure that Black and Brown people were not disproportionately dying was to address the food shortages and supply chain issues. A lot of people also couldn’t go to work and were not receiving their salaries. We worked closely with community organizations to devise strategies for reclaiming food and ensuring that  food insecurity was addressed. Part of what I think needs to  happen continuously is investing in community-based organizations to be a part of this fabric. It was certainly important during the pandemic, and I think it’s even more important now.  

HWH: Let’s delve into your work at the Institute, particularly regarding emancipatory research. Could you elaborate on what this entails and how it diverges from conventional healthcare models? 

Dr. Clark: The idea is that we need to do at least two things: one is that to improve  health, we need to be asking questions that are relevant to communities that have the lived experience that people who are close to the experience, have the best solutions, the best view of  the problems and the best opportunities. 

It also means that we are trying to get free. We are trying to make sure that we’re not just kind of rehashing all the same statistics that we already know about. The pandemic is a key example. We could have told you we were going to have suffering, death and sickness before the  pandemic hit because we sort of knew it. How do we get out of this cycle? How do we make sure that we are putting solutions in place that try to fix problems?

HWH: How do you, when deeply involved in such work on the ground, establish trust within these communities, given the historical violence and unethical experiments within the healthcare system?

Dr. Clark: I think there are three parts to making sure that we build trust. One, as we said, is that we need to make sure that we talk about the history and the current experience because without acknowledging that, we can’t have reconciliation and healing. The second is that we must undo the disinvestment and disenfranchisement in community spaces so that we have the resources that we need to own the  research process. And then finally, we must change what we think research is and what it’s meant to do: science, right? It comes from us. The last thing that I’ll tell you is just related to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is a good example of this. 

When we talked to community members about whether people wanted to get the vaccine when it first came out, we didn’t see hesitancy as much as we saw curiosity: people wanting to understand more about what this is and wanting somebody who would take the time to explain what the vaccine was about. And when we gave those explanations, we also gave a bit of the history. 

An enslaved man in Boston, his name was Onesimus, was the person who brought that technology to Boston. Though there’s not a lot known about him. If you Google and look at the history around Onesimus, he was the person who did a strategy very similar to the way we teach our bodies to fight COVID, by teaching our bodies to make a protein that fights it. He was one of the people who taught the physicians in Boston this technique that came from his communities. Once we reclaim this idea of knowledge historically and presently, we have the knowledge that we need to solve our own problems, that we are scientists who create that. It creates a completely different relationship between science, the process, and our communities that allows us to take leadership there. 

HWH: What does your leadership style look like? Especially in a post pandemic world.  

Dr. Clark: I aspire to a transformational leadership style, one where I flatten hierarchies. For instance, when I’m working as a physician in the hospital, it’s crucial to ensure that everybody has an opportunity to contribute to the plan. I believe that even non-healthcare clinicians can provide valuable insights, such as recognizing when a patient hasn’t eaten much or hasn’t been active. 

Early on, we realized that many of our employees, whose preferred language wasn’t English, didn’t fully understand safety and masking protocols. So, we made efforts to communicate effectively with all employees. Part of a transformational style is valuing everybody’s input. As you make decisions and set your course and strategy, it’s crucial to put everybody on an equal footing, flattening the hierarchy so that everyone has a chance to contribute their knowledge, talents, and abilities to the strategy. Ultimately, with a transformational leadership style, you still make decisions and take on authority and responsibility, but you do it in a way that leverages the collective expertise of the team.