Waking Up White

Waking Up White

Top of Mind with Julie Rose - Radio Archive, Episode 221 , Segment 5

Episode: Egypt, Sundance, Suicide and Altitude, Waking Up White

  • Jan 28, 2016 11:00 pm
  • 37:24 mins

Guest: Debby Irving, Racial Justice Educator and Author of “Waking Up White and Finding Myself in the Story of Race”  What does it mean to be racist? Is it enough to say that you’re “colorblind” when it comes to skin color and then avoid the uncomfortable conversations that accompany race in America? Debby Irving thought so for much of her life, but then, in her 50s, she “woke up to her whiteness” and began to see the many subtle ways that being white has privileged her existence.

Other Segments

Suicide and Altitude

14 MINS

Guest: Perry Renshaw, MD, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Utah  By one ranking, Utah is America’s happiest state. The beautiful surroundings certainly contribute – if you’ve never seen the mountain range running along Utah’s biggest cities, you’re missing out.  But here’s a paradox that puzzles public health officials: the suicide rate in the American West – Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming—is roughly 1.5 times higher than in the rest of the nation. Researchers sometimes call it "the Suicide Belt."  Is it the landscape? The social structure? Something in the “Western mindset” that causes more people to take their own life? University of Utah psychiatry professor Perry Renshaw has proposed an intriguing hypothesis – he says it’s the altitude.

Guest: Perry Renshaw, MD, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Utah  By one ranking, Utah is America’s happiest state. The beautiful surroundings certainly contribute – if you’ve never seen the mountain range running along Utah’s biggest cities, you’re missing out.  But here’s a paradox that puzzles public health officials: the suicide rate in the American West – Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming—is roughly 1.5 times higher than in the rest of the nation. Researchers sometimes call it "the Suicide Belt."  Is it the landscape? The social structure? Something in the “Western mindset” that causes more people to take their own life? University of Utah psychiatry professor Perry Renshaw has proposed an intriguing hypothesis – he says it’s the altitude.