Rush executive: Trifecta is Chicago’s wake-up call
Darlene Hightower, Rush University Medical Center’s vice president for community health equity, practiced law for two decades. The majority of her work focused on civil rights, but here and there she’d find herself in a courtroom litigating a contract.
“One day I was arguing a motion with a guy who was just a total jerk,” Hightower, 49, told me last week. “And when I say I was angry — I was just livid. I remember walking out of the courtroom and thinking, ‘If I’m going to be that mad about something, it better be about something that matters. Not some contract dispute.‘”
She decided to shift her passion toward the nonprofit sector, first as the associate director of the Metropolitan
Chicago Breast Cancer Task Force, then as executive director of Public Allies Chicago before moving to Rush in 2016.
Health and equity are intricately entwined, and Hightower’s mission is to improve both for Chicago residents, particularly in the city’s West Side neighborhoods that surround Rush. She serves on the steering committee for the city’s Racial Equity Rapid Response Team, a task force that Mayor Lori Lightfoot activated in April to address COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on the city’s Black and Latino communities.
Black Chicagoans are dying from COVID-19 at a higher rate than any other racial demographic, according to public health data. Latinos have a higher infection rate than any other racial or ethnic group in Illinois.
Hightower knows that the factors contributing to those disparities predate the coronavirus.
“We know back in 1995, when there was a big heat wave in July, that vulnerable populations bore the brunt of who died,” she said. “It was the same with the AIDS crisis in the ’80s; Black and brown communities were hit hard by that epidemic. And now here we are with the COVID-19 pandemic. You have neighborhoods and communities and people who were already vulnerable in a number of ways, and this is just one more shock, one more hit.
“None of this is surprising,” she continued. “We keep repeating history over and over again. It’s like tripping over the same rock.”
But this time, she said, may be different.
Hightower senses an increased understanding about systemic and structural racism, and a growing appetite for dismantling it.
“We’ve got this trifecta of events happening — from the pandemic to the economic crisis to the killing of George Floyd,” she said. “We are in unprecedented times, and that calls for unprecedented solutions. I’m really hopeful.”
While the topics of race and justice and economic upheaval dominate the national dialogue, Hightower is hoping that elected officials, business leaders and residents alike will continue to connect the dots between the health disparities that COVID-19 has laid bare and other inequities that plague Chicago’s underserved neighborhoods.
“If we’re really trying to get at things like outbreaks in Black and brown communities for COVID-19 or any health epidemic, we’ve got to start doubling down on our investment in the social factors that affect people’s health,” she said. “We know that educational attainment, access to quality jobs, walkability of a community, access to grocery stores — all the things that create a healthy and vibrant person — also create healthy communities.”
She’s hoping that people can look at the protests rolling across Chicago for the past month and understand that they’re related to — not a distraction from — the violence that has spiked in the last week.
“It’s all connected,” she said. “Violence in our communities and Black Lives Matter protests are both cries for help. Violence in communities is about, ‘I don’t have economic opportunities here. I don’t have great schools. I don’t have opportunities period, and so my options are limited. That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing.’ That’s a cry for help. Black Lives Matter is a cry for help. It’s like, ‘See me. See my humanity. See me as an individual and a human being that has friends and a family and hopes and fears and dreams. Don’t see me as just the color of my skin or your perceptions of what I am, but see me.’ Both of those things are cries for help.”
When she’s in a room of influencers, she talks about the historic and contemporary practices that have hung the West Side out to dry. She talks about redlining, a discriminatory practice that denied loans to neighborhoods deemed too high-risk.
“Our neighborhoods on the West Side fell into that red zone,” Hightower said. “That meant investment didn’t happen there, from businesses to mortgages to everything else. And even though redlining was outlawed in the 1960s, the imprint of that kind of thinking and the narrative around those neighborhoods still holds true.”
She cites a recent WBEZ/City Bureau study that found from 2012 to 2018, 68.1% of dollars loaned for housing purchases in Chicago went to majority-white neighborhoods, while 8.1% went to majority-Black neighborhoods and 8.7% went to majority-Latino neighborhoods.
“That is racist,” Hightower said. “I’m just going to be as blunt as that. If you don’t have investment in these neighborhoods from a home ownership perspective, then that means the viable businesses aren’t there, the grocery stores aren’t there. It’s high poverty so you have high crime rates. Again, these are structural things that happen in these communities over and over and over again.”
I asked her what Chicagoans can do to make sure this moment of increased awareness and burgeoning understanding turns into measurable progress.
She had three suggestions.
“The U.S. census is still out there,” she said. “It’s kind of gotten lost behind everything else that’s going on, but that dictates how many federal dollars are invested in these neighborhoods. If you want to have an effect in your community, fill out the census form. Make your voice count in that way.”
“Register to vote and exercise your right to vote,” she said. “Folks forget about the fact that a lot of folks fought and died for the right to be able to vote.”
“And get engaged with your particular community,” she said. “There are so many community-based organizations doing incredible work. Austin Coming Together. My Block My Hood My City. Forty Acres Market. There are so many organizations, not just on the West Side but across the city, that are doing great work. Pick one. Volunteer or write a check or do both.”
She meets people all the time, she said, who she calls “silent leaders.” People who grow community gardens or run youth programs or volunteer at food pantries.
“I see amazing people doing amazing work,” she said. “I’m not discouraged because every day I see people who are incredibly inspiring and who are doing the work.”
None of it’s easy or fast. Many hands won’t make it light. But it’s on all of us to lend one, to keep the work from faltering when the stakes couldn’t be higher.
“We keep repeating history over and over again. It’s like tripping over the same rock.”
— Darlene Hightower, Rush University Medical Center’s vice president for community health equity