People of color need the facts on COVID-19

Crystal R. Emery said she knows that if Black, Hispanic and Indigenous people are going to protect themselves from COVID-19 and become willing to be vaccinated, the messenger is as important as the message.

Emery, a New Havenarea filmmaker who is quadriplegic, has never let her disability stop her from improving the lives of other people of color. She has Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, which affects the body’s peripheral nerves, as well as diabetes.

Now, Emery, 59, has teamed up with a range of people of color including churches and other community groups, to bring accurate information to people who have been mistrustful of media and who may receive inaccurate information from social media.

“Nobody knows what to believe. Nobody knows what is real,” Emery said. “All of the Black and brown people were not getting the right information from sources that they respect.” Those same communities have been the hardest hit by the pandemic, suffering disproportionately in the number of cases and deaths.

Through a video series, texts and infographics, Emery and her organization, URU The Right to Be, has launched Our Humanity, a project “of really dealing with people’s mindsets and belief systems,” she said.

“There’s a huge gap here, and what I do well is creating information that lowers people’s defense mechanisms and that allows a new way or a different way to look at something,” Emery said. “It allows a clearer understanding of what those issues are.”

She has the backing of former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders and once and future Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, clergy, including the Rev. Boise Kimber and Bishop Theodore Brooks in New Haven and the Rev. Charles Stallworth in Bridgeport, and community leaders, including former New Haven Mayor Toni Harp and Karen DuBois-Walton, president of the Housing

Authority of New Haven.

COVID has made the reality of racial and ethnic disparities in health care more stark than ever, Emery said. “The CDC, the American Medical Association have all come out and said racism is a public health crisis,” she said. “The first part of bridging that gap is really creating prevention awareness that really looks like us. … We have over 70 videos made by Black and brown doctors.”

“It’s videos, it’s Instagram Live every Wednesday, where I have different experts speaking, where people can ask questions, make comments,” Emery said.

“Our goal is to reach at least 200,000 to 400,000 Black and brown people across the state,” Emery said.

Online workshops will be offered in English and Spanish and faith and community leaders will be trained to disseminate information.

Because getting both COVID and the flu is “a no-win situation,” she is working with Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center on both testing and immunizations.

There is so much to teach: how to properly wash hands and keep jewelry clean, understanding who you’ve come in contact with. “You may think your bubble is two levels deep but in actuality it’s 10 levels deep,” Emery said. “You have to do this person by person. You can’t send an email.” If it was that easy, a lot fewer people would have become infected with the coronavirus, she said.

Knighton said she would walk up to people and ask them if they understood her posters. “If you don’t understand it within 15 seconds of looking at it, I kept going back to the drawing board to make sure things make sense,” she said.

DuBois-Walton said Emery has been “an amazing whirlwind of activity. She’s just laser-focused” on informing people of color and making sure “the messaging that’s developed is the messaging that will resonate in those communities,” she said. She added she hoped the state would follow suit in its efforts to get Black, brown and Indigenous people tested and vaccinated.

“I’m so excited to be working with her on something that’s right here in her backyard,” DuBoisWalton said.

Kimber, pastor of First Calvary Baptist Church and president of the Greater New Haven Clergy Association, said he’s been working with Emery “to get the message out to the community that is affected the most. That’s where I feel that the state ought to be spending some time in how they’re going to get into the community.”

Another supporter, the Rev. Abraham Hernandez, associate pastor of Grace Fellowship Church in East Haven, said, “I believe that it is necessary to have a calculated and intentional effort, because it’s evident that the message has either not been effectively communicated to our people or we may need more of it.”

Hernandez is executive director of the Connecticut chapter of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, representing 300 evangelical churches. “We believe the houses of worship are institutions of trust as well as community service agencies,” he said. “Our medical experts … are people the community looks up to and trusts and our hope is to support those on the front lines by ramping our communication efforts.”

The Rev. Charles Stallworth, senior pastor of East End Baptist Tabernacle Church in Bridgeport, as well as a state representative, said Emery is “putting forth a great effort. There are multiple outlets right now, so the struggle is which one is going to be most relevant, which one is going to be funded.”

He said there has been mistrust about the COVID vaccine, because there was a perception “initially to be a rush getting something out” by the Trump administration. But while not wanting “to force it on people who don’t believe,” Stallworth said he is “trying to be as informative as possible” and will get vaccinated when he is able to.