Interracial marriage, bioethics, life on a Navajo reservation, and studying multiculturalism with LaVera Crawley and Alec MacLeod, Ep. 53

Multiracial Family Man

Ep. 53: LaVera Crawley and Alec MacLeod are an interracial couple. LaVera is a African-American doctor, who grew up in Cincinnati, received her undergraduate and medical degrees at Historically Black Colleges, worked on a Navajo reservation as a M.D., and now serves as a Palliative Care Chaplain.

In the field of medicine and ethics, LaVera is internationally known for her work on health disparities for palliative and end-of-life (EOL) care. She served as an expert on racial, ethnic, and cultural issues for the 2004 NIH State-of-the-Science of EOL Care Consensus Conference; was commissioned by the California Healthcare Foundation to conduct an in-depth summary of EOL health care delivery for California’s multi-ethnic, multicultural, and racially diverse population; and served a 3-year appointment as an ethics advisor for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She was honored with the Soros Faculty Scholars Award for the Open Society Institute's Project on Death in America in 1999-2001, The Howard Temin Award from the National Cancer Institute in 2003-2008, and the Stanford University Faculty Fellows Award in 2007.

After a 16+ year career at Stanford as an empirical bioethicist, LaVera Crawley embarked on a new career in the art of spiritual companionship, bringing together her work in medicine, ethics, social justice, teaching, research, and public health with her longstanding interest in spirituality. After completing her clinical pastoral education (CPE) in chaplaincy, she began serving in her current role as a Palliative Care Chaplain at the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center. She is also in training to become an Association for Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE) Certified Supervisor.

Inspired by the Schwartz Center’s Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) Program for Healthcare Providers, LaVera’s goal as a Chaplain Supervisor is to create and implement a CPE Fellows Program for physicians, nurses, social workers, psychologists, and other healthcare professionals to enhance provider skills and competencies in addressing the spiritual, existential, and religious needs of patients and families facing life-threatening illnesses.

Her husband, Alec MacLeod, is a White man of Dutch an English extraction, who grew up in rural, upstate New York,lec MacLeod is a Professor in Undergraduate Studies. He received his undergraduate education at Hampshire College where he studied philosophy and fine arts. Alec also holds a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from Stanford University (1983) and has studied information science at the University of California at Berkeley.

His primary areas of preparation are in the studio arts, art theory and information science. He is a practicing visual artist whose work has been exhibited nationally. Additionally, his work in the area of cultural studies includes the visual culture of the internet (especially implicit assumptions in the design of graphical user interfaces), representations of "the Other" in U.S. colloquial English, and visual explorations of theories of perception.

As an educator, Alec has used participatory collaborative methods of inquiry to explore the ways in which pedagogical approaches can assist learners in examining and changing their assumptions about race and ethnicity. He has trained as a multicultural trainer at Equity Institute and Visions, Inc. A member of a research collective, the European-American Collaborative Challenging Whiteness, he has participated in an inquiry into white identity and ways in which white people can become more aware of their identity and its implications. The group has presented its work at educational conferences and recently authored an article entitled "White on White: Communicating about Race and White Privilege with Critical Humility" in Understanding & Dismantling Privilege: the Journal of the White Privilege Conference.

Alec has over twenty-five years of experience as a facilitator of learning in higher education as a classroom teacher and as an administrator. He was a member of the design team for the undergraduate cohort based degree completion program and the inaugural director of that program. In addition to his interdisciplinary courses in the Undergraduate program, Alec teaches courses in visual thinking, creativity, and visual culture.

Listen as LaVera and Alec speak with Alex about their marriage, their careers, and their views on race and diversity.

For more on host, Alex Barnett, please check out his website: www.alexbarnettcomic.com or visit him on Facebook (www.facebook.com/alexbarnettcomic) or on Twitter at @barnettcomic

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Intro and Outro Music is Funkorama by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons - By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/