- Just ahead on "American Black Journal," we are gonna examine the high rate of heart disease in African-American women, and what steps can be taken to lower the risk factors.

Plus, we'll learn how the Carr Center is celebrating Black arts this month, and we'll find out what Detroiters can expect during the NFL draft, which is happening here in April.

Stay where you are.

"American Black Journal" starts right now.

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(upbeat music) - Welcome to "American Black Journal."

I'm Stephen Henderson.

February is American Heart Month, and that's a time to focus on improving your heart health.

This is especially important for African-American women.

According to data gathered by the EHProject, heart disease affects more than 47% of Black women.

They also have higher rates of things like hypertension, coronary artery disease, stroke, and heart failure than women in other ethnic groups in our country.

I spoke with cardiologist Dr. Brittany Fuller from the Henry Ford Health System about how Black women can lower their risk for heart disease.

Dr. Brittany Fuller, welcome to "American Black Journal."

- Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

- So I don't think it's much of a surprise to many people that African-American women suffer more from heart disease and its attendant complications than other people do.

But there is something about the dramatic way in which this is affecting Black women more that I think caught me by a bit of a surprise.

So I wanna start with you talking about just the numbers here and how acute this difference is between African-American women and others in our population.

- So unfortunately, and it's unfortunate across the board, not just even heart health, that women, particularly women of color, African-American women are dying at a much higher rate.

There's a lot of different reasons that you can say that that's, you know, different theories that we can hypothesize why this is happening.

But I think one of the biggest things is that women, we tend to take care of everyone else and we don't take care of ourselves.

And so we ignore our symptoms and then unfortunately, when we finally do come out and say, "I'm feeling this way," women, particularly Black women, are ignored.

- I wanna come back to some of the causes a little later.

But I wanna talk upfront about the things that you think women can do and women's families can do to try to reduce this disparity.

And I say families because I think for all of us, it's helpful and maybe even necessary that the people closest to us are as invested in our health as we are.

- So that can hit a multitude of different things from diet to everyone getting on the same page as mom, sister, cousins are trying to work on eating more vegetables, eating more lean protein, cutting out processed foods, not throwing that temptation out there.

And even some of the biases going into family functions when you start to get in shape and lose weight and the family says, "Oh, you look too skinny," or, "Oh, you don't want these ham hocks."

Like it's supporting women in their journey of getting healthy.

So that's something that families can do, just simply be supportive and say, "Hey, I see that you're getting healthy.

I'm gonna join you on that journey, or I'm at least going to support you."

And then also, because women tend to, again, ignore themselves, if you see something is off, if you see that when they're climbing a flight of stairs or you're walking through the mall, that they're short of breath because women tend to, their symptoms, they may not have that crushing chest pain.

They may just become profoundly short of breath or fatigued.

If you see that and say you're walking through the mall and say, "Hey, you just seem a little more short of breath than you normally do."

Bringing it to their attention things that they may not even realize themselves because they're just slowing down and they just may not even realize that.

So just kind of paying attention to that too and helping them out and just bringing it to their attention, maybe you should see a doctor.

- Yeah, so beyond diet, exercise, and general healthy habits, what else do you say that women can be doing to minimize this discrepancy?

- So I'm a strong proponent of the fact that your mind and body are all one.

So taking 30 minutes a day for just you, whether that's meditation, whether that's prayer, whether that's shutting off all of your social media, your phones, disconnecting from the world, and just spending that time with yourself regardless of what you do.

You can pray, you can meditate, you can do whatever you want, but just choosing that 30 minutes for you, because stress hormones, I always tell my patients, stress hormones are great when you're running from a bear, not so much in day to day life.

So if you can kind of find that mind-body connection, cut off the world for 30 minutes, and sometimes it's hard, sometimes it requires getting up 30 minutes early in the morning or after your kids are in bed, 30 minutes before you go to bed, finding that time for you and just saying that's my me time.

For me, I exercise, I find that 30 minutes for myself to say I'm gonna spend 30 minutes on the treadmill, that's my time, and I carve it out.

But finding that that mind-body connection is important.

- So I wanna go back now to kind of the causes and the context for all of this.

Of course, there's a history of unequal treatment for African-Americans, and especially for African-American women, that no doubt contributes to all of these things.

But one of the other things that I want to kind of focus on is this dynamic where when women do speak up, go to the doctor, speak up and say, "Hey, this doesn't feel right," or "This seems like it's a problem," they often are not believed or listened to.

And I wanna talk about what we do about that.

I mean, you, I think being in the position you're in, is part of the solution, but there there's gotta be other things that we should be thinking about to just change the system and the way it responds to African-American women.

- And I do think that that's happening.

think we're a very, very long way away from it being equal.

I do think there are a lot of things in play right now that, you know, making sure that people have the proper training, that everyone is not the same, symptoms are not the same.

I think we're recognizing more that women and women specifically regardless of race, color, they have different symptoms, so they can have the same disease as the men, but may not present the same way.

So I think that's becoming more mainstream, that, again, women may have more shortness of breath as opposed to chest pain or their chest pain is different.

But I always empower patients and I get a lot of these patients in my clinic for obvious reasons that they wanna see an African-American cardiologist, but I always empower people to, if you don't get the answer, you're not settled in the answer that's been given to you, keep looking.

Don't just sit down and say, "It's okay, I'm fine."

You know your body better than we will ever know it because you've been with it for your entire life.

If you're not getting the answer that you want, keep looking.

And keep going and going to different doctors, different hospital systems, someone will listen to you.

It's unfortunate that we have to do that, but you have to.

- Yeah, but that requires, I think, a certain confidence and a certain comfort with the medical system that I also think is a hurdle for a lot of African-Americans.

I mean, we still have challenges getting access to healthcare for people.

And then when they do, making sure that they can kind of take control of that and speak up and decide who they'll see and make sure they get the care that they want.

- 100%, but I also, in that same token, I empower you to know your own numbers.

So getting everyone, I always empower patients, especially when I go out and do like community talks at churches and just community organizations and health fairs, know your numbers.

Get a blood pressure cuff from a drug store, write down some blood pressure numbers.

Know how to check your blood pressure when you get lab work because, you know, when you go for just a routine physical, knowing your A1C, knowing your LDL, knowing those numbers, because the more information you have, you can go out there and actually find the doctors that you need.

But without knowing that stuff, without having that information, you're kind of powerless.

So the more you have, the more you can present and say, "Hey, my blood pressure consistently at home is 140 over 80.

This is abnormal."

I would hate to say that a doctor would turn someone away and say "That's not true" if you're sitting there with a log in their face.

So, yes, there's some things, and I know that different health systems, especially here at Henry Ford, we do a lot of training and implicit bias training that I think is helping from the physician side, but we also have to empower patients as well.

- It is Black History Month, and the Carr Center in Detroit is celebrating Black arts through February.

An art exhibit featuring the works of Detroit students is on display at a downtown popup location.

The Carr Center in partnership with Bedrock is also hosting other activities in the space, including dance, music, poetry, film, storytelling, and quilt making.

I got all the details from the president of the Carr Center, Oliver Ragsdale.

I wanna talk about how you are celebrating Black History Month in 2024 at the Carr Center.

You've got this really interesting popup going at 1001 Woodward, which is at the corner of Woodward and Michigan Avenue, I think.

What's going on?

- It's right at the intersection.

I like to talk about it as the triangle of Campus Martius, the Compuware building, and 1001 Woodward.

We were invited to create a popup cultural center by Bedrock Detroit several months ago.

And we wanted to take advantage of the typical Carr Center program, thrust, which is a multidisciplinary way of making it all happen and bringing it all to the community.

We engaged performing artists, visual artists, film presenters, quilters, student artists, and have put it all together in a package of 29 days of incredible programming.

- What I love about this is that it is a little bit of everything, right?

It's kind of celebrating the broad spectrum of African-American cultural achievement in Detroit.

You've got a lot going on there.

- And I think it really it is the Carr Center.

The Carr Center, multidisciplinary, 365 days a year, we are doing this work, this popup gives us the opportunity to highlight it and bring it back into downtown Detroit.

We've had dance, we have the visual art exhibition that has students in it as well as professional artists.

We're having classical vocal music.

We've had jazz, we've looked at the potpourri of things, and we're even creating a community quilt that is being put together by a group of master quilters.

But we're inviting the community to come in and make their own personal patch that will all be quilted into the larger community quilt.

- Yeah, let's talk about the fact that this is happening in downtown Detroit, which I also think is significant.

Downtown is changing really rapidly.

The physical landscape of downtown looks different.

And there are lots more people down there than we've had in many years.

Lots of people who aren't from Detroit coming down and checking it out.

But putting this right at that corner, as you say, of Campus Martius and the Compuware building and 1001 Woodward really elevates the Blackness really of Detroit and says, "Look, there's lots going on here," but this is still home to the largest African-American population in the country.

And that is what defines so much of who we are in this city.

- And as you know, we've been downtown before and it's great to be back.

It's really significant as one of our previous iterations, being on Woodward is really significant.

And having those big windows and the opportunity for people to peek in and then to be drawn into being able to see the art exhibition or being drawn in while a poetry performance is going on.

I think that that's really very significant.

We've had a very diverse crowd that's come in in terms of racial background, in terms of ages, and so the location creates a magnet in and of itself.

Our permanent home in the Park Shelton is inside of a building, so it's not nearly as accessible as this space is.

So while we are doing Black art 365 days a year, this gives us an opportunity to really highlight and raise it up in such a dynamic location.

- I don't think you and I have talked much since you moved out of downtown Detroit to the Park Shelton, which is in Midtown.

Talk about what that has meant for the Carr Center and the other things that are going on that I know you guys are always kind of pushing the envelope with the cultural programming.

- I like the idea that we're pushing the envelope.

That's great.

Going into the cultural center was a very important decision on a number of levels.

Some that I didn't realize until we had done it.

But one is to put a Black arts organization in the cultural center is important in a town like Detroit.

The Charles Wright Museum has been there for 50 years, but it's a museum.

We are an arts center, a multidisciplinary arts center.

And being right across the street from the DIA and across the street from the Detroit Historical Society, that is really significant.

Being in a building that was segregated and now is thriving with a Black arts organization as a primary location in that building I think is significant.

And being able to bring people in, still having the opportunity to go to larger spaces.

It's not the biggest space, but it's a very functional space for us with the gallery and our performance studio there.

So it's really important, but it's great to be back downtown for this temporary basis and to be able to get the kind of audience response that we've been able to get.

- Yeah.

And the popup runs all the way through the month of February, isn't that right?

- Right.

It finishes on February the 29th when we culminate the event by awarding first, second, and third place prizes to the junior and senior division of students who participated in the program.

And I don't want to go without saying that it's really important to recognize Bedrock as the partner.

And them stepping up and making the huge investment that they've made to be able to make this happen, and to give it the kind of profile that it has.

We're really grateful for that support and the arts in general are better because of that investment.

- All right, well we will look forward to the rest of the month of programming and the awards for the student contributors at the end.

- And you can always check it out on thecarrcenter.org to find out all of the activities that are going on at the Carr Center.

- Well congratulations and always great to see you.

We gotta do this more often.

Thanks for being on "American Black Journal."

- Thanks so much.

- In just a little over two months, Detroit is gonna welcome hundreds of thousands of visitors who will be here for the NFL draft.

Now this is the National Football League's second largest event behind the Super Bowl.

I had a chance to chat with Visit Detroit President and CEO Claude Molinari at last month's Detroit Policy Conference given by the Detroit Regional Chamber.

We talked about what the city can expect from this major sporting event.

We gotta start with what I think is maybe some of the biggest news of the year in just a few weeks, really, we are gonna host an event that I think most Detroiters don't really understand how big a deal it's gonna be.

I'm not sure we're ready for the crowd that's gonna come here for the NFL draft.

- We're gonna have fans from all over the country, probably all over the world coming to Detroit.

And when you think about last year in Kansas City, they had 300,000 fans.

There was not one other NFL city within a five hour radius of them.

We have six NFL cities within a four hour drive of Detroit plus Canada.

I mean, this is gonna be a worldwide phenomenon.

60 million people are gonna be watching on TV, and we think hundreds of thousands descending on Detroit.

- Can you compare this to other events that we've had here in Detroit?

- No, there's nothing that compares to this.

It would have to be like a South by Southwest or the Olympics, which we don't host.

- We don't do those things.

- But this is as big as it gets as far as people here for a three day event and being all over the city.

- So talk about how an event like this kind of fits into the picture, the overall picture of conventions and tourism in the city.

Obviously this will be a big shot in the arm.

But there's a lot of other things also going on and going well for us right now.

- No doubt, and having the NFL choose to have maybe their second biggest signature event in the city of Detroit, that's a huge validator for our region, our city, our state.

And a lot of times when we're trying to sell our city for conventions, meetings like you talked about, well, when I can say, "Oh, by the way, the NFL chose Detroit," that immediately changes the narrative a little bit.

Like, wow, if a brand like that thinks this is a place to hold my big event, maybe I should consider it as well.

- That sell, come to Detroit, visit Detroit, what does it look like today?

And compare it to maybe 10 years ago when we were just starting to really focus on that and make some improvements that would attract more people.

Where are we on that?

- The perception of Detroit and Michigan has changed significantly.

When I first moved to Detroit in like early 2012, 2013, people would say, "Where are you from?"

I'd say Detroit, they're like, "Oh, so sorry."

And really now, I mean, I was just in California for an event and everywhere, people were like, "You're from Detroit, Detroit's killing it.

I'm hearing all this great stuff."

The excitement about it, the perception change is really great.

And I love it, and it's funny.

We always say, if we can get them here, we'll get them here.

And once we get an event here and the people start to see it, they're like, "I'm shocked, I can't believe how great this was."

And it's almost insulting because I'm like, what did you expect?

But this is a great place to live.

And we have so much industry here and there's 20 cranes dotting the sky, skyscrapers being built everywhere.

I think that, again, it's just a great feeling right now to know that we've really turned a corner and we're starting to change that perception.

- One of the things that was a knock on Detroit for some convention business for a long time has been hotel space.

The number of hotel rooms in downtown Detroit.

Talk about how that played into the NFL's decision.

I mean, this is a lot of people, they didn't seem to blink.

Why wasn't it an issue?

- Big sporting events, as long as we took care of the NFL's VIPs-- - They're not worried about everyone else.

- About 2,000.

But they were happy that we have 45,000 hotel rooms in Oakland, Wayne, and Macomb County.

So we have enough to handle these huge events because even cities that have 15, 20,000 hotel rooms downtown, they're not gonna be able to support 300,000 plus fans.

It's gonna go all over the suburbs and that's great.

But when we have those meetings and conventions that really wanna focus on seven, 8,000 people, and they want them downtown right around the convention center, we're excluded from those events.

So it was a problem.

It is a major problem right now.

In the last five years we did a study, we lost 600,000 room nights for the sole reason that we did not have enough hotel rooms downtown.

- We don't have enough.

- So if we were to double our hotel capacity, that would only put us in the middle of our competitive set.

But that would be worth probably $250 million to the region of southeast Michigan.

- Wow, so speaking of hotel rooms and building hotels, we are building a hotel here in Detroit.

I was a little surprised to learn that the former Joe Lewis site was gonna include a hotel.

I knew it was gonna be an apartment building.

I didn't know that there was gonna be a hotel.

It's a big hotel.

600 rooms.

Talk about how that will change the picture, especially being right next to, not Cobo Hall, but now Huntington Place.

- So it won't be next to, it'll be connected.

- [Stephen] It's connected.

- So it's gonna be, and 600 rooms, it steps in and it'll be immediately the second biggest hotel in the city of Detroit.

So, again, huge benefit, being connected.

I mean, that immediately is a game changer.

And when we announced that, again, I was at this recent convention and so many show managers were like, "Let's start talking about it.

When's it gonna be ready?

'27, I got an event in '28 or '29 or '30 that we're already booking it.

And I can tell you that the US Travel Association, they put their big international travel event in Detroit in '28.

The caveat was that we have to have that hotel.

- You gotta have that hotel.

- They would not have chosen Detroit if we were not building that hotel, and that's a fact.

- That'll do it for this week.

You can find out more about our guests at americanblackjournal.org, and you can connect with us anytime on social media.

Take care.

And we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] From Delta faucets to Behr paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Support also provided by the Cynthia and Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

- [Announcer] The DTE Foundation proudly supports 50 years of "American Black Journal" in covering African-American history, culture, and politics.

The DTE Foundation and "American Black Journal," partners in presenting African-American perspectives about our communities and in our world.

- [Announcer] Also brought to you by Nissan Foundation, and viewers like you, thank you.

(bright music)