It is important that we all create inclusive places of higher education for all people. Perhaps a good place to do so would be with the most invisible.

For me personally, the fact that you have an Asian girl on the poster of Mean Girls as one of the plastics is one of the biggest things. I think it’s a really big deal. I wasn’t cast because of the way that I look but I also wasn’t not cast because of the way that I look. And the fact that that shouldn’t be a headline, it should be a norm. I’m so glad that in 2018 everybody, not just young ethnic women, but everybody who comes to see the show sees that young women of color not only have the right to be heard but have the right to take up space. That’s something that I didn’t really have growing up. I think it’s really important to tell stories about race and racial divide and historical stories, but the fact that this truly does take place in a high school in 2018 and you see that represented on the stage, I think that’s really important and I think that is subversive in its own way and political in its own way without calling any attention to it.

Black infants in America are now more than twice as likely to die as white infants — 11.3 per 1,000 black babies, compared with 4.9 per 1,000 white babies, according to the most recent government data — a racial disparity that is actually wider than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery, when most black women were considered chattel. In one year, that racial gap adds up to more than 4,000 lost black babies. Education and income offer little protection. In fact, a black woman with an advanced degree is more likely to lose her baby than a white woman with less than an eighth-grade education.
This tragedy of black infant mortality is intimately intertwined with another tragedy: a crisis of death and near death in black mothers themselves. The United States is one of only 13 countries in the world where the rate of maternal mortality — the death of a woman related to pregnancy or childbirth up to a year after the end of pregnancy — is now worse than it was 25 years ago. Each year, an estimated 700 to 900 maternal deaths occur in the United States. In addition, the C.D.C. reports more than 50,000 potentially preventable near-deaths, like Landrum’s, per year — a number that rose nearly 200 percent from 1993 to 2014, the last year for which statistics are available. Black women are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts, according to the C.D.C. — a disproportionate rate that is higher than that of Mexico, where nearly half the population lives in poverty — and as with infants, the high numbers for black women drive the national numbers.