Q&A: Meet Andrew Williams, educator, anthropologist and advocate
This was originally published for Hazelden Betty Ford’s monthly Recovery Advocacy Update. If you’d like to receive our advocacy emails, subscribe today.
Andrew Williams is the first director of diversity, equity and inclusion at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, the nation’s leading nonprofit system of addiction treatment, co-occurring mental health care, recovery resources and related prevention and education services. In that role, he drives efforts to create a more diverse, equity-minded and inclusive organization, and partners with key colleagues and community stakeholders to create opportunities to serve more individuals, families and communities from historically underrepresented and marginalized backgrounds. Eight months into the role, he finds his work firmly positioned at the intersections of recovery advocacy, health equity and healing justice.
In this exchange, we were grateful to learn more about what inspires Andrew; his personal truths and connections to addiction and recovery; his anthropological insights on social change movements; and his reflections this Black History Month. In March, look for a video interview between Andrew and Mark Sanders, the great clinician, trainer, advocate and founder of the Online Museum of African American Addictions, Treatment and Recovery.
Q: In what ways have addiction and recovery most meaningfully intersected with your personal life experiences?
Within my immediate family are compelling stories of both substance use disorder and recovery. Sadly, my step-father died at the age of 50 related to his substance use disorder. My mother has been quite open about her struggles to overcome the tenacity of alcoholism in her life. As well, my step-brother, a former elite NFL player, also moved through a well-publicized and inspiring story of addiction and recovery, returning to the league after a 6-year absence. Combined their stories remind us that hope and healing are within our reach if we can get connected to quality, loving care.
Among the many things I have appreciated about my first seven months at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation is the ways hearing the stories of our colleagues and patients, including children, have pushed me to interrogate and grapple with the potential short and long-term impacts of growing up in a house where drug use and alcoholism were every day realities.
Q: You are a very experienced DEI leader and educator, and a student of human culture. In other words, you think deeply about issues of humanity. As an anthropologist, what insights have you gained and found most interesting in this first year of working in the addiction and recovery space?
I’ve been struck by the parallels between the mission of Hazelden Betty Ford and the work of advancing racial justice in the broader society and within our organization. In some ways, our racial justice work is partly about helping ween Americans of their addiction to racism and anti-blackness. And as is commonly understood within the field of substance use disorder treatment, naming and accepting that one has a problem is the first step toward healing. Unfortunately, as a nation, we have been very reluctant to honestly reckon with the history of our nation as a colonial settler society based on genocide, colonization, and slavery. We see this in recent efforts to ban books and check the influence of critical race theory in our public schools. As a result, racial healing and progress remain elusive. Instead, we are encountering the calcification of our racial fault lines, lingering inter-generational trauma, and increased racialized violence. And it is these persistent nightmarish realities that have led BIPOC communities to be disproportionately impacted by our nation’s current opioid and overdose crisis.
As a cultural anthropologist with an interest in racism and African American history, culture, and politics, I was definitely aware of the overcriminalization of drug use by BIPOC and the disparate policing of BIPOC who use drugs and the devastating and lasting effects of this expression of systemic racism. But I had little awareness of the massive disparities in opioid overdose deaths among African Americans and Native Americans that have emerged over the last several years. This has been perhaps my most unsettling, but motivating new insight. And I’m actually looking forward to examining the anthropological literature on addiction and treatment in the months ahead.
Q: What inspires you?
My African American ancestors are an on-going source of inspiration for me. Thanks to my own genealogical research supported by Ancestry.com and 23 and Me, I was able to discover the names of a number of my enslaved ancestors and document their journey from a plantation in Virginia to a precarious freedom in Indiana. Among their descendants are my two 4th-great uncles Isom and Michael Ampey who served in the historic 54th Regiment in the Union Army, the first Black regiment in the Union Army which fought in the crucial Civil War battle at Fort Sumter. The story of this regiment is documented in the movie, Glory. The courage, strength, resilience, and deep love of Black people and freedom demonstrated by my enslaved ancestors and their descendants fuels my passion for social justice, including the specific DEI work I do within our organization.
Although I may not agree with all their positions and strategies, I’ve also been inspired by the new generation of Black Lives Matter leaders who have offered us new models of movement leadership and an incisive critique of anti-blackness in American society. I’ve been especially sparked by their courage to engage in non-violent civil disobedience to advance our shared racial justice goals.
Q: What parallels or intersections do you see between recovery advocacy and other social change needs and movements?
I believe that among the most obvious intersections between recovery advocacy and movements for racial justice is a concern with an overlapping set of social justice issues which make people more vulnerable to substance use disorder or unhealthy substance use. Every day, our colleagues encounter the devastating consequences of racial injustice among the patients and communities we serve. Many recovery advocates see it as their responsibility to address systemic racism, such as inequalities in law enforcement, housing, education, access to health care, and other resources, that put patients at risk for substance use disorder or limit their access to prevention, treatment and recovery supports.
On the flip-side our nation’s racial justice movement has for over 50 years offered an incisive critique of our nation’s racialized policy response to drug use, including the selective and discriminatory recognition of addiction as a medical condition and/or public health issue. The federal and state response to crack use in the 1980s and 1990s focused funding on law enforcement, which was then targeted at BIPOC and fueled mass incarceration. In contrast, three-quarters of federal funding to address the opioid epidemic, associated more closely with white people, went to research, treatment, and prevention. Part of my attraction to working for the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation was the opportunity to work at the intersections of recovery advocacy, health equity, and healing justice.
Q: What are you reflecting on most during this Black History Month?
Much of my career in higher education was devoted to teaching and learning about African and African American history, culture, and politics. So like other months, I reflect the beautiful cultural, ethical, and political inheritance that African Americans have gifted the United States and the world. It is an inheritance that I believe highlights a path toward restorative justice, collective healing, joy, and greater human freedom.
Every Black history month I seem to return to the James Baldwin quote, “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.” So this is also a month when I am especially focused on how our nation’s history of slavery, Jim Crow, and racialized capitalism shows up in the contemporary patterns of racial inequality, including, especially, police killings. This partly means that during Black History Month I grieve all that has been lost to the world by 400 years of limiting the opportunities of African Americans. But I also I remind myself of the strength, courage, sacrifice, and hard work of our ancestors that made possible the greater life chances, equal rights, and freedom that so many Blacks like myself enjoy today. Put another way, Black History Month is a time for me to consider how Black history might equip us intellectually, culturally, politically, and spiritually to reclaim our humanity and progress together toward a more genuine multicultural democracy.
