The conversation opens with Davey D breaking down a quiet but devastating move by the Trump Education Department that declared key careers like nursing and teaching as “non professional” for federal loans. He frames it as a slick attack on Black and Brown communities, women, and working class folks who rely on those pathways for stable work and community care.
Registered nurse and union vice president Jennifer Esteen explains why that ruling is both an insult and a direct economic strike. Nursing is mostly women and largely people of color, and nurses are the ones who actually keep patients alive and cared for. She connects this new policy to massive federal cuts, the long standing nursing shortage, and the racism she and her mother faced trying to enter and move up in the field. Jennifer stresses that this is about destroying the pipeline of Black and Brown providers while worsening medical disparities that were already clear during COVID.
Educator and author Christopher Emdin zooms out and names it as part of a larger project to strip value from soulful professions rooted in care. He argues that nursing and teaching are attacked precisely because they require humanity, empathy, and what he calls soul, something many of the people making policy lack. He links the move on loans to earlier signs, like putting unqualified leadership over education, and explains how Black students have used federal loans not only to pay tuition but to survive while studying. For him, this is an economic and political assault on Black resistance, because classrooms are the boot camp for fights against white supremacy.
Dr Norlissa Cooper, a nurse with a doctorate in health policy, brings in the academic side. She notes how advanced nursing degrees are already rare, especially among Black nurses, and this policy will choke off the future supply of professors and researchers who study and challenge health disparities. All three guests land on similar solutions. We have to turn back to community, build our own support systems, lean on unions, sororities, and Black institutions, and even look to models like the Black Panther clinics or Filipino labor unions that created their own funds. The conversation closes with a call for resilience, imagination, and collective responsibility to defend nursing, teaching, and the communities they serve.
Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.