The Coffee People Zine Interview - Part Two
Part two of coffee people zine’s featured interview with David Paul, founder of the black-owned coffee brand, Bold and Gritty – touches on the importance of highlighting black male success, normalizing conversations related to mental health, and the future of Bold & Gritty Coffee.
Question: Coffee wasn’t part of the original idea, but seems to be a big part of your brand now - when and why did you decide to incorporate coffee?
Answer: Over the past several years some of the most important conversations I’ve had have been over a cup of coffee. So, when you think about Bold and Gritty as a brand for telling inspiring stories it is easy to see how coffee plays into that narrative – and how it helps us to amplify the voices of a group of people whose contributions both in and outside of coffee have largely been ignored. Coffee has always been about Black people. We’re just using coffee as a vehicle to bring the conversations around that cup full circle. We strongly believe that the story of every generation and every culture deserves to be told and that every story needs an audience. For us, we found that audience around cups of coffee – and we want to share the beauty of those moments with the rest of the world.
Question: Why is highlighting and celebrating Black male excellence so important?
Answer: Black men are disproportionately underrepresented across several professional disciplines and the media continues to fetishize the brutal murders of Black men at the hands of police. With the exception of a few celebrities, the focus on Black men in popular media is largely negative. Our goal is to shift the narrative. “We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.”
Question: In addition to celebrating the good, you’ve also recently experienced heartbreak - Daniel Prude was your cousin. Can you tell me how that experience affected you?
Answer: When I found out Daniel was my cousin – that he died in the very hospital I work in and that I could have advocated for him had I known – it was a tremendous burden to bear. For me, Daniel became more than just another Black man on the receiving end of police brutality. His death reignited in me a passion for promoting issues of mental health and forced me to reckon with demons in my own family’s past. I used writing as an outlet to process the slew of emotions – to challenge the world to see my cousin as a human being – and to shine a light on how we all are responsible for Daniel’s death. Bold and Gritty as it exists now was formalized as an idea in the midst of this crisis of self. A large part of my drive to make Bold and Gritty successful comes from a desire to leave a tangible legacy for my son and future generations.
Question: How has your education as a neurosurgeon influenced your perspective on mental healthcare?
Answer: My perspective on mental healthcare has less to do with my role as a neurosurgeon and more to do with my proximity to the healthcare system in general. Daily, I see the burden of a system with too few physicians adequately trained to handle psychiatric illness – there are delays in acquiring inpatient consults, and not enough hospital beds for everyone. Compounding this fact is a disproportionately low number of minority physicians in psychiatry – 2% of all psychiatrists to be exact. It is not a system that is set up to handle the true prevalence of psychiatric disease in our country – let alone the unique circumstances surrounding underrepresented populations.
Question: Mental healthcare is so important, yet inaccessible to many, especially members of Black and brown communities. What do you hope to change about how people view mental health and mental illness?
Answer: I want to normalize issues of mental health within the Black community and to normalize therapy and treatment. Even more important is prioritizing equitable treatment. We treat mental illness as something that you just have to overcome. We don’t talk about it nor do we seek the kinds of help that we need. Compounding the issue is that physicians have perpetuated false statements for generations regarding perceived biological differences between White and Black people – e.g., Black people don’t feel pain. As a result, when Black people do seek treatment, we receive less pain medications than our white counterparts. And, with regards to mental illness – we are more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia and less likely to be diagnosed with mood disorders when compared with white people who present with the same symptoms. We need more culturally competent physicians and allied health professionals. We need to encourage our bright Black boys and girls to pursue careers in mental health. We need to talk openly about our emotions and struggles and encourage our brothers and sisters to seek help. And we need to advocate for ourselves when we do seek help – armed with the knowledge that there are biases in the healthcare system we need to watch out for.
Question: As part of Bold and Gritty’s lineup, you offer journals and candles for sale. Why journals and candles?
Answer: As we fleshed out the brand and our product assortment– we homed in on products that feature heavily in the routines that help me to live a Bold and Gritty lifestyle. Every time I sit down to study, write, or do anything important – I usually light a candle and set the atmosphere. Something that we noticed was missing in the marketplace was high-quality candles with more androgenous or masculine scents and deep, complex woody notes that everyone can enjoy.
As for the journals – again, writing is something that has been therapeutic for me. It’s how I processed the death of my cousin. Every stage of my life from medical school on has been mapped out in a journal. And, if you look at all of the great thinkers of past generations, a journal was an essential component of their success.
Question: Do you have plans to expand what you offer through Bold and Gritty? What are your next steps?
Answer: As we continue to build our audience, we are excited about adding another single-origin coffee in the spring of 2021 – and continuing to evolve creatively in our story-telling. Being relatively new to the coffee industry, we are growing every day and learning more and more from the community around us!
This article was originally published in Issue 11 of the Coffee People Zine. Republished here with written permission. Copies of the zine can be purchased online - all proceeds go towards non-profit organizations that support the coffee community.
