Loreto and Isabel, please take it away.
Buenos tardes, soy Loreto, estoy aqui con
Isabel y seremos interpresar hoy.
Good afternoon, I'm Isabel, this is Loreto,
and we are your interpreters for this event.
Mucha gracias a todos ustedes por crear los
espacios bilinguas y multilinguas.
Thank you to all of you for creating bilingual
and multilingual spaces like this one.
Vamos a repasar rapidamente como acceder la
interpretacion por Zoom.
We're going to briefly go over how to access
the
interpretation feature via Zoom.
Si esta usando su computadora, por favor encuente
el icono del mundo en la parte inferior de
su pantalla y selecione espanol.
If you're joining us from your computer, you
can select
the world icon at the bottom of your screen,
and choose Spanish for a Spanish interpretation.
Usted si quiere, puede ser escuchando en ingles
a un volumen mas bajito. Pero si no, lo puede
silenciar.
If you'd like, you
can listen to the English audio in the background
quietly, or, if you'd like, you can mute it
completely.
Si esta en su celular, por favor haga clic
in los tres puntitos en la parte inferior
de su pantalla.
If you're using a cell phone,
you can click on the three dots that are at
the bottom of your screen to make the same
selection.
Y haga clic en el boton interpretacion de
idiomas, o language interpretation.
And click on the language interpretation
button.
Despues puede escoger espanol.
You can then choose Spanish.
Y nuevamente si desea puede eschuar en ingles
a volumen mas bajto o silenciar el audio original.
And here you can
also listen to the English audio quietly in
the background or silence it completely.
Si tene una pregunta para el panel, por favor
escribela en espanol, esta bien, se la traduciremos,
donde dice preguntas y respuestas, o Q y A.
If you have any questions for the panelists,
please write them in Spanish in the chat,
we'll translate it for you — in the section
that says Q&A.
Mucha gracias. Thank you very much!
Gracias! Thank
you
all so much for being here today. Welcome,
good afternoon, good morning, good evening,
depending on where you are. Thank you all
for being here. Welcome to our second in a
series of 'Right to Health' online gatherings.
Having said at our first Web-In, several weeks
ago, a central goal of this gathering is to
grow and build a constituency that's armed
with a really strong argument: that uncontrolled
epidemics, like the one we're currently embroiled
in, are both evidence of and made worse by
systemic violations of basic human rights.
The effects of these systemic violations of
human rights, as many of us know, fall disproportionately
along social and economic fault lines in our
global society. Most clearly, these fault
lines fall along the lines of racism, economic
class domination, the legacies and current
manifestations of colonialism, and the genocide
and seizure of indigenous people's land. We
sincerely hope that this gathering, which
we're titling "Racial Capitalism and the COVID-19
Catastrophe", and the remarkable panel of
scholars, activists, organizers, and social
leaders, and all of you, leaders in your own
right, are here to help us begin to unpack
and gain a deeper understanding of what this
moment represents. How has it come to this?
What are the unvarnished realities for our
communities that are rendered most vulnerable
to this pandemic? And what can we do right
now to fight for a just end to this pandemic
and those that are to come, in ways that grow
real power in a broad movement for the right
to health? We hope that all of us come away
from this web-in with new ideas, new relationships,
and perhaps new pathways to action in the
days and weeks ahead. So we're going to ask
all of you at the end of this panel to join
small group discussions, in which we'll debrief,
highlight points of resonance, and begin the
process of imagining how we can work together
in this moment. We have a team of 40+ small
group trained facilitators that have stepped
up to the plate to create space for these
conversations, and we want to offer a huge
thanks to them for taking this on. For our
Spanish-speaking viewers, we have a Spanish
language small group that we hope you'll join.
So we'll send more information about that
at the end of the panel. A couple of notes
on technology, all attendees will be muted
during the panel. You can submit questions
via the Q&A tool at any time, and we'll try
to pull those together and have a few questions
at the end that the panelists will engage
with. I want to give a shoutout to Julia,
who is kindly typing out closed captioning
for this portion of the talk, so you can access
that down below. Also we are recording the
panel. It will be shared to YouTube for folks
to watch who weren't able to be here today.
After the panel Q&A, we'll share instructions
to move to small group discussions. Finally
a quick review of the agenda. Shortly, we'll
be jumping into our panel discussion, then
at 4 pm, we'll move into small group discussions.
We'll give instructions on how to do that
then. Small groups will last just about 35
minutes. And then we'll regather in the big
group and have a short debrief and evaluation.
One last word of thanks — we have an amazing,
all-volunteer organizing team of more than
30 people who have met multiple times per
week and put many hours into pulling this
together. So thanks so much to all of you.
And definitely last but not least, I want
to acknowledge our co-hosting organizations,
GlobeMed, which you'll hear about in just
a moment, and secondly, the Campaign Against
Racism. With that I want to welcome Anne Marie
Collins, the organizer from the Campaign Against
Racism to share a bit about their work. So
welcome Anne Marie! Thank you so much Jon,
I want to start by saying my thoughts right
now are with everyone who has lost the people
they love due to the injustices of COVID-19.
Especially to communities of color, who we
know are most impacted by these injustices.
And I want to begin by saying that Ruth Wilson
Gilmore, a critical activist for prison abolition,
and has been for over three decades. She said
that her main work is to uplift the movement,
not to lead it. That's what I want to talk
about today, the work of CAR, which is to
uplift all the work collectively, of those
that have always been speaking truth to power.
Everyone who is organizing globally around
systems of oppression, that long before COVID-19
were weakening our communities. However, once
again, with COVID-19, we're seeing that structural
inequality live. We need to uplift the work
of everyone who's ready to radically reimagine
an act to guarantee our collective liberation
from racial capitalism. We want to tell the
global story of our world, where yes, you
can have COVID-19, but the difference being
that the response and impact would be distributed
equally. We are grateful for the Right to
Health movement, who are centering this conversation
today. So let's go into it. What is the social
medicine consortium Campaign Against Racism?
We started organizing over two years ago with
Dr. Camara Jones, who at the time, was the
head of the American Public Health Association,
and asked us to take on the global part of
the campaign against racism. It's first important
to say — what is racism? And we use the
definition that comes from Camara Jones. A
system of structuring opportunity and assigning
value based on the social interpretation of
how one looks, which is what we call "race".
This unfairly disadvantages some individuals
and communities, and unfairly advantages other
individuals and communities. And it saps the
strength of the whole society through the
waste of human resources. So with the Campaign
Against Racism, we have twenty-two chapters.
We're in the US and we have main chapters
around the world. We're organizing health
workers and their community counterparts to
name racism. To ask: How is racism operating?
And strategize upon that information. Last
May, we did some collective reflection on
the economic system that's upholding racism,
and the historical legacy of the mutual reinforcement
fo these systems. For the second phase of
the campaign, we decided to focus our organizing
on dismantling racial capitalism. We launched
this phase in November, one hour from the
Mexico-US border, naming racial capitalism
in the border context. We continue to do collective
work to raise our consciousness of racial
capitalism via radical traditions and post-colonial
theory. Along with political education, we're
always deepening our organizing strategies
and our understanding of distributive leadership,
collectivizing our responsibility to not reproduce
power. We drew up four organizing principles.
The first one is that we're all leaders, personally
and collectively responsible for self-reflection.
We must act in solidarity in communities to
expose and dismantle capitalism and racism
as mutually reinforcing acts of violence.
We will imagine a new reality that humanizes
and centralizes the margins. Racial justice
is required for health equity; therefore we
must name and dismantle racism. The last one
is we must repair and create — reparar y
crear. I'll move on to talking about what
Campaign Against Racism is doing around COVID-19.
Right now, we have working groups that aim
to uplift the organizing of our chapters.
We have one working group that's focused on
making visible the invisible stories of the
injustices of COVID-19 via a racial capitalism
lens. We have another group that's focused
on social media and media. Last week they
had their first online campaign around #CancelTheDebt,
a campaign that called out IMF for its postponement
of the debt, and demanded that it be a permanent
cancellation. We have a collective education
group that aims to send out the voice of the
Global South and especially how racial capitalism
is operating alongside COVID-19 in their contexts.
And the last group is on healing and building
community. This is about entering a process
of learning more about what collective healing
globally looks like. And how we must start
to apply these frameworks to our own work
and in our own communities. Our organizing
statement for COVID-19 right now is: We're
organizing together with communities in struggle
and solidarity for an intersectional COVID-19
response with an existing anti-racism, anti-capitalism
approach to end the historically-rooted inequities
in health and create a liberated world. Our
strategic goal is: The goal of the CAR and
SMC pandemic response is to collectively build
power to dismantle racial capitalism and uplift
the various global, intersectional responses
that are taking place within CAR chapters.
I just want to end by explaining what our
chapters are doing right now, we have twenty-two,
so I've tried to draw out some examples. Atlanta
are focused on mass incarceration and health.
They recently collaborated in a Free Them
All rally, working various tactics right now
for the release of prisoners. Our chapter
in Los Cruces found out this week there was
an outbreak of COVID-19 in an ICE center.
They wrote an open letter to the New Mexico
Department of Health that was signed by 120
health professionals, demanding the release
of these detained individuals. Palestine are
organizing around support to stock materials
and effective crisis management. They do not
lose sight of the underlying conditions that
have placed Palestinians at such risk from
a pandemic. COVID-19 makes clear that health
of Palestinians is intrinsically linked to
their liberation. Our Haiti chapter is organizing
around destigmatization of COVID-19, and yesterday
hosted their first community dialogue on that.
In Barcelona, they are campaigning around
the needs of undocumented peoples during the
state of emergency and are now working in
community solidarity actions during Ramadan.
So I'll stop there on the slide where we are.
You can look for us on social media at the
social medicine consortium Campaign Against
Racism. If you want to join a chapter, please
email us or you can start your own chapter,
we are opening applications for new chapters
soon. I'll pass this on to Right to Health,
but we are at the campaignagainstracism@equalhealth.org.
Wonderful, thank you so much Anne Marie for
that fantastic introduction to your really,
really, important work. So thank you for being
here with us in solidarity. With that, I want
to turn to our fantastic moderator for the
panel, Priya Fremerman, who is the executive
director of GlobeMed, which is a student-driven
grassroots organization that's advancing global
health equity around the world. Priya will
be moderating today's panel, and I just want
to give her a big thank you and welcome. Thanks
for doing this, Priya. Absolutely, I'm s happy
to be here. Thank you Anne Marie, Jon, and
the entire Right to Health team for gathering
us. I'm happy that GlobeMed can be a co-host
for this web-in, and I'm honored to introduce
our incredible line of panelists that blends
the knowledge of academics and activists,
including Dr. Mary Bassett, director of the
FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at
Harvard; Luz Zembrano, General Coordinator
for the Center for Cooperative Development
and Solidarity (CCDS) in East Boston; Jaron
Benjamin, VP of Community Mobilization and
National Advocacy at Housing Works, and Professor
Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor of African
American Studies at Princeton. So thank you
all so much for taking the time to be with
us today, and share your knowledge and experience
as we dig into this critically important conversation
about racial capitalism and COVID-19. We have
so much to learn from all of you in a short
period of time, so I want to jump right in.
We are seeing communities of color being disproportionately
affected by COVID-19, with Black Americans
in particular, dying at 2-3x the rate of white
Americans. The pandemic did not create existing
inequalities but it is unveiling deeply-rooted,
structural racism and social inequalities.
I'm hoping that you can help us understand
how did we get here? And Mary, you've dedicated
your career as a public health practitioner
and academic to understanding health through
a human rights lens, so I'd love to start
with you. Thanks very much Priya, I feel like
I should warn viewers that I'm having an unstable
internet connection. It snowed in Boston,
so if I freeze, just move on to someone else.
I did my medical training at Harlem Hospital
and I'm a physician who works in public health,
as an academic at a school of public health.
I never saw people sicker than the patients
that I had at Harlem Hospital and that set
me on a journey to try and understand why
people of African descent in this country
are sicker and die younger than other groups
— except Native American Indians, a group
to which we've all paid too little attention,
I would say. So I focused on racial disparities
for a long time, but the reason I was so excited
to be here, is because I think it's so important
to talk about these disparities as not an
accidental or unfortunate consequence of our
history of enslaving human beings but to tie
them to the economic system that this country
has had since its founding. A capitalist system,
which has been racialized from the beginning.
That is the phrase that I think is encompassed
by racial capitalism. So we are seeing these
huge disparities, both in who gets sick and
who dies of COVID. We need to think about
those separately. Who gets sick has to do
with all the things that strip working people,
particularly people of color, of the ability
to have a decent life. A good job, labor protections,
a decent place to live, access to healthcare,
access to public transport, good food. All
of these have created differences in risk,
particularly the overrepresentation of people
of color in essential workers. And then you
have the racial patterning of many common
diseases that make it more likely that if
you get COVID, you'll die of it. So this has
been a fact of our country from the beginning,
it's cost lives from the beginning. But now
it's put this country in the midst of the
worst COVID outbreak in the world. Something
that I think we have to acknowledge is structural
in origin and has threatened all of us. The
solution is not just to be nicer to people
and not be prejudiced against people. The
solution is to reorganize our society so that
it protects people's health and allows people
to get healthcare when they need it. So that's
how we got here. Thank you. Ruha, do you want
to add? Sure. I'll jump in. Can you hear me
ok? Thank you so much for including me in
the conversation, thanks to the organizers
for all their work getting us together, and
thanks Priya for moderating. So how did we
get here? Well we could tell a story going
back just a few months or a few years, in
which our federal government made a series
of monstrous mistakes, from firing the entire
pandemic response team in 2018, to the administration's
slow and effective option of public health
measures up to the present. But we could also
tell a longer story going back hundreds of
years, as Mary began, in which our deeply
stratified social order is rooted in genocide
and slavery. Just last, the indigenous people's
movement and the Dakota law project hosted
a virtual town hall titled "From Smallpox
to COVID-19, let's heal one another", reminding
us of the genocidal effects of infectious
disease. But also, of the healing traditions
of which we can and must build on. This long
view also reminds us that one of the deeply
distorting features of our society is that
human beings were treated in law and custom
as things. That our enslaved ancestors were
not simply exploited to enrich the slavocracy,
but that our ancestors were the riches. Human
beings bought, sold, transformed into capital,
property, assets, that they were insured and
used as collateral, underwriting white credit.
We got her, in other words, because white
accumulation and racial dispossession of land
and labor produced this nation. Given this
context, the phrase essential worker takes
on added meaning. Who, after all, were this
country's first essential workers? Essential
to exploit, essential to sacrifice, essential
to expose, essential to gaslight, essential
to coerce, essential to romanticize, essential
to resist, essential to organize, essential
to unionize, essential to protect, essential
to pay, essential to care. We got here because
racism is productive. Not in the sense of
being good, but in the literal capacity of
racism to produce things of value to some,
even as it wreaks havoc on others. We're still
taught to think of racism as an aberration,
a glitch, an accident. An isolated incident.
A bad apple. In the backwoods and outdated.
Rather than as innovative, systemic, diffuse,
an attached incident. The entire orchard.
In the ivory tower. Forward-looking, even
viral. In my own field of sociology, we like
to say: race is socially constructed. But
we often fail to state the corollary: that
racism constructs. So in the context of this
pandemic, we know who racism is harming. But
who is it benefiting? What is it producing?
If we only look at the underside of racial
capitalism, we'll miss out on who is enriched
by our wretched system. Whether we're talking
about the senators who sold stocks in January,
after a private briefing about the coming
crisis, or the airlines that have started
charging extra if you want an empty seat next
to you. Air for sale. Or companies that have
made a killing building underground diaster
bunkers for the wealthy. Racial capitalism
not only exposes some people to premature
death, it's also a tool for hoarding life.
So that's how we got here. I often think of
the United States these days as a successful
settler colony — a framework that hasn't
been used very much. But after all, this began
as a country that launched a genocidal campaign
against the people who were found here and
then proceeded to accumulate wealth on slaves'
labor. That's another way of looking at the
system that brought us to this day. But it
became particularly rapacious in the 1980s,
and that has been my whole adult life. Where
we saw this rush to privatization, fragmentation,
the stripping of labor rights. We have an
astonishingly low proportion of our workforce
that is unionized, most of them government
workers at this point, not the private sector.
Our healthcare delivery system is heavily
privatized, highly profitable. And the government
that is supposed to protect us from these
excesses has been stripped of its regulatory
powers, and in many ways, captured by lobbyists
and special interest groups. So those are
the structures that have thrived through the
racial hierarchy that exists in our country
and made us so incredibly vulnerable. And
I just looked at the numbers, from a private
university, by the way, that's where you get
the best data at this point. We're approaching
4 million cases globally, we're gonna hit
next week sometime 100,000 dead in the United
States. Jaron, do you want to add to this
conversation? Yeah, I really want to dovetail
onto what Ruha just said. I think that it's
almost impossible to look at where we are
without looking whiteness. I want to bring
in Nancy Leong's views on racial capitalism,
which she describes as valuing of whiteness,
which then in turn forces us to figure out
what is the value of diversity? Or non-whiteness?
And that value is almost always made crudely
in figures and numbers. And racial capitalism
really robs us of the ability to have real
conversations about race. Race, again, is
just a commodity that is crudely expressed.
I also want people to think about what Charles
Mills calls white ignorance. So these are
his words: Imagine an ignorance that resists,
fights back (paraphrasing here), it's active,
dynamic, presents itself as knowledge. So,
one of the ways we got here is that every
way that we have thought about reasonableness,
worth, the way our society is supposed to
function, the value of a life, all this is
was formed with a white, land-owning man in
mind. And the way that we've constructed whiteness
is America makes our society resistant to
talk about, to have real talk about income
inequality, gender, or race. And this in turn
means that people in the United States are
expected to start with the assumption that
we should never expect to raise an eyebrow
when talking about who we're in love with,
or that any law-abiding citizen should worry
about leaving their home safely. I think this
is one of the reasons you see the proliferation
of people who want to open up the country,
storming capitols with guns, feeling like
it is their god-given right. At the same time,
these same people are just in a much larger
segment of the population that are just so
turned off by black people, or people of color,
who just say "my life is worth something,
my life has value, my black life matters."
No, it doesn't. Blue lives matter. Blue is
a race. We're not sure what a race is. I think
we have a long way to go from where we are
now. Absolutely. And as you talk about the
value of a life and Ruha talks about the understanding
of what's an essential worker, I'm curious
what your experience is, Luz, with your population
in East Boston. Thank you everybody, for putting
a context to this conversation. Here in East
Boston, we mainly are, or used to be, an immigrant
neighborhood. Mainly Latinos. But even before
the pandemic, we were experiencing a lot of
problems because our neighborhood got gentrified
really quickly, and people were getting displaced.
And with that, most of us in the neighborhood
were trying to organize and trying to see
how we can continue living in the neighborhood.
With prices of rent going up before the pandemic,
a lot of people were pushed to live with 2-3
families in a household. What that means now
with the pandemic is that if somebody gets
sick, and they don't have a place to quarantine
or to isolate, most people in that household
get sick. Also because a lot of us work as
essential workers, cleaning workers, nurses,
we drive buses, we drive trains, and it is
really hard for us to stay home. So a lot
of people go out because they need to support
their families, and when they get back, that's
what happens. In our neighborhood, we're seeing
that we have the preconditions to what now
is a catastrophe. Even before the pandemic,
most of us were working three jobs to support
our livelihood here, because we cannot pay
the rent that East Boston has. And with that,
a lot of people are undocumented as well,
and when they lose their three jobs, they
don't have the right to employment or the
right to healthcare. And that brings a whole
new world where people don't have the safety
net to actually survive. And that is really
a catastrophe for our neighborhood. Thank
you. I am hearing so much woven in from all
of you about the exploitative nature of our
systems, and how all of that predates this
pandemic. And how that is so deeply rooted
in our histories and in our systems. Like
you said Luz, even without a pandemic, we're
struggling to see our communities have access
to health and what they need to thrive. And
I'm curious how you see race and capitalism
intersecting in this current moment. How are
you seeing it, and Luz I know you started
speaking to this, but Jaron I'm interested
for you and your work in New York as well.
How are you seeing those pieces intersect
in this moment?for us here and the work that
we do at the Center for Cooperative Development
and Solidarity, we see capitalism as pouring
profit as the main thing, the center, not
human beings. That is a problem. Even before
the pandemic, as I said, people of color,
black and brown communities, have the conditions
for this catastrophe. Most of us at the bottom,
low-income communities of color, we already
live in precarious conditions. We don't have
access to healthcare, we don't have equal
access to housing, we live in food deserts,
we live in conditions where we cannot get
nutritious food. So the pandemic just amplified
what we had been experiencing even before.
Communities of color are once again putting
their lives on the line to support our families
and the community at large. A lot of us, low-income
communities of color, like I said before,
are the ones that are essential. But at the
same time, we don't have a safety net. So
in this capitalism world, the ones on the
top always benefit from the ones on the bottom
and that's what we're seeing right now. People
in our communities, especially here in East
Boston where I live, I can see how people
are desperate to really get the support that
they need for their families. And the ones
that can work, they are in the most dangerous
work that you can think of. And the ones that
lost their jobs, they don't have anything
to support their families. That's how I see
it. Jaron, I'm curious how that is resonating
with your experience. Yeah so one of the things
that Housing Works prides itself on other
than fighting to end the AIDS epidemic not
just around New York state but around the
nation and around the world, is also our fight
against homelessness. So we have to keep the
homeless in mind when shelter-in-place issues
are ordered. Because homeless people can't
necessarily stay home. Especially if you living
on a subway car — and I have to bring this
up, since the mayor of New York City and the
governor have decided to shut down the MTA
because of homeless people. Now, let's be
clear. Mayor DeBlasio is turning down money
from FEMA to house homeless people in a time
of crisis. And instead, just choosing to shut
down the subway system from 1 to 5, the first
time it has ever voluntarily been shut down.
So again, all of the things that everybody
has said about how we've gotten here, you
can really see that resistance to give a group
of people, who are disproportionately people
of color, places to sleep so they can keep
themselves safe. And to make for a better
public health outcome as well. And I, no,
go ahead. I apologize, you were about to ask
a question. But one of the things that troubled
me in the way that the reaction to the excess
mortality among Black and Latinos and Native
Americans as compared to whites, it just placed
the responsibility all on the individual.
These are the individuals who didn't follow
public health advice, even when as Luz and
Jaron have really made so clear, that advice
may be impossible to follow. And then the
idea that people's bodies were somehow, you
know, not in good shape and therefore that's
why they died. This whole narrative of lack
fo fitness driving the excess mortality among
people of African descent is a very old one
in the United States. And nobody was talking
about who is out there working and making
it possible for those of us who are lucky
enough to be able to work remotely to continue
to be at home, fed, and get our mail, and
get packages delivered. And all these essential
services. Nobody was talking about the racial
composition of the workforce and how that
was driving the racial disparities and COVID.
And this is such a misleading framing: isn't
is sad — they're sick already, now they're
going to die because of COVID. Or isn't it
sad that they just can't seem to follow advice?
These are the kinds of narratives we hear
— anyway, I just thought of that when Jaron
was speaking. No, that's huge — the systemic
inequities become even greater because we
choose to blame individuals instead of looking
at the structural nature of what's going on
and how the decisions that we make as a society
enforce and reinforce the value of some lives
over others. I am curious what you are seeing
in your communities in terms of a response,
or a reaction to COVID-19? I know Mary, for
instance, is working on prison decarceration
and I'm curious what that effort looks like
right now, and how you're mobilizing and organizing.
The main effort has been through the courts.
And for, sadly, the predictions are now all
coming true. The people who are incarcerated,
the people who depend on others to protect
their safety — living conditions where the
defense from COVID-19 was impossible. The
6 ft rule, it just doesn't pertain in prisons,
detention centers, homeless shelters. People
can't maintain it. They often don't have access
to water to wash their hands. And people who
come into these settings have infected them
and we have these large outbreaks of COVID
now in prisons. The only answer is to release
everybody who is not a risk to public safety.
But there has been reluctance to do that because
politicians consider it something that will
make them vulnerable. And also because who's
incarcerated? And how much it matters to us
as a society when people who are incarcerated
get sick and die?It's been fought in the courts,
we've had some victories in Massachusetts,
with one individual at a time being released
from prison. This is obviously an insane way
to tackle the problem of risk related to incarceration.
But that's the main way it's happening. And
then politically, some attorney generals and
district attorneys have declared that they
will release people. It's happening, it needs
to happen more. Compliance with court decisions
has to be monitored. It can't be assumed.
So I'm signing every declaration that comes
my way. It's a step. Ruha, what has been your
experience with the communities that you work
with — I know you're big in the technology
and academia spaces. Yeah absolutely. Before
I jump to that I just want to pick up on something
Mary brought up that I think is really important.
And it's something that we can all begin to
address in our own conversations and in our
own thinking about how to diagnose the current
moment. So one of the many reasons that the
cycles of inequality and injustice persist
is that in our public discourse and in our
policies, people are willing to acknowledge
racial disparities in everything from education,
to healthcare, to the mortality rates with
the pandemic. Yet at the same time, willfully
distort the reasons for those disparities.
So on the one hand, it looks like a level
of awareness, but that awareness is actually
counterproductive in that it's distorting
our understanding and then the interventions
that we seek. So everyone from public officials
to everybody's family pundit routinely point
to the poor values or the bad behaviors of
racialized individuals, poor individuals,
as the reason why they're dying at higher
rate from the virus. For example, it's no
wonder because we live in a nation where people
can witness a black jogger attacked and killed
and then go on to pose the question — well
what did he do to deserve it?The US Surgeon
General for example, singled out Blacks and
Latinx people, urging us not to drink or smoke
as a preventative measure during the pandemic.
Which plays into this long history of government
officials invoking the supposedly bad behavior
of racialized groups as the reason for their
adverse outcomes. We see it with the very
different responses to black and white drug
use — one is a crime, one is public health
emergency. So this is textbook distortion
pulled from the culture of poverty script,
which lets the bad behavior of powerful institutions
off the hook. But it's important to note that
this distorting lens is not just a top-down
phenomenon. It permeates through everyday
understanding of racial disparities. Teachers
use it, employers use it, law enforcement
officers use it, even doctors and nurses are
known to use it. For example, a friend of
mine, Professor Khiara Bridges, was recently
on this radio talk show talking about the
racial dimensions of the pandemic. A nurse
that had listened to her interview emailed
Professor Bridges to say quote "I believe
you have some huge blind spots. I am white,
64 registered nurse who has worked in critical
care for 40 years. I dated a black man from
Louisiana (red flag). I AM EXPERIENCED at
being a bedside nurse and interfacing with
blacks in intimate situations. I may have
insight that you do not" she says. "I take
issue with your comment about perhaps blacks
not getting good health care prior to admission
to ICU. You made no mention of whether these
patients took responsibility for THEIR OWN
HEALTH… I believe the black CULTURE increases
the likelihood of blacks not being taken care
of as well as whites. It is a choice of their
own... They damaged themselves before they
ever got to the hospital.” Now this is someone
sitting at the bedside of your uncle, you
aunt, your grandma, who has this distorting
lens. It's almost as if her and the surgeon
general were trained at the same school of
medicine, or perhaps the problem is the culture
of medicine, itself? So the nurse's email
goes on for several pages, acknowledging health
disparities but blaming in on the bad behavior
of individuals and the pathology of black
culture. This is textbook cultural poverty
talk. The point is that two people can look
at the same data and interpret them in dramatically
different ways. One person narrowing the focus
on individual bodies and behaviors, and the
other zooming the lens out to include all
of the factors that actually lead to illness
and premature death. I should say that the
narrow interpretation isn't simply lazy, or
just another opinion, it's wrong and dangerous.
So whether we're talking about the US surgeon
general or we're talking about a random nurse
or the news reports that mention "pre-existing
conditions" such as diabetes, hypertension,
asthma, to explain why black, Latinx, and
indigenous people are dying at higher rates
without mentioning why those pre-existing
conditions persist in the first place, the
effect is the same. To reinforce the myth
of cultural pathology, which serves as a ready
alibi for those benefiting from the status
quo. So all of us have to be very clear to
name the pre-existing social conditions as
my co-panelists have in housing, employment,
education, healthcare, policing and incarceration,
that have impacted communities well before
the pandemic. So the pre-existing social conditions
of our nation, not simply the pre-existing
biological conditions that individuals have
that lead to their health outcomes. And so
with that, I can just spend a minute highlighting
a few points about technology. I'll start
by saying tech solutions are being proposed
to address many different aspects of the pandemic.
So I'm not going to try to summarize all my
concerns, but in general, I think we should
refuse any magical fixes — tech, pharmaceutical,
or otherwise — and we should insist on historically
and sociologically informed technological
development. Which means in practice, any
tech intervention needs to be put in its place
and be part of a much broader approach that
puts the concerns of those who are routinely
harmed by scientific racism and tech myopia
at the center of the conversation. And so
I can talk about specific examples of this,
I've talked enough now, but I'll just name
them and then if people are interested we
can into depth later. One has to do with the
ventilator allocation protocols in many hospitals
and the many algorithms that are used to decide
who gets these scarce medical resources. And
the other has to do with digital contact tracing,
which raises a number of concerns around privacy,
surveillance, and data extraction. So I'll
just put those out there and I can say a lot
more about technology and equity for those
who are interested. Luz. Ok, so here in East
Boston, in our neighborhood, we are organizing
amongst grassroots organizations mutual aid
nets to give out food, to distribute information
in different languages about testing and treatment
for people affected by COVID-19, creating
awareness campaigns about use of masks, and
keeping people updated on health, food donations.
Most of the families of our mutual aid groups
are serving undocumented immigrants that don't
have any city or state assistance. Undocumented
immigrants do not qualify for a stimulus package,
unemployment, or benefits of US citizens or
permanent residents. So we are really focusing
on these communities. Where I work, besides
the mutual aid, giving out food and stuff
like that, we are supporting the development
of family cooperative projects. For example,
especially for undocumented people, we are
working with immigrant women in sewing cooperative,
where we sew masks to donate to the ones in
need, or the ones who cannot afford to buy
one, but also to sell to ones who can afford
to buy them. So the women can support their
broken families. Immigrant communities are
trying to survive the barriers they are facing
and the injustice of the system. We always
say that the crisis is is also an opportunity
to organize and to create a more just world,
one that we always imagine. So here in East
Boston, we are trying to do our best and sometimes
we think we are doing the work of the city
and the state that they are supposed to be
doing. But we cannot just wait for them to
do it. We have to do it, and I think we are
doing it in the best way we can. Most grassroots
organizations here in Boston came together
and are trying to respond as best we can with
the limited resources we have to support to
the residents. Jaron do you want to jump in
with your experience as well? Very quickly,
Housing Works of course is a willing participant
in the AIDS movement, so that means that any
attack on the LGBT community is an attack
on our organization. Some people may have
followed the Samaritan's Purse tents that
were set up in Central Park. Housing Works
along with other allies — did a lot of really
aggressive advocacy to close Sumaritan's Purse.
They made sure anybody who was volunteering
or working with their organization took an
oath that was anti-gay and anti-trans. They
recognized that marriage was a unity of one
biological male and one biological female.
Somehow the city decided to let them set up
in Central Park. They are out. We are also
continuing to push our campaign of Homeless
Can't Stay Home, pushing the city and state
for 30,000 COVID isolation units for homeless
and unstably-housed people. And Housing Works
opened the very first COVID isolation units
in New York City for homeless folks. And then
something that's eating up a lot of my personal
time and professional time right now is the
Cut Red Tape for Heroes project, which has
made the pledge of securing and distributing
more than 1 million units of personal protective
equipment to healthcare workers who are actually
at the hospitals and are short of PPE. And
to organizations that serve homeless folks
and to homeless people as well. Over the last
2-3 weeks, we've driven up a truck to a hospital
that's been short on PPE, told the staff who
are sadly disproportionately people of color,
that during your shift change you can just
walk out to the truck and get a week's supply
of free PPE just by showing your hospital
badge. We wouldn't be in this situation if
the federal government and state government
and city government had just gotten the PPE
to our essential workers. But that's where
we are. Just to close, one of the early deaths
in the AIDS crisis was Michel Foucault, who
came up with the theory of biopower, which
basically says that it's the state's responsibility
to categorize into two pots: one pot are people
that they're going to make live, and the other
pot that they're going to let die. I encourage
everybody here to keep working to expand that
make-live pot. Whether it fighting for the
continuation of the Affordable Care Act, as
Jon Shaffer and I did successfully, along
with thousands of other activists, or fighting
to expand the safety net right now. This is
work that must be done. Thank you. It's so
enlightening hearing about not only where
we've seen failures in our history but where
we're seeing failures in this moment for our
government and other systems to adequately
support our communities, particularly, of
communities of color. I recently came across
this quote by novelist and political activist
Arundhati Roy, and she says "historically,
pandemics have forced humans to break with
the past and imagine their world new. This
one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway
between one world and the next." It feels
strange to be living in this moment that is
a world between worlds, with all of the tension
and uncertainty that brings. At the same time,
I can feel a bubbling desire, especially from
the young people that I work with to leverage
this moment — intervene, disrupt, transform,
and radically reconstruct our society. So
I'd love to hear form you — what's your
advice? On how we should imagine the future
and what we should be doing to fight for it.
Ruha, I'd love to start with you. Sure. So,
for starters, in the same way that through
this conversation, we've been trying to expand
how we understand the problems and the threat;
similarly, I think we have to fight for an
expansive understanding, as you just described,
of what our response should be. What needs
to change, for example. We don;t just need
to find a fairer way of triaging patients,
we need to address the underlying investments
that produce scarcity in the first place.
We don;t simply need to make conditions safer
for those in prison, we need to abolish prisons.
Even the fact that we have a hard time imagining
a world without prisons, let's say, or a world
without want, that;s a reminder that imagination
is something we have to defend against. Imagination
isn't just an ephemeral afterthought that
we have the luxury to dismiss or romanticize
— it's a resource. It's a battleground.
It's an input and output of our social order.
I think we should acknowledge that most people
are forced to live inside someone else's imagination.
And one of the things we have to come to grips
with is how the nightmares that many people
are forced to endure, that we've been talking
about, are the underside of elite fantasies
about efficiency, profit, safety, and control.
So racism, among other axes of domination
— and if we had more time I think it's be
important to really highlight the intersection
of ableism, ageism, sexism, with what we're
talking about. All together to produce this
fragmented imagination where you have misery
for some and monopoly for others. So for me,
this means that those of us who want to construct
a different social reality, one that's grounded
in justice and joy. We can't only ciritque
the underside, we have to wrestle with the
deep investments, the desire for some that
want to maintain social domination. And so
I understand that what we've been laying out
is huge, right. the problems can feel overwhelming,
but I wan to suggest a different view. Precisely
because of the many ways that racial capitalism
is perpetuated in our laws and policies, and
in our cultural norms and practices, institutionally
and interpersonally. I think this means that
we can each foster any of these places as
a site of change and transformation, no matter
what kind of work we do no matter where in
the world we live. Precisely because the problem
is so big, there are so many different ways
to address it. If the virus has taught us
anything, it's that something that is invisible
can de deadly. And that small decisions, small
things we do in in our own lives, that may
seem invisible to many — whether it's to
stay home, or wash hands, or check on neighbors
— when combined with the work of others,
can have exponential effects in saving lives
and in transforming this world. So yes, COVID
is contagious but I think solidarity is contagious
too. I felt myself sighing from relief towards
the end of that. Because you're right, it
does feel so big and just knowing that small
actions matter and build up into bigger actions.
And moments of solidarity are what bring us
together as a community and allow us to move
to the other side of this experience. So thank
you so much for that. I would love to open
up to Mary, Jaron or Luz. Do you have anything
you want to add about this imagining? It's
really hard to follow Ruha — I think we
all feel like we could sit and listen to you
speak. It's very inspiring. But I think what
I've been thinking about is how important
it is for people to understand that people
are poor because some people are rich. That
these are connected; it's not as though this
reflects a set of failures on the part of
either individuals or their communities that
people are poor. So I've been thinking a lot
about the importance of defending the essential
worker. This epidemic has displayed how precarious
work is for so many people. And how many people,
that Luz has been talking about, work on jobs
in which they have only the hours they hours
they work for the pay they get. And they have
no protections at all, particularly if they're
undocumented. And that's what nearly 11 million
people — and many people are living in mixed
households — so it's many millions of people.
And there are wildcat strikes going on: Walmart,
the single biggest employer in the United
States, that uses part-time work as a way
of depriving people of their rights. There
are strikes at Amazon, and I think we should
all express solidarity with the courage of
these workers in standing up to protect their
families and their lives. So I've been thinking
a lot about that. And additionally, just the
risks of the people who are being held in
congregate settings, detention centers, prisons,
the jails. And the importance of leaving those
places. And this I think brings us back to
what brought us all together, is the phenomenon
of racial capitalism — we are facing something
really big now. There are over 30 million
people out of work now. There are, in the
midst of a pandemic, for-profit hospitals
are closing, laying off doctors, nurses. So
we have to see more government action. I don't
know how we can get out of this without the
government taking back some of the private
sector that has become so unbearably irresponsible
in its ability to deliver needed goods to
people. So I think we'll see more and more
solidarity around collective action, and that's
very encouraging to me. Thank you. Very quickly,
CCDS is part of the solidarity economy that
is trying to really change this capital system.
We know it's going to be hard and we are doing
it in the belly of the beast. But we are trying
to do it little by little. How we can see
a solidarity economy and cooperation is one
of the answers to the problems we are facing,
especially in low-income communities of color.
How we are trying to change something that
is so dehumanized, for something that put
human beings at the center — to see us as
who we are. So for me, one of the things that
I think everybody has to think about, is how
do we listen to the stories of people that
are going through all this? How do we actually
invite people who are affected by injustice
to be at the center of any campaign, or any
legislation that we are trying to change.
Cause a lot of times we have the good intentions
but we don't really know what people are going
through. We need to involve people from the
bottom — include us — so we actually have
a meaningful campaign and meaningful legislation
that will change the world. Absolutely. I'd
love to bring in a question form the audience
that straddles the question of how we can
act and also what is possible in this moment.
So from our audience member Kamara: "what
are we to do right now about the premature
reopening of our states?" How can we send
her the voices of our community members in
those decisions? So may I? Please. Great.
I think that this reminds me of a much more
scaled down, all hands on deck situation when
Donald Trump got elected. The first thing
that we were all worried about in my profession
was that we're going to lose the Affordable
Care Act. Imagine if we had lost the Affordable
Care Act, where we'd be right now. All of
my colleagues were telling me that it was
going to be a waste of time, that we were
going to lose the Affordable Care Act by March,
but that didn't stop me and two colleagues
from going to sixty cities in sixty days and
training more than a thousand people to ask
really tough questions of people who were
lawmakers that said they were going to repeal
Obamacare root from branch. And we won, we
did the unthinkable. I think that something
even bigger is possible now because even much
more is at stake. And the first thing you
need in order to make something like that
happen, is connections relationship-building,
this here. Spaces like this. And we need more
skills. We need to think about where decision
makers and power brokers are vulnerable. Right
now they're not meeting in the offices; their
phone lines are the only ways that they can
communicate, and email too. So guess what?
We organize a phone zap or an email zap on
an elected official that's doing something
you don't want them to do? That will potentially
be debilitating to their entire outfit and
they will cry uncle quicker than you think.
So that's one thing. Another thing is to pay
attention to some of the protests that follow
social distancing protocols. Whether it is
what's happening in Connecticut or in New
York, where people are doing car protests
to get people out of jail that don't belong
in jail in the first place. Or if it's a protest
where you see people that have banners that
show that they are at least 6 ft apart while
forming a human chain around some no-goodness.
Or spray painting or painting a message out
on the street outside Jeff Bezos' house. Those
are all things that are happening now and
there are ways to get connected to these organizations.
Chances are you know who these people are.
Absolutely, and the Right to Health Project
is also organizing a campaign called the People's
Pandemic Prevention Plan, which I'm sure Jon
will be excited to share with everybody afterwards.
Since we do have to wrap up, I'd love to pass
it to Ruha to share one final nugget of wisdom
with us all. Yeah I wanted to just wrap it
up with the words of Cedric Robinson, who
over thirty years ago, theorized this idea
of racial capitalism, so I think it's important
for us to include his work where he says "I
am not discussing a coming revolution. I am
trying to impress the fact that you are in
the midst of a revolution; you are already
in the midst of war. There has been no war
of modern times that has taken so great a
sacrifice of human life and human spirit,
as the extraordinary period through which
we are passing today. Some people envisage
revolution chiefly as a matter of blood and
guns. And the more visible methods of force.
But that, after all, is merely the temporary,
outward manifestation. Real revolution is
within. That comes before or after the explosion.
It is a matter of long suffering and deprivation.
The death of courage and the bitter triumph
of despair. This is the inevitable prelude
to decisive and enormous change. And that
is the thing that is on us now. We are not
called upon then to discuss whether we want
a revolution or not, we have got it. Our problem
is how we are coming out of it" - Cedric J.
Robinson, Black Marxism. Thank you. And thank
you to all of our panelists, Luz, Jaron, Mary,
and Ruha. We're so grateful for your time
and wisdom and experience that you shared
with us today. It felt far too short, and
we're just really, really, grateful that we
were able to learn from you and learn with
you. Before I pass it back to Jon and we break
out for small groups I also just want to send
a huge thank you to our co-hosts at the Campaign
Against Racism, my team at GlobeMed, and all
of out audience members and participants who
are learning alongside us. And most importantly,
the entire volunteer-led Right to Health team
for organizing this web-in and directing our
collective action. These spaces to learn and
act alongside each other are SO needed right
now. They're part of how we lead that revolution,
and your time and dedication makes them possible.
Thank you again, and I'll pass it back to
Jon.
