When Teaching Remotely is Safer for Reasons Other than COVID-19

From Getty Images/The New Yorker

I nodded at the joke, posted by one of the editors I recently worked with, claiming that while everyone else was running around panicking about COVID-19, women of color were at home giving themselves spa treatments, catching up on their reading, and spending quality time with their kids. I knew this to be true for myself, of course, delighting in being able to cook meals from scratch more often in the first few days of social distancing. However, as the days continued, I also noticed that both my partner and I had a bit of a lighter tone in our voices, a bit more sparkle to our smiles. It’s not that we weren’t working just as hard, if not harder. I was on deadline for a review of a new anthology whilst trying to make sure that my students understood the changes taking place in our classes. I was negotiating whether my mother should go to certain doctor appointments and physical therapy, and trying to ensure that we had the groceries we needed despite the shortages and overwhelmed food production system. My partner was taking an entire student outreach program online in order to make sure that everyone working for the program, many of whom were college students, would get paid during the pandemic crisis. We were and have been working hard each day. However, somehow we felt better and lighter.

            As soon as I thought it, I understood why. I have been working for a diversity task force for the last four years at my college campus, and during that time, I’ve been attacked in various ways, the worst being when a senior faculty member screamed at me in front of a room of my colleagues. My partner, too, has suffered incredible attacks at his workplace because he is the head of a program where art education for low-income students of color is the focus, and one peripheral faculty member has been abusive to him non-stop. Now that we are social distancing, we are free of the micro- and macro-aggressions wielded our way on a regular basis. That is, we are free of these behaviors to a certain extent.

            Ultimately, we have always seen and been victim to these behaviors in a systemic fashion. Right now, the most vulnerable populations are being positioned as disposable. Many people are ready to get back to work, thinking that two weeks of social distancing will be enough, despite clear proof in other nations that is nowhere near enough. According to our leadership, the cure is worse than the cause. In other words, protecting our weakest is worse than keeping the status quo. This kind of thinking is exactly why someone like me, someone viewed as a minority (despite world stats), suffered before the crisis. For some people it is always easier to continue with the status quo, to allow abusive people at best and racist people at worst to dictate policies in our organizations. It is supposedly easier to just let these leaders continue leading, and not listen to anyone brave enough to speak out, even if that person might have a better, kinder way of leading. In the end, social distancing—or hiding—is not enough to escape this abuse. Now these abusive leaders want all of us to work in close quarters again, saying that people like me, who are immune-compromised because of asthma, or people like my friend, who suffers from severe immune disorders, or people like my mom, who is elderly and a cancer-survivor, should be happy to die for our country (according to one official from Texas). So much for social distancing.

            I have always known as a Black woman, as a Latinx woman, as a queer woman, my life is disposable in the eyes of many. I have seen the hateful eyes right before me, telling me in their red fury, “You don’t belong here.” Still, somehow my excellence has always found a way to secure a place in rooms where most of the people there would have me shunned. What a miracle that is. Maybe what I carry with me, what I might pass on to others, is what people fear the most. Maybe that unimaginable world, the one I have always been a part of, the one where someone like me is valuable, is what everyone is really reacting to right now. In order to get through this, we have to imagine that everyone is valuable, even people with disabilities, even people who are older, even people who cannot afford insurance, even people who are undocumented. I have always known we are all valuable, and my behaviors fall in line with that, crisis or no crisis. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all behaved in a way that exemplified that idea? I guess that idea is too scary for some of us.