A crisis of crises; stories for shifting change

"Let’s chat y’all: do you bring up systemic racism when speaking of black people being disproportionately affected by COVID-19? Do y’all speak on the fact that some living in poverty don’t have access to things such as clean water or affordable healthcare? Do we consider that there are some black people who just CAN’T afford to stay home, and so they go to their essential jobs (who aren’t doing what they can to protect their employees)? Or are we just looking at the groups of people who are caught outside and say “Dang! Black people can’t do anything right 🙄🙄!”?

I genuinely would like to know. " -T

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Preaching among far more qualified preachers here but yes. Was on a association of public health professionals +national academy of medicine call yesterday and a lot of the solutions the docs are trying to lean on won't fly in most despotic Afrikan communities given the legacy and betrayal of trust committed by the medical system and US government.

The pandemic is a crisis that highlights the ongoing crises that so many communities were already facing.

The fact that the food system, thread workers, all the minimum/below minimum wage jobs happen to have essential roles says so much about the legacy of slavery and what our country still relies upon for making itself seem functional.

People still pick tomatoes for 50 cents per the crate, and most of them are brown migrant workers who have limited to no legal rights in the US.

Mask makers who have the privilege pf volunteering to create low for the public and maybe some hospitals would be paid 5 cents per hem in the LA sweatshops where my grandmother and aunts worked during the 90s, and about 10 or 15 cents per garment if they worked for American Apparel in 2015.

They're literally subsidizing the externalized cost of incompetence, negligence, and greed among hospital administrators and the Federal government who prop "free market" economic opportunity for exploitation of profit amid crisis over people. Even the mask shortage is an economic reason rather than because of a public health priority.

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There's a powerful opportunity with a moderately open window to sway folks in say, a suburban setting, to understand and empathize with what it's like to navigate fear and crisis. From this end, the biggest challenge is mustering a gentle heart and emotional presence to guide those fears while handling what's typically more than one's fair share of fragility around race and other iterations of inequity.

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There's a professor who shared a really useful framework I think often about for advocacy that informs what kind of skills and information are needed to be effective when speaking to poverty.

Poverty can be looked at in three ways:

1) personal stories --what it's like to experience poverty

2) as a measurement/index/bureaucratic definition for policy

i.e. average median income; academic concepts; government/legal definitions

3) the systems that tend to create the stories

I choose to look at it as a triangle or three-legged stool: you need all three in order to create cohesive systemic change.

We need patience and support to cultivate emotional solidarity and labor to empathize and connect with people.

We need patience, a lot of resources and a certain kind of keen language aptitude to wade into numbers and rules plus advocate without getting sucked into the system's red tape and political favors without losing your ability to step out.

We need patience to identify patterns and see things from small to big picture both as it is plus what the likely trajectory might be, and how to dance with changing or facilitating things that are far bigger than what one person, organization, or even community might usually want to move with ease.

And for most of us, that's something that we have and can practice to grow.