Lysol, Collective Trauma & Reparation Opportunities for the Melanin-Deficient

NSFS: Not Safe for School, your snark-filled antidote to racism and corruption in education. Follow @postphdtheblog on Twitter and @allisonharbin_postphd on Instagram

This week in NSFS: 'rona memories, vulnerability, what teaching at an urban charter high school the last day before lockdown last year was like, and reparation opportunities for the melanin-deficient.

Dear friends and fam,

I think it’s safe to say that all of us are emotionally exhausted. We are all going through the emotional torment of the one year anniversary since the ‘rona shut shit down. My inner-art historian is fascinated by theorizing this global collective-trauma, because when you think about it as a shared experience, all of humanity has this in common. This is a transformative cultural moment. I can’t wait for the art. We all share this experience, and the burden of its legacies.  

Of course, this collective trauma varies in intensity depending on how close you are to the virus. Which is, as we now know for a fact, directly related to your body’s (in)ability to produce melanin. And now, we all must watch whatever white nationalist hellscape of injustice George Floyd’s trial is likely to inhabit.

Every BIPOC academic, writer, human being I talk to these days is TIRED-- emotionally exhausted does not even begin to cut it. I’ve had some amazing e-conversations with several of you about emotional trauma while being BIPOC in academia. It’s horrific. But also, LOVING all of the GWM (Generic White Man) stories so please do keep their roast going in my inbox with your GWM rants.

What’s New on Post-PhD: 

Last week, I shared a painfully vulnerable post about what it was really like to be exploited, sued, file for bankruptcy, and maintain Post-PhD the blog.

As I chewed on this idea of collective trauma, shared grief, and individual despair, I realized that this is what connects my commitment to anti-racism with the graduate students’ rights activism I do through Post-PhD. After sharing my story, it became crucial that I continue to bear witness and testimony to the injustice that so many others go through in the neoliberal hell of academia. 

I’m so fortunate to have been able to be in conversation with all of you readers-- especially those of you beyond the limiting confines of the U.S. As all of our common yet painfully unique collective traumas make clear: this whole thing, this white patriarchy thing, is rigged. Perhaps the only thing we can do about it is to believe survivors, believe women, believe BIPOC, believe LGBTQ+ folks.  As I talk about in my latest post, we hate women and do not believe them. 

This desire to be listened to, to be heard, and to be believed is also universal, but the severity of the trauma that occurs when this does not happen is, of course, heavily skewed.  As Gayatri Spivak, postcolonial feminist scholar extraordinaire, queries: Can the subaltern speak? Perhaps we should also ask (and to make literal Spivak’s genius rhetorical construct): Even if they can, are white people capable of listening?

I should have known all along that I was always going to whistle-blow (again) on the pathetic white people who have so corrupted public urban education. After all, I have middle class white lady outrage privilege. Absolutely not, as I used to tell my students when they were about to do something stupid like try to play hop-scotch across desk tops. 

It is so important to share, to grieve, and to listen to stories about collective traumas, and how they show up in our own individually unique realities. Even as our memories soften around the image, that fear stills lingers. We are all changed, a bit on edge, and as the threat begins to lift, emotions are flooding in. I have less patience for white people. Which is to say, I have less patience for my people. Let me explain myself:

Last March, the charter school in which I worked held an emergency faculty meeting to go over remote teaching and how to use Google classroom. Throughout the rushed presentation, we were assured that the lead administrator had no intention of closing the school. He insisted there would be no school closure. This is when the panic of taking the subway began to really sink in for all of us in the greater NYC area. Less than 48 hours later, on a Friday, we were alerted 5 minutes before classes began that this would be the last day of in-person classes for at least a week. 

Teachers and surgeons are two professions that make the most decisions in a given moment, and that day pushed us all. I switched to damage control, I explained what I knew about the virus and how it spread, over and over, to every class. You see, the administrators hadn’t bothered to do anything school-wide about pandemic safety. So it fell to the individual teachers. As I rushed through how students would be graded and how attendance would work, I fielded anxiety filled questions about their family members: would they get it? 

Of course, I could only counter with what we knew at the time: hand washing, and that’s about it. In one of my last classes, a student raised their hand to ask how they could protect their diabetic grandmother, who was their sole guardian. This student and I had talked about how awesome her grandmother was, so I knew just how important this question was for the student. 

You see, this student worked at Trader Joe’s after school, and after I explained how the virus was spread, they were understandably wondering if they should quit their job or not. I wasn’t a scientist, nor a magician. I couldn’t tell this student what to do, after all, I had never had to choose between bringing in much-needed money into a household and the safety of my sole guardian. As we went over various scenarios, I silently went around my room and grabbed the bottle of lysol I used to clean desks, a roll of paper towels, and some random rubber gloves, and stuffed them into a grocery bag and mutely handed it to the student. It was all I could do. 

I couldn’t tell them what to do, much less assure them their grandmother would be fine, but I figured at least I could give them some name-brand Lysol? I don’t know, not much of my thought process that day made sense.

The deaths began immediately. Or, I suppose, they were already in the process. By the end of the first week of remote learning, that student lost their grandmother. Their sole guardian. Over text threads, I gave them reassurances, and did what I could to prepare them for the process of moving in with estranged relatives in the south during a literal pandemic. 

Mental Health Reparations Opportunity

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So perhaps, as a public apology to my parents who were subject to many phone calls of me screaming at them to take the virus seriously, one can understand where I was coming from (thx mom and dad love u i know y’all were careful the whole time but still wear a mask plz). While of course my own experience of the pandemic was valid and stressful, it pales in comparison to what I have watched my BIPOC friends and students go through during this pandemic. Nothing. 

Again, I’m not saying that my experience doesn’t matter because it wasn’t “as bad,” what I am saying is there are differences in degree, and differences in kind. And the overlap of both is usually what it is like to compare the experiences of white people with those of BIPOC people around a shared event.

Reparation Opportunities for the Melanin-Deficient: 

Every week, I’ll shout out a BIPOC-run organization that could use some money. Tbh, I’m not really even very interested in making the argument as to why white people should pay reparations, because Ta Nehisi Coates et al have already done that, and Coates is a way better writer than me. So, skipping over that formality, I take it as a given that we have a responsibility to ourselves and BIPOC to attempt to level the playing field, financially or otherwise. 

Far too many BIPOC teens went through traumas similar to the one I just described. However, they are far less likely than whites to get psychological treatment. Here is more about this.

Here’s what you can do about it: The Loveland Foundation works to get treatment to Black women and girls seeking therapy nationally (in the U.S.). Pitch in $25 and call it lunch. Pitch in $75 and feel good about yourself. A little goes a long way when a lot of people pitch in.

Until next week,

A

P.S. My two cents on trying to be a better white person:

One thing that I realized from this recent exposure to systemic racism and the horrific trauma it brought down upon my students, is that while racism is systemic, we are also simultaneously individuals with some amount of agency within that system.

What we say matters. What we do matters even more. 

How are you grappling with the legacy of white supremacy? Or rather, more to the point, how do you navigate conversations with other white people about race? 

Which is why, what white people say and do to oppose racism is essential. 

What We White Folk Can Do: It’s all in the small stuff. Which also means it’s easy for individuals to make a huge difference. 

I truly believe that it’s through the micro-expressions, the way in which we speak up and out to our other white people, and how we shift our own consciousness and perspectives, that the most important work towards equity can be achieved. 

It’s all about the small things. The little things we can do to extend empathy and belief to the oppressive and genocidal legacies of our people’s histories are the most radical acts of making Black Lives Matter. 

With that said, financial reparations are also a huge way for white people to do a small act of solidarity. Look for BIPOC-run organizations and communities in your area, and give. Don’t tell them what they need, or offer your perspective. Unless they ask you (nobody wants to be that guy that the first episode of Nice White Parents shows). But what they really need is for us to listen and give resources to them, so they can care for their community. ((the small act of solidarity irl looks like giving money with no strings attached)) Or, if you are passionate about mental health and students’ rights (which is, honestly, the only stories you and I seem to exchange in individual emails are just that-- graduate student rights are also student rights. We all deserve access to mental health, but most especially BIPOC LGBTQ+ communities because internalized racism is very much real, just as is internalized homophobia. Our society as it currently stands makes it far too easy for BIPOC to believe that they are worthy of less. That’s the original global pandemic. 

White readers wanting to learn more about this topic: don’t ask BIPOC people to do the heavy lifting, in fact, don’t ask them anything. They’re exhausted and frustrated by us. Ask me, ask Google, but ffs don’t ask your minority friends to explain this to you.

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