Light in the Darkness: Race and the COVID-19 Pandemic — Lessons for Humanity

• In Event: Peaceful Solutions to Challenges of Pandemic: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives From the East to the West

Abstract

The current COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on health, social, political and economic disparities in nations around the world. This paper focuses on the impact of the pandemic in the United States, in particular how the persistent challenges of racism in the U.S. have resulted in disproportionate impacts on African-Americans, Latinx, and Native Americans. While the virus was spreading, actions of police violence against civilians, particularly African-Americans, re-emerged in the public consciousness after the killing of George Floyd, resulting in mass social protests across the country and indeed the world. Thus as a society, the United States struggles with navigating the deep wounds and intersections between joint life threatening health disparities and life threatening impacts of persistent historical racism.

This paper examines these dual societal challenges through a human development lens, asking what we can learn about resilience in communities who wrestle with persistent structural threats to their well-being. The author offers an overview of the history of resistance and resilience in the African-American community, a history informed by communal belief systems, responsive social networks, identity orientations around inter-dependence, and the vision of creating institutions – starting with schools established by African-Americans for themselves after the Civil War – that could provide supports for the community and in particular for youth. These resources for resilience include cultural artifacts created within the community to invite critical reflection on human possibilities. The historical examination runs from the period of African enslavement in the U.S. to current social protest movements around “Black Lives Matter.” This history then takes on theoretical explanatory power by how foundational theories in human development affirm the potential of these explanatory variables in accounting for and explaining resilience in light of trauma.
This historical exemplar of resilience is useful for several reasons. At the heart of the U.S. conundrum is the nation’s difficulties dealing with and understanding what is gained through cultural diversity. This issue of cultural diversity is a challenge in many nations around the world, where the status of ethnic minorities results in inequities along multiple dimensions (e.g. Uyghurs in China, the Malay in Singapore, Turks in Germany, Maori in New Zealand). Current international migration often stems from violence pushing refugee populations out of their homelands. Ideologies that position minority populations as the “other” are often demonizing and influence structural barriers that minorities must learn to navigate, resist and transform. This historical example offered from the history of African-Americans pushes back on difference as deficit, on difference as victim. Drawing of Spencer’s Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory, the paper argues that this historical example offers evidence of sources of resilience informed by identity orientations, examples of how micro-level interactions and consciously organized social structures at different levels of the ecological system have transformative power. The paper argues that re-thinking race as a metaphor for navigating difference and recruiting resilience in the face of trauma is particularly informative during this period in which cultural inter-dependence is all the more critical.

Author

• Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University