(no audio) (no audio) (no audio) - The evidence is overwhelming, the impact of COVID-19 on communities of color was out of proportion to the size of those communities in the overall American population.

Today's guest is among a group of scholars whose new book argues the experience with COVID is consistent with other difficult experiences in American history.

He's Dr. Yohuru Williams, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(gentle bright music) (gentle bright music continues) Hello and welcome to the "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller with The Providence Journal.

- This week we're joined by Yohuru Williams, the distinguished university chair and professor of history, as well as founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas.

He's a contributor to and co-editor of a new book "After life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America."

Yohuru, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thanks for having me.

Good to be with you both.

- So the book is co-edited, I should note, with Keri Leigh Merritt and Rhae Lynn Barnes, and it's a remarkable read, "After Life," which tries to make sense of the pandemic experience in the United States.

And I should note that as we sit here today, there's more than 1 million American dead from the pandemic and we're losing, still, about 400 to 450 Americans every day as we tape this.

Can you put that into some sort of context for us?

How big is that number in American history?

- Well, it's incredible.

And in fact, that's part of the reason that we were motivated to write the book.

You had in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, of the kind of reckoning with what was happening, these questions about, was there any comparable moment in our history we could look back to and say, "This is similar"?

And when we think about, for example, the number of people killed during the American Civil War, this surpasses that.

If we think about the number of people killed in World War I, World War II, these numbers surpass those numbers.

So it's not hyperbole to say that this is unprecedented.

At the same time, there's much that we can learn from the experience of Americans with those previous moments of tragedy.

And part of what we hoped to do in writing this book was to make those comparisons, to draw out those comparisons.

You often see, when people talk about historians, thinking about us talking about things that have happened in the distant past.

And in fact we thought historians might be best positioned in this moment to help provide a little bit of hope by giving the perspective of what was happening through the lens of history.

- So I think I wanna pick up on that a little bit.

So I'm a historian too, and you know, we think of ourselves as sort of squirreled away in archives reading, you know, dusty papers.

Is there a risk in having historians reflect on something that is so immediate?

- Well, I think there is, at least in terms of the academy, it's something that we're probably uncomfortable with.

And we acknowledge in the introduction that this is a bold experiment.

It is really taking historians out of their comfort zone and saying, with that ability to anticipate from this deep knowledge of history, are there things that we can learn from the past, are there things that we can project forward?

You know, how do we develop a sense of hope?

How do we understand resiliency in light of something like a global pandemic and its relationship to other pandemics in our history, the Spanish Flu of of 1918, for example, How do we think about a racial reckoning in light of other moments of racial reckoning, the Civil War Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and how do we deal with large questions of grief and political turmoil in ways that actually inspire us to have hope?

And I think historians, legal scholars, are uniquely positioned to do that, even though, as you pointed out, our work typically is done looking backward rather than projecting forward or talking about the contemporary.

- So I wanna pick up on what Jim picked up on.

You and your co-contributors, co-editors wrote this during the pandemic.

This wasn't, "Okay, we're gonna wait until, you know, this fall when we're, in some senses, beyond the worst of it.

What about the risk of that?

I mean, you're writing in real time and I would say I think some of the power of these essays comes from doing that 'cause these were people writing, you know, literally as people around them, people they knew were dying and suffering.

And anyway, long question, was there a risk there?

- I think there was tremendous risk and we were asking our contributors to be vulnerable in a way that, typically, we don't expect scholars to be vulnerable.

You think about some of the people that are in this volume, people like Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Heather Ann Thompson, Peniel Joseph, Robin D. G. Kelley, some of the most recognized scholars in our field.

And we were saying to them, "We don't necessarily want you to approach this solely from a historical lens.

We want you to look at this in the context of our contemporary moment to try to make sense of this in terms of that broader history that you bring to the table."

I think in particular about Heather Ann Thompson's article on COVID in prisons, "The Permeability of Cells," one of my favorite pieces in the entire volume where she is raising the issue of all the questions that we associate with mass incarceration in America in the 21st century, and how COVID-19 exacerbates those by forcing us to contend with those in light of this global health pandemic that then calls into question, what are we incarcerating people for?

Why is, you know, the world leader in terms of democratic practice last in terms of mass incarceration?

And what can this tell us about, again, looking back at other moments in our history, about the problems of mass incarceration as they're related to health crises such as COVID-19.

- So you use the term exacerbate in terms of people behind bars, and that was a really good essay.

The exacerbation also however could be and was expanded beyond simply people in prison to communities of color, to indigenous communities who paid a much higher toll and price during the pandemic and continue to.

Maybe you can talk about that, the roots of that, why that could even have been the case and was the case and what happened actually during the pandemic.

- Well, it's one of my favorite sections of the book too and we owe that in large part to Keri Leigh Merritt and Rhae Lynn Barnes, who both were very much wanting to be able to have readers explore the unique challenges of communities of color, particularly indigenous persons, in this moment, Latinx, African American.

In the first half of the book, the first part, it's divided into four parts, it is entitled American Exceptionalism.

And it's taking on this notion of American exceptionalism and immigration in light of the lived experiences of communities of color.

And in that section in particular in the introduction, Rhae Lynn Barnes and Keri Leigh Merritt talk about the particular challenges that COVID-19 posed to indigenous people looking at, for example, religious practices, cultural practices that in some sense exacerbated the response to the pandemic, but also racism and legal ways that exacerbated the response to the pandemic.

So that was important for us.

You also have people like Monica Munoz Martinez, who wrote a phenomenal essay entitled "El Paso in the Morning," where she looks at violence against Latinx people during the pandemic talking about COVID-19 and its disproportionate impact on communities of color, specifically Latinx, But also looking at that in light of the El Paso Massacre and asking the question that, we're talking about mass death, not only in terms of the pandemic, we're talking about America reckoning with these kind of deep-seated racial fault lines that still exist, that are still a very big part of the fabric of our nation and which really manifest themselves in the most glaring terms on January 6th.

So, you know, I think that's part of what the motivation was there and we had some incredible scholars, you know, weigh in on that and look at that through various lenses, Robert Tsai and Monica Munoz Martinez, in particular.

- You know, Yohuru, I read this book with, it's a difficult read in the sense that it exposes so much injustice throughout so much American history that continues to manifest itself in the way the pandemic played out and in the kinds of fatalities and disease rates that we saw, particularly in communities of color.

But you end on a note of some optimism and some hope.

Can you spell that out for us here?

- Yeah, absolutely.

You know, one of the things that spoke to me in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd here in Minneapolis-St. Paul was a letter that John Lewis wrote, his final letter to the American people, which was published posthumously in the "New York Times," you know, shortly after his death, in fact, days after his death, and in it John Lewis wrote, "Together we can redeem the soul of America."

And it's a very hopeful and inspirational piece that reminds people that, you know, we have the power, even in the midst of this unprecedented challenge associated with COVID-19, associated with this racial reckoning, to write our own future.

And Lewis said in particular, I like to call it the Lewis doctrine, "If we study the past, if we recognize our shared humanity and if we recognize that freedom is a constant struggle, that we all have a duty and a responsibility to contribute in meaningful ways, to be caretakers of our republic and caretaker caretakers of our community, then, you know, we're always gonna be moving forward.

We have moments of challenge, but we can overcome."

And I think that's where we wanted to end.

We're very much inspired by John Lewis, very much inspired by that message and I think people needed to hear that in this moment, particularly from people who studied the past and are looking at, again, these moments where this is the first time that we heard that, you know, people were closing the door on our future, and in fact we've risen from the ashes, but we could only do that when we follow what John Lewis outlined in that piece.

- So you co-wrote the conclusion with Keri Leigh Merritt, and it's really a call of action to all Americans and I just want to read just a passage from that.

And then I have a question.

So you wrote, "We need a massive interracial grassroots social movement, a movement of the people, the likes of which no one even from our generation has ever seen.

It's time, in fact, it's past time to turn our outrage, anger, and deep, disheartening sadness into action."

Very powerful, very, very powerful.

Do you see signs that that grassroots movement is beginning, could begin and where it might go?

- It's a great question, Wayne, because I think a year and a half ago definitely I would've argued that I saw signs of that.

I worry, and I think this is a challenge that, again, we have as scholars, as you're kind of, you know, looking back, that Americans have a very short memory and unfortunately the American people like a tragedy with a happy ending.

I listened to an NPR program a couple of years ago, maybe 10 years ago, and as they were introducing it, they talked about the difference between American literature and Russian literature and whereas the Russians love these kind of long drawn out tragedies like "War and Peace," these tomes where the hero is poorly rewarded.

Americans like the sitcom.

We want, you know, our tragedies summed up in 30 minutes and we wanna believe that we can overcome in a short period of time, and we're not invested in kind of the long haul necessary in order to create real and lasting change.

I worry in this moment that as we move further and further away from the memory of 2020, what we all experienced viscerally in terms of the stay-at-home orders and the grief and loss that people felt in that moment, in the big and small things that people in our volume, like Ula Taylor talk about, the loss of our Starbucks table, which would be easy for people to trivialize.

But she's saying it wasn't just the loss of the Starbucks table, it was a loss of community, the loss of the ability to socialize, our experiences in airports, those types of things.

As we come back online, as things are coming back to normal, I think that there's a real fear that the momentum toward that is being lost.

And in many ways, I think January 6th is a kind of a referendum on that.

It's a call to action in the sense that we could see what happens when those deep-seated divisions manifest themselves in ways that are harmful.

Stephen Berry writes about that in a phenomenal article entitled "Confederates Take the Capital," But also is an opportunity for us to think about, you know, the ways that what Keri Leigh and I write about in the conclusion, we can encourage that.

And I think a lot of that is a pushback towards some of the things that we've seen manifesting themselves today.

The pushback against the teaching of substantive U.S. history, hard history.

'Cause really, again, this is something that John Lewis talked about, the way that we redeem the soul of America is facing our past unflinchingly and then thinking about ways that we can be part of the change to elevate our democracy.

- Yohuru, you mentioned the essay by Stephen Berry, which is powerful about the, sort of, the historical legacy of the American Civil War and its relevance to today.

There was a sentence that struck me.

He wrote, excuse me, "The Civil War was inaugurated, basically, because one side refused to recognize the legitimacy of an election."

I mean, are we on the cusp of another civil war?

- Well, I think it's such a powerful point, and in fact, I remember reading that line when Stephen submitted it and just being blown away by the kind of starkness with which he stated that.

And I think Peniel Joseph also speaks to this in his essay, this idea that we're on the cusp, perhaps, of this kind of, he calls it a third reconstruction, I talk about it in the book as a third reconstruction, but we have to remember, this reconstruction follows civil war, follows this kind of fraying, and we can't deny that we are in the midst of something that feels an awful lot like 1861 all over again in terms of our politics in America today.

It's funny that Stephen Berry is talking about growing up in Florida, which is one of these key battle grounds, and we talk about what were the three states at the center of reconstruction, the last holdouts?

Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina.

Sounds, again, suspiciously a lot like today in a lot of ways.

We can learn a lot from our history, but I think part of what Keri Leigh Merritt and I were writing about in the conclusion that you found so compelling, Wayne, is our hope that in embracing this notion of the need for a third reconstruction, we'd be very forward-thinking in terms of how we'd be expanding that in ways that would leave no person, no group, no question, large question left behind with regard to environment, access to healthcare.

We would actually be talking about "After Life" in a way that Saidiya Hartman talked about the afterlife of slavery where she says, "Look, you know, traumatic things leave scars, slavery left scars.

Economically, socially, politically on our landscape and we can see that in voting rights and denial of voting rights.

We can see that in policing, so on and so forth."

We'd be asking questions today about how do we, in kind of thinking through this third reconstruction, ensure that the "After Life," again, would address some of those key issues and ways that meaningfully would address some of the blind spots that we've missed in the past.

- So, Yohuru, there's another element here related to, can we move forward?

Can we have this grassroots movement?

And you mentioned, I'm summarizing, but that your optimism is a little less now than it was before.

The other element here, and I've written about this in a lot of my own journalism, we've discussed this on this program, and that's the mental health impact of this pandemic.

So many people who are still alive have been traumatized in so many different ways due to economic reasons, due to to racial injustice reasons and due to losing family members and whatnot.

How does that factor in?

I mean, this is a huge, huge problem that this country and indeed the globe is now facing.

- I'm so glad you mentioned that, Wayne, because I think mental health is a huge part of this.

And in fact, you know, there's opportunity in looking at the mental health cost of the pandemic and the racial reckoning in ways that, again, affirm some of the things that we've already mentioned, but are worth expanding.

The idea that part of mental health is recognizing the problem and naming the problem.

So the pushback against, for example, things like critical race theory, the phantom menace of critical race theory in American public schools, and this kind of manufactured controversy over the teaching of the warts that we associate with American history is not about good mental hygiene, it's about trying to hide our history in ways that ultimately produce harm.

Because what they do is make this moment seem like an aberration rather than unfinished business.

And really, what we're talking about is the unfinished business of race in America, the unfinished business of gender equality in America, the unfinished business of the perfection or perfecting American democracy.

Having said that, I think the other part of this that's critical is that it's hard for people to see a way forward when they haven't had an opportunity to properly grieve.

And this third part of the book is called Finding Light in the Darkness, and it's kind of dealing with the question of grief.

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, perhaps has one of the best essays, for me, in that section.

Where she's talking about, you know, basically going through and building a family archive during the pandemic and coming to grips with some of the grief.

You know, she talks about the grief that came before the grief, you know, this kind of recognition that these are longstanding problems.

That we do become, in some sense, blinded to our own realities in ways that I think are detrimental and invite us to think about mental health in terms of our own mental health, but also the American psyche.

You know, what will it take in this moment to think about ourselves differently, to build a new identity, one that's not based on, you know, mythologized American past, but one which is based on an aspirational future where we try to live up to some of the values that we articulate in our core documents and mean those in ways that involve the entire populace so I think that's part of it.

But I would be remiss if I didn't say that I think that one of the things that will be a huge impediment is how people will respond in this moment to those losses which are less tangible and less real to us, and that are really owned by the generation below us.

This idea of you know, what does it mean to have been denied the opportunity to engage socially with others in school and how is that gonna impact that generation going forward?

What does it mean to have lost, in some cases, large numbers of one's family, you know?

And then how do you deal with that?

Again, not unprecedented in terms of us being able to look back and talk about other periods where this took place, but in terms of scale, certainly this is something that weighed heavily on us and something that we believe is very important.

- Yohuru, one of the essays that affected me most was the essay by Philip Deloria, an indigenous professor at Harvard University, who writes about the shock that he had that his greatest emotional release came from the death of a singer-songwriter.

It wasn't the pandemic, it wasn't the lockdown, it wasn't someone who died that he knew in his family, it was this songwriter who died.

And it resonated with me because I can think of times in my own life in the last two years where I could not explain my emotions in a given moment where I felt overwhelmed and emotional, sometimes literally moved to tears.

And as I thought about what Deloria had written about, it occurred to me that perhaps even in our isolation, we were part of this massively-shared experience that manifested itself in a whole bunch of different ways.

But I don't know, I'm sort of riffing here, I think a little bit, but this idea that we live through this shared experience even in isolation, is there validity to that?

- It's a wonderful comment and there's definitely validity to it.

In fact, one of the things that we spent a lot of time talking about, and again, this is, you know, Rhae Lynn Barnes is, you know, brilliant scholar, but she was on social media, it was kind of interesting, and using social media in the very beginning of the pandemic to engage with other scholars and asked these big questions and talking a lot about mass death.

And one of the things that she hit on that Philip definitely develops in that piece in talking about the death of this singer and how it impacted him, is the way that we think about ourselves in relation to our celebrity culture.

And for me, there's no better example of that than the death of Kobe Bryant.

If we go back to the death of Kobe Bryant in January, in that moment, we are still believing that it's a tragedy to see such a young superstar pass in that way.

And it's an aberration.

Things like that don't happen.

This is a tragic accident.

And you know, we mourn Kobe Bryant for the loss of the athlete, but we also recognize that, you know, a helicopter crash is something that, you know, it was an accident and so on and so forth.

By the time we're in the midst of the pandemic and we are witnessing with frequency the passing of people from all walk walks of life, celebrities, actors, politicians, a pandemic that doesn't discriminate and no one is immune from, it becomes very real for all of us to have to grapple with our own mortality in ways that it may not be tangible.

Maybe you didn't have somebody in your immediate family pass, but someone who you felt you had a kinship and familiarity with because of their music, because like Dawn Wells from "Gilligan's Island," you watched them on television, you know, in endless reruns as a child, and they pass, it makes real, that sense of loss.

And so I think when you talk about that, it's why I love Deloria's piece, it's one of my favorite pieces in this volume because I also went through those emotions.

It was like every time someone else, you know, we're accustomed to those things coming far more spaced out.

And you want to be able to say, when you're talking about somebody in that context, "Well, you know, they lived a good life," or, "You know, there's some explanation."

But when it's a global pandemic and they're coming so close together, it just reinforces all of our own mortality and our own sense of vulnerability.

- Yohuru, yeah, that's one of my favorite essays as well.

And what Jim was saying and what you're talking about in terms of emotions, I mean, this has been two and a half years of just incredible, I don't even want to use the word roller coaster, I'm really at a loss for words about that.

And I'm so glad that this volume recognizes and explores that.

I have a completely unrelated or somewhat unrelated question, which is everything we're talking about here is against the backdrop of a highly politically polarized country.

Can you speak to that?

What do we do?

How do we move towards some shared vision again, some resolution, some way of moving forward?

- We got about 90 seconds left, Yohuru.

- I'll be brief.

Just saying that, I think that's one of the reasons that we benefited from some of the voices we were able to bring together in this volume, because they provide this against the backdrop of history.

This is not unprecedented, but we've survived because we've recognized, ultimately, at the end of the day, that resilience and strength come from this kind of belief in a shared civil theology.

Now, what binds us together is our belief in the American enterprise.

And as outdated as that may seem to some, or as frayed as that might feel in our contemporary moment, there is a real sense of belonging that comes when one says that what unites us is our belief in this thing called America, where we can have what John Lewis talked about in that piece, we can redeem the soul of America by reinventing and reinviting people to reimagine what America could mean for the future.

And that's an inclusive, democratic, united nation where people recognize their kind of shared kinship through the lens of our troubled history.

But then in recognizing that history, also recognize tremendous opportunity to be something that we aspire to be and that we're in the process of becoming.

- You know, we got literally about 20 seconds left here, but is there a generation of political leaders now who you think are capable of that?

We don't have a lot of John Lewis's right now.

- I think they're being formed.

It's such a great question because I truly believe they're being formed in this moment in the same way that John Lewis was molded by the Civil Rights Movement, in the same way that some of the great statespersons that we admire so deeply were very much shaped by the moments in which they were born and what they experienced.

I think there's a generation of political leaders now who are being formed who'll be able to lead us effectively into the future.

- Yohuru Williams, the book is "After Life" and it is an important read.

Thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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