Systemic Racism Is Akin to Negligent Homicide

Regarding systemic racism: "Systemic" does not have to be the explicit and stated aim of a law or policy but rather the systemic effect of its implementation. Think of it this way: systemic racism is akin to negligent homicide: death that is the result of reckless indifference to an ought-to-be-known consequence. Systemic racism is the neglect of the inequities amplified when broadly enforcing the status quo. Policing is a prime example. Even if the police honestly believe their job is not to promote racism, policing's implementation is all too often racist. Housing policy tends to be another. This use of "systemic" applies to any legislated or applied policy that when implemented has an ought-to-be-known consequence on people given their race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, age, etc. Since police have a legal monopoly on violent force, they are often the witting or unwitting agent of systemic racism.

The Neglected Student and the Academic's Cozy Pandemic

I would think some of us –– those secure in a bubble of privilege ––  would remember what was essential in our own academic journey.  Are some senior faculty in American universities blind to the impact the closed campus has on students threatened by the absence of direct connection to mentors and peers? Is our unexamined comfort a source of collusion? What is our mission? Have we not failed if we do not produce passion for our subject matters, lifelong connections, or future academics? 

The virtual is not good enough. Students need in-the-flesh community to enact the rite of passage the traditional university is designed to provide.  This is especially crucial for graduate students as they enter and when they leave the university. Their life plans hinge on finding friends and mentors when they begin a new stage of life and to cement those relationships when they exit. It is unrealistic to believe this can be achieved online. The person to person connection and commitment is not the same. I write from experience. During the first months of the pandemic I taught entirely online “Case Studies in the Lives of Persons” at Harvard Extension School.  The face to face Zoom interaction often felt intimate and satisfying. But here’s the rub. I am fairly certain that if I was walking on campus and passed any of these students, I would not recognize them beyond some uncanny feeling they seem familiar. 

Most of my academic load is teaching and supervising doctoral level clinical psychologists. I am also a practicing psychoanalyst. In the past, before I would consider initiating or terminating a therapeutic relationship, I wanted to be physically present. Nonetheless, since the pandemic began, I have begun working online with a few individuals and couples who simply could not wait until we felt safe to meet in person. Online therapy has a different cadence and perspective. The face to face immediacy is both challenge and asset. And, as with my online only students, I fear I would not recognize any of my new patients if we sat at nearby tables in the outdoor cafes now open in Boston.

Here is what I am observing: Some of my peers, people at least for now reassured about their means, the ones not struggling with child care, those not worried about student evaluations for promotion and tenure, are sleeping better, feel less hurried, and find comfort in their extended, sheltered-in-place lives. We are enjoying our enforced staycation. 

Suddenly freed from showing up, freed from the demands of students, we are quietly invested in remaining at home, on Zoom, reading what we want, getting caught up on TV, tending our gardens, having our food delivered. We are thriving. Thriving, that is, at the expense of an obligation to our students and those less sheltered. This staycation is a relief for people secure in their social lives, family, and career. For people who are not secure or established, the profound isolation of shutdowns and the extreme uncertainty of what they face, if and when the pandemic passes, provokes responses from ordinary anxiety to scarring trauma. I witness both patterns daily.

For those the pandemic has not created desperation, has it offered a hard to admit but welcome break? Is whatever guilt we notice dampened by our virtuous acceptance of a social distance we don’t really resent?  

We are complicit in intergenerational injustice if we relish the cozy place we have in our retreats. I would not have thought this weeks ago, but I am discovering conflict with the comfort I have achieved. I say I want this over, but I am reluctant to have it end. When the lockdowns started in March, I would have thought I would want them ended as soon as it was clear our hospital systems were no longer in danger of collapse. Months later, I cannot claim my comfort with the closed campus is an ethical concern for the greater good of students; instead, it’s mainly about my comfort.

We all face a pandemic. A terrible disease for some elders and for those whose social conditions of race, ethnicity, and economic class place them in harm’s way; and for the medical responder inadequately protected and overwhelmed by a viral load. Nonetheless, ordinarily, the virus is a manageable sickness for most students and the young. There are horrible exceptions, many exceptions that require many cautions. 

We need proper planning to protect those who need protection and we need to be prepared for expected and unexpected tragedy. But this pandemic could last for years. The hope of a vaccine by the winter that actually works may be good for the markets but does not reflect medical or logistical reality. Anticipate this. Sequester vulnerable seniors in well lighted, well ventilated rooms with bright monitors and good headsets. Give us sufficient bandwidth; but let students and willing faculty gather with realistic caution of contagion. At this point some of our contentment is obvious, but what should be obvious is that this contentment is complicit with the degradation of a generation of future academics.

The pandemic is a prequel of global stress to come. We need a thousand solutions. Those enjoying their comfort should be aware they are part of the problem.  

6/30/20 edited 8/17/20

The current Rate of Transmission (RT) in my community is now hovering around .83. Very soon, Northeastern and Boston University will bring large numbers of students into my neighborhood. I expect the RT to rise. But is keeping them home a better public health practice than sending them back to school? On campus, masked and unmasked, will they maintain social distance? Of course not. They'll hop from classroom to bar; they'll party and generally mess around with each other. They will spread infection. No doubt. But what do we expect they'll do at home? Stay in the house? At home, who are the targets of infection? Friends, parents, siblings, grandparents, and others under the same roof, in the same rooms. A household vulnerable to sickness and death, some more than those on campus. We need a reasonable risk/benefit analysis that compares home risk to the problems of on-campus learning. Perhaps it's been done. If so, it would be useful to see.

7/3/20
From The NYTimes: A Problem for College in the Fall: Reluctant Professors 

A version of this posting appeared as an Op Ed in the August 17, 2020 Harvard Crimson:

The Pandemic's Neglected Student and the Cozy Academic

1/24/21

From the NYTimes: Surge of Student Suicides Pushes Las Vegas Schools to Reopen.

From the The Washington Post: France’s president says he understands university students’ misery during the coronavirus pandemic. Students aren’t sure.

12/22/21

From the NYTimes: Another Surge in the Virus Has Colleges Fearing a Mental Health Crisis  

1/27/22

From the Harvard Gazette: CAMPUS & COMMUNITY Two years in, still coping with pandemic stress

What to expect? The Pandemics effect on personality, culture, and politics.

Expect soliton waves: self-reinforcing waves of infection that propagate at a constant velocity.

I hope I've missed the likely better outcomes.

We are all in this together. None of us has ever experienced health and financial uncertainty in a global context where everyone else does, too. Historically, society wide unemployment has led to populist movements, from the totalitarian Nazi, to the New Deal versus America First. The New Deal brought people together. Pandemics and plagues elicit fear of the neighbor and the stranger. That sort of populism wants to build walls and rid itself of contamination and impurity.

Like it or not, adversity seldom brings out the best in us. Mostly, it makes us mean, suspicious, and selfish. It threatens narcissistic stability, and we act accordingly.

Social disruptions foster crisis cults and new religion. Collective trauma and deprivation are seedbeds for populist fear of the despised “other” and malevolent identity politics. 
The dilemma of global stress creates temporary or sustained uncertainty. Cross-cultural stress, collective trauma, and a heightened awareness of difference in security, power, and privilege are already writ large. Look at some examples from cultural demography: The Great Depression, Post WW1 German trauma and deprivation, and the various holocausts and forced migrations. These collective circumstances affected communities and cultures many ways. What happened? Did people find common ground with the stranger or attempt their elimination? And, in contrast, consider the white middle-class post war Baby Boomer’s opportunities that moved people from the lower middle to the middle or better. But then consider the globalization that returned many to the lower middle. Consider their political shifts. With an expected recession, let’s be real: the lower middle is completely screwed.

Things to wonder about: Circumstances experienced globally are a vector for culture change. Global events of varying duration, now a context of our judgments and action, can change our character if acted on long enough to become in-character. If this changes enough of us, accompanying changes in our culture’s characteristic choice principles and social practices follow.

Here’s a key question: Given sufficient practice and experience, how long does it take to develop new ways of living? How long are these characteristics stable at different periods of life? Daniel Levinson’s ideas, taken with a grain of salt, offer a guide. Adult personality transitions require five +/- two years. Periods of ‘settling down’ are seven +/- two years. But how long does it take to fundamentally alter a child's rapid development and emerging view of self, community, and world? A year is a much larger portion of life for a kid than for an established "grown up".
How long will the pandemic last? What difference will it make to people at different phases of their life? Are you looking to start college or begin a career? Hoping to get out of debt? Are you a kid told to avoid the playground and the neighbor’s kid?

The pandemic’s major variables: How long will it last; how well will authorities understand rapid upward and gradual downward infection slopes; and how competently will they promote and apply varieties of corrective feedback. And, will there be ongoing and extended recurrences with or without adequate corrective action?

Will the pandemic be a year or less of disruption; a painfully extended but temporary abnormal? Or will it last long enough to alter the shared course of people’s lives? And, in so doing, shift culture and personality? We are going to find out.


About Soliton Waves: Projecting the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 through the postpandemic period (Science, 22 May 2020:Vol. 368, Issue 6493, pp. 860-868)