“But as we become more in touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes” - Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” p.2
At the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, I experienced the reality of being an essential worker. From April to June 2020, I worked nearly full time as a cleaner and cashier at a grocery store in Colorado Springs. And from June until August, I picked up a second job as a server at a local family-owned Italian restaurant. After a summer filled with nearly 50-hour work weeks, I was able to quit my restaurant job to begin my two remote, on-campus positions when the semester started up again at my predominately white institution (PWI).
Both the detriments of vulnerability when it’s socially imposed and the value of vulnerability when it’s intentionally chosen have been made clear to me. My experience as a frontline worker during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic sharply contrasts my current position as a remote student-worker and simultaneously represents a widely shared experience among communities of color––that of socially imposed vulnerability. As defined by the Center for Disease Control in 2018, social vulnerability is: “The resilience of communities when confronted by external stresses on human health, stresses such as natural or human‐caused disasters, or disease outbreaks.”
My access to student life on a private, residential liberal arts campus, where over 75% of the student body comes from the national economic top 20%, showed me first-hand the ways that wealth acts as a sort of body armor against imposed social vulnerability. In addition to mandatory random weekly testing, Colorado College students have been required to conduct a majority of their academic and employment-related work remotely since last March. Beyond their designated social pods and Zoom-mates, many of the students who opted to return to campus at the start of fall semester were not subjected to in-person jobs with significant COVID-19 exposure in order to be able to fiscally provide for themselves.
For the entire summer, this was not my reality. In both “essential” work atmospheres, I was frequently subjected to patrons’ disregard of pandemic protocols and made vulnerable to the disparate impacts of COVID-19 exposure. “I have a documented heart condition; I don’t have to wear one,” is just one of the many extravagant excuses I heard from dine-in seeking, maskless customers feening for their weekly $12 panino. On more than one occasion I served maskless tables that would ask me to pull down my own so that they could see “the pretty smile beneath the mask.” Cleaning bathrooms, scanning people’s groceries, and picking up people’s dirty plates were the pastimes of my summer 2020. Unable to move back home, I would walk back to my on-campus apartment frustrated and exhausted between my lunch and dinner shift and check social media for the stack of Snapchat stories showing my peers lounging “bored” in their childhood bedrooms.
The implications of my own experience with lack of privilege and how it affects vulnerability cannot be understated. It is estimated that 393,000 Americans have died from coronavirus. According to the COVID Racial Data tracker, Black people in the U.S. have died at 1.4 times the rate of white people, with upwards of 50,000 fatal COVID-19 cases found in Black populations. Systemic disparities have exacerbated since the start of the pandemic. According to The Lancet:
“Part of the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communities of colour has been structural factors that prevent those communities from practicing social distancing. Minority populations in the U.S. disproportionally make up ‘essential workers’ such as retail grocery workers, public transit employees, and health-care workers and custodial staff.”
Resilience is a trait too often ascribed to communities of color. It is a word frequently used to describe the Black collective specifically. Posited as a compliment, resilience as a cultural expectation serves to maintain popularized archetypes of Black feminine strength and impenetrable Black masculinity. Both of these tropes have negative impacts on the treatment of Black people in medicine. According to a 2016 study, 40% of first and second-year medical students believed that Black people literally had thicker skin than their white counterparts. Black people undoubtedly have a unique collective strength, but if the distinct discrimination we face continues to be underwritten by federal and medical institutions as some type of inescapable ramification of the Black condition, then the disproportionate impacts of social vulnerability will never be productively acknowledged or rectified. Most simply stated, Black people should not always be expected to remain self-reliantly strong, especially not in times of pandemic-level danger.
More often than not, Black people suffer the consequences regardless of the ways we respond to imposed social vulnerability. A Black man who tunes out the world with headphones can make himself physically vulnerable to a gunshot in his back by a law-enforcement officer. A Black woman who displays too much emotional vulnerability is often deemed unprofessional or characterized as “the angry Black woman.” As a whole, communities who spoke out on their imposed vulnerability to COVID-19, police brutality, and other systemic issues in the #BlackLivesMatter movements of summer 2020 were met with the very type of violence that they were protesting.
There is a distinction to be made here between the harm caused by imposed social vulnerability maintained as a systemic power tool and that of willing vulnerability as a mechanism of agency. When vulnerability is actively chosen, Black individuals are able to utilize their vulnerability in service of immense social change. Change germinates at the moment of decision. America was forever changed when Harriet Tubman decided to make 300+ trips on the Freedom Trail to free those who were enslaved, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. chose non-violence as a civil rights strategy, and again most recently, when activists all over the world chose to look their oppressors in the face and insist upon the value of their Black lives. A willingness to be vulnerable is a catalyst of courage, strength, and future-oriented thinking that aims to turn unjust reality into illustrated truth.
Two hundred forty-five years ago, Thomas Jefferson constitutionally declared a self-evident truth: All men are created equal. Equality is declared a natural right in the founding document of the United States of America. But both recent political events and the COVID-19 pandemic have shown how far American reality has strayed from this principle. So how do we make this self-evident truth into our reality? By continuing to do what we have for so long: willingly put ourselves into vulnerable positions for the sake of creating real progressive change and in search of achieving what we know to be self-evidently true.
As yet another decade and presidential administration come to an end, it is critical that people understand how the already disparate areas of healthcare, economics, and social injustice have manifested as a triple-layered pandemic. 2020 undoubtedly reflected glaring systemic contrasts between security as attained by economic privilege versus the risk factors inflicted by socially imposed vulnerability. The pandemic has also illuminated how willing vulnerability can be used as a methodology toward achieving true democracy––one where all people are empowered to seek equality. So to the privileged who consider comfort a right and vulnerability as an equally afforded standard, I ask that you recognize how imposed social vulnerability has been systematically used to hold marginalized people back from accessing the democratic ideal. To the underprivileged, I ask that you embrace the triumphs of our collective history and continue to challenge dominant narratives that suggest that choosing vulnerability is weakness. Recognize that your willing vulnerability is a source of immense agency that has potential to continuously benefit you and your communities in the ongoing fight for social equality more than you might have ever imagined.