Stressed out and overwhelmed by all the pressures of Corona and non-stop racism, my husband and I set out to get away from it all and take a vacation. So we attempted to put it all on pause and take a trip to Puerto Rico. But as we trekked to our flight, along the airport’s long terminal A corridor, a sculpture screamed a question that has been haunting me for a while,”Who will raise the child?”. It’s a profound sculpture by Zimbabwe Artist, Gladman Zinyeka, that explores the socio-economic and displacement effects of the AIDs pandemic in Africa. However, as a teacher and new black mother, in the trenches of a new global pandemic, the art spoke to me with renewed meaning and an overwhelming urgency to find the answer to its question. With long-standing systemic health and social inequities plaguing every aspect of our lives, according to the CDC, African Americans are at increased risk of getting COVID-19 and are 5 times more likely to be hospitalized and/or dying from Covid-19 than their white counterparts. Just as the AIDS pandemic disproportionately hit Africa by storm with over 50% of the world’s HIV infections in sub-saharan Africa alone and 30 million live loss present day, Corona too will adversely impact blacks in America and abroad, merely because most have poor living and working conditions. So the truth is that it is not a matter of “if” black families will be impacted by the Covid-19 virus, it is “when” and how will we as a community respond to the loss. Most are talking about the economic loss of this virus as if we are a business and this is just another cost of doing it. But as a teacher and a black mother, I think about the human loss and the generational domino effect of that loss that will reverberate for decades in an even poorer black community than before. Who will raise those children deeply impacted by the effects of Coronavirus and all its indirect casualties? Yet, on social media platforms and from members of the Atlanta City Council, there are demands to ban and punish black children selling water in the street and even punish their parents as they try to simply take care of their families. All the while, city parks and recreational programs have been shuttered, youth programs such as Pathfinder, STEP Forward and the Mayor’s Summer Youth program have all been decimated in the past decade, multiple service industry jobs have been adversely impacted by the virus and not to mention the city’s mismanaged Atlanta Worksource Agency which returned $1.3 million last year for failure to spend money and place people in jobs. So again, with all this loss, who do we point the finger at and blame for these systemic issues of poverty? It seems we’ve chosen to blame our children and the least among us at a critical time when they need us most. Just as with the AIDs pandemic, Coronavirus too will forever change the lives of our children, but it is vital that we respond with compassion, love and patience as we seek to understand the lived experiences of our children and their families in this season. So I ask again, as the late sculptor Zinyeka asks, who will raise our children as this pandemic devours our communities and our families and how will we as a community respond?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorEducator, student advocate and community activists. Archives
October 2021
Categories |