The Opportunity of Now: Community Engagement in Plural Pandemics
With Dr. Tania Mitchell
Photo Credit: Nicholas Pfosi via REUTERS
On March 23rd, Dr. Tania Mitchell joined the Duke community to discuss how Covid-19, ensuing health and economic disparities among Black, Latinx, and Native Americans, followed by the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin, have unveiled plural pandemics.
Dr. Mitchell examined these intersections both as an internationally recognized scholar in service-learning and community engagement, and as a member of the South Minneapolis neighborhood where George Floyd was murdered, just three blocks from her home. Mitchell described how George Floyd Square’s transformation from a site of trauma to a space that centered community, healing, and racial justice, informs her perspectives on community engaged work in higher ed. Mitchell’s presentation, part of Duke Service-Learning’s Opportunity of Now series, outlined three reparative community-engagement practices – “Reveal, Respond, Repair” - that aim to disrupt hierarchical frameworks, center hyper-marginalized communities, and support, rather than direct, a community’s vision for itself. Summaries and key quotes from Dr. Mitchell’s presentation are outlined below:
1. REVEAL
“Our community engagement work should be revealing. It should make clear the systemic injustices at play that marginalize the already marginalized, focus on the policies, practices, conditions, and experiences that shape the everyday realities of poor and people of color.” (Mitchell, 2021)
“One of the taglines to come out of the pandemic is ‘we’re all in this together.’ But it’s important to remember that we’re all not “in it” equally. The impact of oppression on minoritized people is violent, and it is magnified depending on the number of minoritized identities you have – and that informs the contexts you exist in.” (Mitchell, 2021)
“We know that minoritized communities will have a harder time rebounding economically from the pandemic and the structural injustices of racism - from disproportionate rates of homeownership to less reliable medical coverage and access from the everyday fear of police violence to the agonizing burden of grief and grief of losing loved ones. At a time when it feels like the government believes that Black and Brown and Asian people are disposable, we are in the midst of multiple pandemics.” (Mitchell, 2021)
“Community engaged work should find ordinary and creative ways to center those stories so that they are seen and heard and understood in new ways.” (Mitchell, 2021)
“George Floyd’s image is everywhere in the city. I think there’s a humanizing effect when that happens. We have a sense of knowing who George Floyd is. That’s important. The sense that his life mattered is very real and remains very real because of the ways his image has been memorialized in so many different spaces in our community.” - Dr. Tania Mitchell. Photo Credit: Bebeto Matthews.
2. RESPOND
“Our work needs to better match the priorities of the community members we purport to serve. And in order to do that, we need to hear what these community members are seeking in order to move closer to their own liberation. What resources and improvements do they see for themselves?” (Mitchell, 2021)
“Too often our actions in the community are dictated by the organizations in place for generations, but with little staff or investment from the community. Work done for or done to, instead of work done with or done by.” (Mitchell, 2021)
Dr. Mitchell added that community needs assessments can help us better understand what resources, programming, and development opportunities the community desires. She emphasized that community engaged work should cultivate capacity and create agency for communities to be at the front of the table. This allows community members to lead from an inspired, energized place, rather than being in the exhausting position of juggling liberation work with everyday survival.
An interactive map of George Floyd Square
After George Floyd’s death, the Central Area Neighborhood Development Association (CANDO) gathered in solidarity with the community to support their vision of transforming the intersection of 38th and Chicago from a place of trauma to a site of activism, healing, sanctuary, mutual aid, and Black joy. See the interactive map created by Ameen Taahir to learn more about George Floyd Square.
The role of art in activism, joy, grief, and healing
Photo Credit: Nicole Melancon
“There is pain in this moment but there’s also beauty that emerges from it. The art brings forth the ability to hold both of those tensions – to see this as a site of grief, but also see it as a site of potential joy and thriving. That is the tension that art allows us to hold in this space. And that’s why it’s become so important.” - Dr. Tania Mitchell
3. REPAIR
Reparative community engagement prioritizes work that the community names as necessary, and sustains efforts until the emancipatory aims are met.
“We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us.”
– Combahee River Collective, 1978
“This past year has revealed much about the costs of oppression in our society, the losses, the struggle, the precarity faced by Black and indigenous people of color is represented by what Bryan Stevenson names as quote "the persistent refusal to view black people as equals" unquote. By shaping our community engagement work as reparative, I am hopeful that we embody a practice that challenges the skepticism expressed in the Combahee statement (above) and that we demonstrate our care by prioritizing the work that the community names as necessary and by sustaining our efforts in community until the emancipatory aims are met.” (Mitchell, 2021)
Mitchell says reframing issues as “policy failures rather than personal failures” is critical to a reparative practice. For example, scholar Andre Perry reframes the “racial wealth gap” as “devalued assets”, since wealth disparities between Blacks and whites are a result of racist practices that undervalue homes and property owned by people of color. Pedagogical theorist and teacher-educator Gloria Ladson-Billings reframes the “racial achievement gap” as an “education debt” that has accrued because of the long history of excluding minoritized communities from high quality learning opportunities and school systems more widely available to whites. This reframing is an important part of acknowledging the root causes of these disparities, so that we can hold the inflictors of harm accountable and change the system.
Photo Credit: Lorie Shaull. The intersection of 38th and Chicago contains mutual aid stations designed to support community members in need. It has become a gathering space, a meditation space, a Covid-19 testing and vaccination site, a medical center, a food pantry, and occasionally a dance party.
Mitchell invited participants to consider the questions below to better understand if community-university partnerships serve to Reveal, Respond, and Repair the “disparate impacts of multiple pandemics that continue to rage unabated”:
Do remote engagement opportunities place undue burdens on community partners, especially those seeking to respond to emergency and or urgent needs?
Does the additional work of community engagement place undue burdens on students who are minoritized and hyper-marginalized who may be feeling the disproportionate impacts of the multiple pandemics?
How do we reconcile the replacement of paid working community organizations that have responded to the financial challenges with furloughs and layoffs with the unpaid labor of students?
Are the organizations we’re supporting aligned with efforts to bring attention to the impacts of racism and economic inequality?
Are they led by people of color?
Are they located in and operated by people who live in these communities where their work happens?
If not, whose experiences are centered in these experiences?
Are the experiences that we're developing through higher education focused on changing the material conditions that bring minoritized people towards liberation?
What does that work look like?
What and whose theories of change are employed in these opportunities?
What logics are reinforced, whose knowledges and capacities are produced, expanded or limited as a result of the work?
Photo credit (below): Kent Nishimura via Los Angeles Times / Getty Images
