The event featured presentations from Catherine Powell, J.D., professor of law, on the color and gender of COVID; Christina Greer, Ph.D., associate professor of political science on being Black in Biden’s America; and Michele Prettyman, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies on the politics of the Black image of rebirth. The webinar was hosted by Laurie Lambert, associate professor of African and African American Studies.

“Let me start with what I call the ‘color of COVID,’” Powell said. “I start with our current inflection point, our moment of interlocking pandemics of COVID-19, economic insecurity, and inequality.”

Powell said that we must examine the race and gender issues built into the COVID-19 pandemic to understand how this crisis relates to economic and social injustice. With Black and Latinx populations being overrepresented among essential workers, they’ve been exposed to COVID-19 more, she said. And they are more likely to have pre-existing conditions and live in congregate settings, which is part of why they’ve been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, she said, both in terms of health and finances.

One way to think about addressing these pandemics is through a “viral convergence,” she said, a twist on civil rights scholar Derrick’s Bell’s theory of “interest convergence,” which argued that Black people have been able to achieve civil rights victories only when white and Black interests align.

“My idea of viral convergence is a recuperative project—one that seeks to span our shared and differential interests,” she said. “It calls for the adoption of transformative laws to reinforce our shared and unifying elements of our current crisis, while also addressing our differential vulnerabilities, whether in the context of the cross racial nature of the movement for Black Lives, or the rise of urban-suburban alliances that are paving the way for large scale inclusive politics.”

Greer said the alliances Powell discussed were instrumental in electing President Joe Biden. But she also noted that the current political landscape includes a “swinging pendulum” that moved dramatically from the first African American president to Donald Trump. That swing has brought large, overarching questions about how Black people are thinking about their roles in the country, she said.

“Can Black people ever be full citizens in this country? Can anyone who’s not white ever be a full citizen in this country, especially after what we just experienced for the past four years, and especially what we saw over January 6?” Greer said.

Biden, to start, has made efforts to swing the pendulum back, including putting together one of the most “inclusive cabinets,” Greer said. But he also has to deal with the historical context of these “multiple pandemics.” and “systemic inequalities.”

One way to continue to swing the pendulum, Greer said, is through the combination of “protest politics” and “electoral politics.”

“Black people in this country have never gotten anything without the duality of both,” Greer said. And I think a lot more Americans are understanding the power of protest politics, to change policy and to change electoral politics.”

Protests are some of the most common images depicted in the media of Black people and others fighting for justice, Prettyman said. She showed the image of TIME magazine’s cover from the Baltimore uprisings in 2015, featuring a photo of a Black man running from police. She asked everyone to consider what a “revolutionary image” might be in this time.

“As we consider this notion of a revolutionary image, I wonder, is it an image of protest, a visual articulation of defiance or resistance?” she said. Or, she said, “perhaps a revolutionary image is one that challenges that paradigm and offers us one of intimacy or care.”

Prettyman showed images from protests and from movies such as Judas and the Black Messiah, where Fred Hampton, a Black Panther leader from Illinois as played by Daniel Kaluuya, is depicted giving a rousing speech. She contrasted those to more everyday images of Black people working, living, experiencing joy.

“Is it possible that that is also a revolutionary image? Perhaps still, a revolutionary image is one that simply shows the everyday life of Black people doing nothing spectacular, nothing dramatic, titillating, or comedic?”

Lambert said these presentations worked together in a way “that’s blown my mind.”

“As we move through these dual pandemics, I thought that was great to ask us to reconsider images of joy and care and intimacy, and everyday life—seeking those out, finding those, but also thinking of them as the spaces of possibility where some of this work is going to be done,” she said.

“Some of you might be familiar with the joke about Dominicans as those black people who don’t know or think they’re black,” Ramírez said to a group of Fordham students and staff in Lowenstein’s South Lounge. “My book Colonial Phantoms shows both why this has come to be and why there’s a problem that it’s the primary way in which Dominicans are discussed in various conversations with the U.S., the Caribbean, and beyond.” 

Her talk, which took place during National Hispanic Heritage Month, was part of a Fordham lecture series about Hispanic Caribbean women writers who examine the intersection of race, gender, and imperialism in their work. The series is sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences; the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures; the Center on Race, Law, and Justice; the department of African and African American studies; the Latin American and Latinx Studies Institute; and the Comparative Literature program. 

In a presentation that mixed music with academia, Ramírez spoke about her award-winning book, Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present, published by New York University Press last year. The book details how decades of literature, music, and speech show Dominicans’ ambivalent relationship toward blackness, thanks to its unique racial history: Unlike many nations in the Americas and the Western World, the Dominican Republic, for centuries, had a majority mixed-race and black population that was free. For years, Dominicans have tried to distinguish themselves from the New World narratives that have “ghosted, misunderstood, or acknowledged them only as inferior others” through creative outlets, she said.

One example is the music video “El Tigeraso” by Maluca Mala, an Afro-Dominican artist born and raised in New York City. The song opens with Maluca Mala sitting in “a quintessential Dominican site—the hair salon,”  said Ramírez. To many U.S. scholars, her decision to go to a salon to straighten her hair represents a Dominican’s denial of his or her blackness, said Ramírez. But when Maluca Mala leaves the salon, she keeps the rollers in her hair. In other words, she demonstrates “an ambivalent kind of black performance that is neither outright denial [of blackness]  nor the kind of celebration we expect in the U.S.” 

“She is neither wholeheartedly embracing Dominican women’s hair-straightening practices, rooted of course in the racist notion that black hair is bad, nor is she rejecting the practice of going to the salon by wearing her hair in natural curls. Instead, she stops the process midway,” Ramírez explained. “Her embrace of the rollers is a complicated embodiment of both African diasporic and diasporic Dominican subjectivity.” 

In a Q&A session, Ramírez spoke about what motivated her to study the relationship between race and Dominicans. 

“It might seem like the obvious answer is because I’m Dominican. But actually, my major in college was Japanese literature,” she said, to laughter from the audience. She was born in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, and raised in the Bronx. But it wasn’t until graduate school that she became fascinated by the history of her homeland and the Caribbean. 

Sitting in the audience was Yuko Miki, Ph.D., associate professor of history at Fordham, a fellow Brown alumna who studies Brazilian history.

“I’m a historian of slavery, too,” Miki said to Ramírez. “How do you talk about blackness in the D.R. without imposing U.S. or even Haitian categories of blackness onto it?”

Ramírez urged her to feature different narratives of race, especially the ones that are often left in the dark: “The narrative of Dominicans as white nationalists and anti-black is the louder story. So kind of turning down the volume to hear the other stories, which include various forms of black pride,” Ramírez said. 

A student in the audience asked Ramírez a more personal question: how can a person navigate their racial identity, especially for those from a country that experienced colonization. 

“A question that I’ve asked myself my whole life—and also that I know a lot of other people ask—is with this type of history, how can we come to remedy or just find our own narratives and ways of identification?” the student asked. 

Ramírez struggled to address the question. Ultimately, it was the student’s responsibility to find the answer—not another person’s, Ramírez implied. 

“Maybe that’s the answer—that I’m writing against this idea that people with certain backgrounds whose ancestry has been subject to so many layered colonialisms, that … we are given some room to work through those histories without impositions—especially from different spaces of power—in how we define ourselves,” Ramírez said. 

Read the full story at Fordham Law News.