“There’s something really important about the fact that we are in the business of teaching,” said Tetlow. “If there’s anyone who should understand how to spread information, how to help people understand—it’s us. So how do we model our own pedagogy with each other?”

Tetlow spoke on the Twice Over Podcast, which was developed during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to find meaning and connection during a turbulent time. Over the past two years, it evolved into a platform where students, faculty, administrators, and guest speakers at other academic institutions share effective practices in their work and build connections through candid conversations. More than 40 guests have been interviewed by the podcast’s two hosts: Steven D’Agustino, director of online learning, and Anne Fernald, special advisor to the provost. They conduct recording sessions in a sound-controlled studio within the Learning, Innovation, Technology Environment, a new center in the basement of Walsh Library where students, faculty, and administrators use cutting-edge technology for their research.  

The podcast episode featuring Tetlow was published on Nov. 28. For nearly an hour, Tetlow speaks in depth on many topics, including why she decided to work in higher education and how her second grade teacher changed her life. The podcast episode can be streamed on Twice Over’s website, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, and YouTube. 

Full transcript below

J.D. Lewis: The eureka moment was in an English class. We were talking about The Merchant of Venice and we were talking about Portia, and the teacher said, “So you have to consider Portia as being a girl in a boy’s body, acting like a boy.” I was like, oh, that’s me. And so that was essentially the point at which I realized this is what my gender is.

Patrick Verel: When President Obama’s Department of Education issued guidance in 2016, that schools should allow students to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity, it was hailed as groundbreaking by supporters of transgender rights. But when Donald Trump took office in 2017, it only took a month for his administration to reverse course. Fast forward to 2021. Joe Biden reinstituted the guidance, and efforts to lift up and support people who identify as non-binary continue. In June of that year, for instance, the state of New York began offering the option of an X gender to anyone who did not identify as male or female. The federal government followed suit in September, allowing people to choose it on their passports. For those of us who are old enough to remember when President Bill Clinton signed the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, it’s fascinating how much things have changed. Over the last few months, I’ve talked to Fordham folks who have had insights to share in the topic of gender, either because of their work, their personal experience, or both. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham News.

When I first met J.D. Lewis, a professor of biology at the Calder Center in 2011, they had presented as male. At an event in 2019, Lewis presented as female. We recently sat down to talk about that journey.

Now, you told me that you realized something was different about you when you were four years old, right?

JL: Yes, that’s correct. And so two big events both occurred at the same time. I discovered my profession and I discovered my gender in one day. And it happened when my mom’s older sister was visiting us. And she is a professor, and so she was my motivation to become a professor. And at the same time, I realized, oh, I’m a girl. And at the time, I didn’t think much of it. I’m four years old, and I just figured this is something that happens to everyone. And as I got a little bit older, I start to realize that I didn’t just feel like a girl, but that I kind of fit somewhere in between. And again still assumed this is how everyone felt. And by the time I was starting middle school, I realized, oh, this is pretty unique. And I have to admit that, at the time, because I identified more as a girl, I was hoping that puberty would give me a different body than I have right now and that I would end up having a girl body to go along with my sense of being a girl gender.

And again, at the same time, we didn’t have the language to be able to explain that, and so it was really difficult for me to be able to convey to other people what I viewed as my gender. And it was difficult for other people to tell me what they viewed as. And so, kind of the Eureka moment was in an English class, we were talking about The Merchant of Venice and we were talking about Portia, and the teacher said, “So you have to consider Portia as being a girl in a boy’s body, acting like a boy.” I was like, oh, that’s me. And so that was essentially the point at which I realized, this is what my gender is. Yeah.

PV: So at the same time that you figured out what you wanted to do with your life, you figured out who you were as well. That’s a lot for being four.

JL: It was. And of course, just like my gender, my ideas of what I wanted to be professionally shifted over time. But ultimately, obviously, I ended up becoming a professor, and in fact, that was partly because of my gender identity. I wanted to pick a field where I would be able to be comfortable with the way I dressed, so I knew I couldn’t work in the business world, because I am not comfortable in a suit and tie. And I wanted to be able to work in a field that was less gender-biased, for lack of a better way of putting it, than most of the STEM disciplines. And botany, at the time, was a field that was more open and welcoming to people who were not male. And so that’s how I ended up, partly, as a botanist and how I ended up as a professor.

PV: Really. So that influenced your choice even within the sciences.

JL: Yes, very much so. And then one other part about that is I was really interested in plant reproductive biology because plants can be whatever they want. You can have male flowers, you can have female flowers. You can have plants that produce male flowers some years and plants that produce female flowers some years. You can have flowers that are both male and female. You can have flowers that are male and have other flowers that are male and female on the same plant. You can have plants that have female flowers and male flowers at the same time. I’m like, this is perfect. This is me.

PV: Wow. Okay. That’s amazing. So that’s, what an interesting… and obviously you’ve stuck with it. It’s worked well for you.

JL: It has.

PV: Yeah. What changed for you between 2011 and 2019?

JL: Good question. And I think two things really were what made me change, how I approached this. And one was we had a better sense of what terminology we could use to describe our experiences. And so the idea of gender fluidity, for example, that term became much more commonly used. People started to understand what it meant. And so people could start to use it to identify how they felt because other people would understand what it meant. So I think that was part of it. And another part of it was working with students who were concerned about representation. And I had a meeting with one of my grad students who was lamenting the lack of representation of certain groups. And I realized that I needed to do a better job of representing, that it wasn’t just enough for me to be supportive and to be effectively an ally. That because this is my experience, I needed to be my full self.

PV: Yeah. When was that?

JL: It was about six years ago now, around 2015.

PV: And how do you identify today?

JL: So as a biologist, I view gender from a non-binary standpoint. And obviously, I’m gender fluid, and so I fit within that category as well. But because when I was young, I didn’t identify with a specific gender, now I typically use the term either genderqueer or agender to identify myself.

PV: So I think there’s this assumption that if you feel, as you do, that you aren’t the gender that you are assigned at birth, that you would naturally gravitate towards transitioning, either with things like hormones or with surgery. You’re not interested in that, right?

JL: So I think for a lot of people who are trans in whatever way that they’re trans, transitioning is clearly a critical part of being who they are, right, being their full self. And gender affirmation surgery, clearly, is really important, and hormone therapy can be really important. I think for me because I don’t identify with a specific gender, it makes it difficult for me to decide what I would transition to. And because for me, the fluidity is, okay, so I’m feeling more like a girl today, or I’m feeling more like a boy today, that also makes it pretty difficult to decide what to transition to.

And then another aspect of it is that I’m already fairly androgynous in terms of my build, and so my face is fairly masculine and obviously my voice is fairly masculine. But if you look at the proportions and I’m trying to buy clothes, then women’s clothes actually fit me better than men’s clothes do. And so even before I was open and out, I mostly wore women’s running gear, for example, because women’s running gear just flat out fit me better.

PV: What’s it been like since you decided to be more open about your gender?

JL: So there’s been a lot of support, which has been really nice, and I feel for the most part very welcome. One of the interesting things for me was that, when I was younger, I would be teased a lot. And people assumed that my gender isn’t what was different, that it was my sexuality. And so I was called a fairy a lot when I was very young, and I was called a different F-word when I was older. And that was basically on a daily basis that I would get this. It was whenever I was out and people didn’t know me, I would get the F-word, and it’s like, oh, you think you’re so original. And what’s been interesting, since I started dressing more like how I feel about my gender, is most of those kinds of comments have stopped. I still get death threats, and riding on public transportation can be kind of challenging because you always get someone who’s looking at you like, you don’t fit in.

But for the most part, people have been really supportive, so it’s been really nice. And again, for me emotionally, it’s been much better. So I feel like I am being able to be my full self now, and I’m able to go about my day without worrying about how I look. And to be blunt, before I started dressing the way I dress now, every time I was out, I felt like, I look crazy. I look ridiculous. This is not who I am. Now I feel like whenever I go out, I’m like, I like how I look. I like that people see me this way. And so that’s been a big change as well.

PV: I’m sorry. I have to follow up on this. Death threats?

JL: Yeah. I get people riding on the train who, as they’re walking past, say things like, you’re an abomination, you should be killed, or you’re a Satan worshiper or whatever, right? And it’s kind of like with the F-word, it’s like, oh, you think you’re so original. So. And I actually have had people physically accost me. And so it goes beyond just words, but actually, physically accost me.

PV: And what about here at Fordham?

JL: So for the most part, people have been really supportive. It’s been really nice. It’s been a journey. And I say that because I realize for everyone around me, it’s been a journey as well, right? And so my transition, I try to do over a fairly… and when we’re talking about transition, of course, it’s not from a medical standpoint. It’s more as how I present or how I dress, it’s my hair length, it’s things like wearing makeup. And I realize that for a lot of people at Fordham who have known me for a long time, it is different. And so I realize that it’s been quite a journey for other people as well. And so I feel that my being able to be my full self is a testament to the fact that most of the people of Fordham are nurturing and encouraging about it and are supportive about it.

PV: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great to hear. That’s great to hear. I mean, it’s so disturbing to hear about these kinds of things. You talk about the public transit. There’s this idea that we hold ourselves to, in New York City, that we’re so enlightened, but you know that that’s not the case at all, in many settings with many people. So it’s disturbing to hear that, and I’m sorry to hear that. That can’t be easy, but at the same time, I can’t say I’m all that surprised.

JL: Yeah. And thank you. It is easier in New York, I feel, because New York is very much a you do your thing, I’ll do my thing kind of place, which I think is good in this kind of situation.

PV: That covers all the questions that I have formally written down.

JL: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

PV: There is one more though.

JL: Oh yeah, okay.

PV: That I’ve been thinking about, and that is to say your family. Is that something that you feel like you could talk about?

JL: Yeah. I’m willing to talk about that. My ex-wife and I are you get along… well, we co-parent our children pretty effectively. Our kids joke about us being essentially co-workers as parents because we both work together on it. And she’s asked how do I identify, because of course she sees me like this, just like everyone else does. And same answer, right. It’s just kind of like, I don’t really identify with a specific gender. And with my kids, a couple of my kids are queer, and they’re very comfortable with their queerness. And so I, in some ways I feel like that, again, it’s this idea of representation, that for me to be my full self is good for them, because it lets them know that there are people even in our family that are supportive.

PV: Talking with Professor Lewis gave me a great local perspective on the subject. So, for my next interview, I decided to expand beyond our borders. Sameena Azhar, an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Social Service works with Khawaja sira, a group of third gender people who have lived in communities in Pakistan since the 16th century. Did I say that right?

Sameena Azhar: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

PV: I did. Khawaja sira.

SA: Khawaja sira.

PV: Just rolls right off your tongue. Yeah.

SA: Yeah, yeah. And the accent is for the a, on the A at the end, so Khawaja sira.

PV: Sira. Oh, okay.

SA: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.

PV: So now, in my intro, I noted that in the United States, you can now pick a third gender on official documents. That’s old news in South Asia though. Why?

SA: Well, it’s not super old. In 2014, the Supreme Court of India allowed for the creation of a third gender. So rather than registering as an M or a male, or a F as a female, you can register as an E. So this third gender option. And similar policies have also been passed in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, not in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, but the rest of those South Asian countries passed similar policies. Additionally, in India, Hijra are considered a scheduled caste.

So the scheduling of castes and tribes in India is a process that dates back to colonialism, and there were certain groups of people or communities that were considered to be scheduled as caste or tribes. And these individuals in modern India get a sort of affirmative action-style status by the government. So there are social entitlements that are available to them that are akin to welfare or food stamps, allotted seats in the representative government at the local level, so they’re called panchayats, so they’re reserved seats for people that are from these communities. So they’re pretty progressive actions to try to include these folks who are fully socially within South Asian society. And it’s a community that has been really gripped by both a long history of being honored and exalted, and also a long history of being marginalized.

PV: Now, I just spent a lot of time talking about the Khawaja sira and getting that correct, but you just referenced another group in India.

SA: Yeah. So, I mean, we’re basically talking about more or less the similar identities of third gender and gender-nonconforming identities. In India, the nomenclature is most commonly called Hijra.

PV: Hijra.

SA: Right. There’s other names for it in India as well, like Kinnar, Khusra, Aravani. There’s many names for this. In Pakistan, the name is Khawaja siras.

PV: What does colonialism have to do with all of this?

SA: So prior to British colonization, under mogul or Raj, but control, there was much more state-sanctioned support for these communities. So folks who were hijra or Khawaja sira would often work as courtesans or advisors or handmaidens in the royal court. And with the coming of colonization, the identity of being a hijra became criminalized. So in 1871, the Criminal Tribes Act made hijra criminals. And then additionally, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which is borrowed from the British penal code, criminalizes what is called carnal intercourse against the order of nature. Right? So this essentially is interpreted to be homosexuality or more specifically sodomy.

PV: When you talk about these folks that embrace this way of being, are we talking about people who would typically be identified as male embracing femininity or vice versa?

SA: No, typically it is folks who’ve been assigned male sex at birth and identify as either women, or as men and women, or as a third gender person. It’s much less typical, I mean, pretty much, for the most part, doesn’t exist, to have somebody who was assigned female sex at birth, who may identify as a man and be called a hijra. So it is quite specific to what we would call in the West, trans women. But the third gender classification of E does encompass anyone, regardless of whatever sex was assigned at birth, to identify as E.

PV: And how does this all relate to what you do here at Fordham?

SA: So my research really began in south India. My family is from a city called Hyderabad. It’s where I did my dissertation research, so mainly looking at issues related to HIV and gender non-conformity stigma of people who are living with HIV, are HIV positive. And my work in Pakistan has been somewhat of an extension of that. I’m not focusing there on folks who are HIV positive. There’s also a much, much lower prevalence of HIV in that part of Pakistan, so my research there is focused on an area called Swat, which is in Khyber Pakhtunkhwaqua, and that is the northwest province that borders Afghanistan.

So it’s been a very interesting place to be doing research, first through the pandemic, but also through the huge influx of Afghan refugees that have come in the past several months. The focus of those interviews and surveys that we’ve been conducting in both India and Pakistan have been really around trying to figure out how to reduce these experiences of the stigma that people are encountering within their families, within their communities, within employment settings, within healthcare settings, knowing that these experiences contribute also to poor mental health, and most probably acutely to experience the violence or homicide against gender-nonconforming people.

So one of my participants, research participants in India had been murdered during our research, and it really just drives home that these are issues that impact people’s lives in very intimate and violent ways.

PV: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man, that’s brutal.

SA: Yeah, yeah. Truly was.

PV: Daniel Alexander Jones, a professor of theater who performs under the stage name Jomama Jones, first introduced me to the concept of gender fluidity when I met him in 2013. Now, Daniel, Jomama has been a vehicle for you to try to get people to see both themselves and others in a new light. Do you feel like you’re seeing some of the changes you were hoping for?

Daniel Alexander Jones: Oh, Patrick. That’s a good question. Yeah. I think were you to look at maybe 2010 and look forward at where we seemed to be heading as a nation, we’ve gone in a very different direction.

PV: Do you feel like there’s been a backlash?

DJ: There are people who believe their way of life is threatened by the changes that are happening, or even by, and this may be a more accurate way to say it, the naming of things that have always been there, but the taking up a space around those things, right? We know that those we call trans folk now have always been here, throughout history. This is not a new phenomenon, but it is culturally shaped in such a way that claiming sovereignty and truth and ownership of that identity is going to be a threat to someone for whom that identity’s invisibility is necessary for them to understand themselves, for them to feel their own sense of power, right? When you think about how that’s connected to the last five or six years of our national experience, it’s sobering.

PV: The last time we talked, you said that so much of the conversation about gender fluidity is about how we encounter someone who is different from ourselves, and what happens to us if we fully accept them. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

DJ: This was originally, Patrick, from my perspective as an artist, because I was thinking about, both in my work professionally and also in the classroom, what role curiosity plays. The idea of engaging something you don’t know and being heightened or quickened or energized by the unknown, as much as you are by the process of naming and pointing out the things that you do know. And for an artistic process, whether it be writing or acting or directing, whatever the thing is, vital work depends on that curiosity. And it is that destabilization and the reaching for language to articulate what you’re feeling, the comparison of this new feeling to things you have experienced before. And also, if you will, the surrender into the possibility that that new experience has. All of those things are so necessary.

And what I began to encounter in the classroom, and what I began to encounter professionally even more so, was this sense of, we’ve got to name it and know it. What the problem is rooted in is a kind of taxonomical approach to life. Meaning that, if we think about taxonomy, we think about this idea of naming, delineating, putting things into categories. I’m thinking very often of those butterfly cases. Like those, the people who go out and collect them, and they pin the butterfly, and they name the butterfly, and there’s a sense that it is that thing. But we know that butterflies in life move. What they came from you don’t get in that pinned creature. So there’s so much of the story that’s missing from that pinned moment in time.

And then too, we then begin to think about exemplars of a particular group. Like this is what this type of thing looks like. And the connected part of that is we then begin to assume that something that looks like that, that has the same shape or form or the same name, will have the same content. Why? Well, in part we know it’s because our brain wants to filter out the things that are familiar so that we can pay attention to the things that aren’t. But I think the artist has a responsibility to deliberately engage what we don’t know, to deliberately destabilize what we think we know. It is part of our social responsibility.

And I think one of the things that this question around gender fluidity rubs at is that, if we live in a culture that has defined gender according to these formal shapes, whether they be shapes of thought or shapes of material of the body, we then eliminate the content. And that subjective content is the truth for that individual. So what does it mean that we would center a process by which I can have my observations, but I can’t then overwrite my truth of what those observations mean onto you before I get to know who you are, before I hear from you. Because as is so often the case, especially with folk who are dealing with expressing their own gender fluidity, very often what’s on the inside doesn’t match, quote-unquote, what’s on the outside. And so if I come to you and I have determined your interior by your outside, then I have done a violence to you.

PV: Talk to me about your own journey. How has your act changed since you started?

DJ: I was born into and raised in a worldview that was so profoundly shaped in the macrocosmic way by the civil rights movement, like the freedom movement and the workers’ movement, the grassroots movements that created the community I grew up in. Also, the courage of my parents who had an interracial marriage at a time where that was really forbidden, and the power of my community, which was a black community, working-class in western Massachusetts, that also was the house for a kind of multiethnic enclave. All of that to say that the culture that was born from that mixture of people, and that particular time, was in many ways set in opposition to the world that I entered when I started to go to school, which was a hierarchical world where race had a hierarchy, gender had a hierarchy, class for sure had a hierarchy.

So I had very early on to learn that I knew things about life that many of the people that I was going to meet in this other world didn’t know. And I also had to understand from a very early age, and I’m talking about memories from kindergarten, first grade, second grade, that many of the stories that were in that new world about who I was, about who my parents were, about who the people I loved were, were false. And I had to have the inner resolve, even before I had language to articulate it, to say, that’s not true. They don’t know.

And it’s when I became aware of my sexuality, and I understood that I was gay. What I understood is, just like I talked about those two different worlds, I could also look and say, oh, this is what is posited as being a boy or a girl or a man or a woman or… I could look at what the rules were supposed to be. So again, I came into this all at a time when I was looking around and saying, oh, wow, everybody’s playing this game. Everybody’s adopting these roles. And this person that I’ve known my whole life is now suddenly a jock or a girly girl or whatever. And I’m like, oh, it’s so interesting to see the person I know, take on and perform an extreme version of gender, as a way to get power, as a way to find their security, as a way to name themselves and be part of this larger configuration of students in this public high school.

And I knew it wasn’t me. So if I don’t fit any of these things, then the pressure, which I think is what a lot of young people face, is how do you conform? How do you figure out how to get access to or move in that system? Or the real danger, how are you taking that in, like do you try to fight your way back into the thing? And maybe the blessing and the curse that I had was like I told you, I had an experience and a bodily experience of something else.

One of the things that’s interesting, I’ve been teaching at this Jesuit university, and I hear a lot about the teachings of Christ. And I think one of the primary ideas is that you greet strangers as holy presences, that who you don’t know may be an angel. It’s your responsibility to take care of your fellow human being. Care means presence. Are you willing to be present with another human being? And I’m shocked always by how many people are unwilling to do that. I shouldn’t be shocked, but I remain shocked.

PV: Talking to Daniel shed light on how the culture is changing, but of course, culture can’t thrive if it’s not given the space to do so, which is the realm of law. For that, I turn to Elizabeth Cooper, a professor of law and the faculty director of the Feerick Center for Social Justice at Fordham Law School. Now you were involved in the passage of the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act or GENDA, a 2019 New York law that was originally part of a previous law that was passed in 2002.

Elizabeth Cooper: I have had the real pleasure of being a member of and an advocate for the LGBTQ communities for many decades. And I remember very clearly when we were trying to get the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act, otherwise known as SONDA, passed through the state legislature. And there were a number of advocates that were trying to get the bill passed in its original form. And that would’ve prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation, which is being lesbian, gay, bisexual, as well as on gender expression or identity. And those phrases typically refer to people who are transgender or gender non-conforming. The advocates were told that they could get SONDA passed, but only if they took out the protections for gender expression.

And the advocates agreed to do that with the notion of, we’ll come back next year, get the gender expression non-discrimination provisions passed. Well, it just so happened that SONDA was passed in 2002, became effective in early 2003, but it was not until 2019 that the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act actually was enacted. The law is so powerful, because it prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression in employment, in housing, in places of public accommodation, in education, in countless areas, basically adding gender expression and identity to the long list of identities that cannot be the basis for discrimination in New York State.

PV:  When it comes to the push and the pull of these laws, you’ve said that Jim Crow laws can be a helpful reference point. Can you explain why?

EC: If you think about Jim Crow laws or Title VII, which prohibits discrimination in employment, or the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination on basis of disability, you have lots of prohibitions on discrimination based on an individual’s identity, their core identity, who they are. Historically, I think the Supreme Court often thought of these as immutable characteristics. Not all of them are so immutable, but they are basically aspects of identity that go to one’s core. They also have absolutely no impact on how well one can perform one’s job. So if you have a person who is an excellent lawyer, for example, it should not matter whether they are transgender or cisgender, meaning that their physiology and their gender identity aligns, cisgender. And so, why should we permit discrimination based on gender identity? It makes absolutely no sense. This has nothing to do, like race, like sex, like religion, with how one can do one’s job.

I think that thinking about this historical context is also helpful when we start to think about the ways in which some people argue that religion or biblical values mean that one should be able to discriminate against people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender non-conforming, and so on. It’s important to look historically to the kinds of arguments that were raised against Title VII and other laws that prohibit discrimination based on race. For example, people argued that it would be wrong to have black people and white people in the same bathroom, that it went against the Bible, that there were risks of violence. There were people who argued that separation of the races was mandated by the Bible. And in this context, I think that we are getting to the point where we understand that gender identity or expression or sexual orientation, this is not a matter of choice or going against God or going against the Bible. This is just a matter of who we happen to be.

PV: It seems like people either are willfully ignoring history or just don’t know about it.

EC: I think most people don’t know about it. I think that the point is just to look at people for the value of, for example, employment, the job that they can do. Why would you ever want to tell someone who’s gender non-conforming that they can’t walk into a movie theater? Or why would it be okay or should it be okay for a doctor to say to a transgender person, I don’t want to treat you?

PV: You’ve been involved in this advocacy for 25 years with groups such as the law school’s LGTBQ student group. How have things changed within the movement itself in that time?

EC: I confess that I am just dumbfounded by the changes that have happened in my lifetime. And when I say dumbfounded, I mean in the best way possible. When I first started teaching at Fordham, I was concerned about coming out. I remember that the LGBT law student group sometimes met off-campus, so its members would not have to worry about being seen walking into a room where people knew that the gay group was meeting.

The attitude today towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender identity more generally, is just striking. I see law students and undergrads. I have a niece who’s 18 years old. I see her and her peers having a comfort with people who are different from themselves. And they don’t look at it as something that should require segregation. They look at it as something to learn about, and they want to embrace the richness of diversity in their lives. So you have straight people, like my niece, joining the high school Gay-Straight Alliance. You have kids coming out as teenagers in high school, sometimes middle school. You have people claiming their gender identity or presenting themselves in gender non-conforming or genderqueer ways much earlier on.

There is a real, tangible move away from understanding gender as a binary. There is a much greater acceptance, understanding and acceptance, that gender, like race, is very socially constructed. It’s not that men don’t typically have more testosterone and women typically have more estrogen, or we have different body parts, but that, in the way we present ourselves, some of our rules are arbitrary. Why should only women wear nail polish? Why should only women wear dresses? Why should only men wear ties and Oxford shoes, right? It has nothing to do with who you are and your core values as a human being. If anything, how much more wonderful this world is when people can be their full selves and live their full lives, whether it is with their families of origin, or in the workplace, or walking down the street in the middle of New York City or the middle of any other small town, anywhere in this country.

So now, what? To help us use the lessons of the recent past to move forward in the future, we sat down with Kirk Bingaman, a professor of pastoral mental health counseling in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education.

Listen below

Full transcript below:

Kirk Bingaman: On the one hand, it seems like everyone lives happily ever after, we’re back to normal. But with this missing year, I think there’s going to be like, reentry time with some hiccups.

Patrick Verel: As summer arrives and the trend lines for vaccinations and COVID deaths in the United States head in opposite directions, it feels like freedom is finally within reach. But let’s face it. The pandemic has taken its toll. We’re not the same people we were 15 months ago. So now what? To help us use the lessons of the recent past to move forward in the future, we sat down with Kirk Bingaman, a professor of pastoral mental health counseling in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education at Fordham. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham News.

When you think about this summer, what besides joy do you expect to be a prevailing feeling?

KB: We’re social beings, right? We humans are social beings. But we couldn’t be fully social beings the past year or so with the spread of COVID. We did the best we could under the circumstances, but it’s had an impact on all of us, on our psyche, whatever our age, even my own psyche. I wonder, working at home, thanks be to God, I can continue to do what I love to do, but it’s not been the same. So yes, it’s summer, there is joy, there is hope. But it’s a different kind of summer. There’s a mix. With the joy and hope, there’s anxiety, there’s still anxiety. There’s still this cautionary note. And there’s confusion. When will we be on the other side of this? Are we on the other side?

PV: Yeah. Have you heard this term that has been going around? Some people have been calling it the Hot Vax Summer.

KB: I’m not sure.

PV: Yeah, the Hot Vax Summer. And it’s all like, “Wait, really? Are we going to… Oh.” I mean, it’s obviously meant to be this kind of thing. Like, “We’ve been cooped up for so long. Everybody’s just going to cut loose and go wild.” And I just keep thinking, “Ah, I don’t know. Maybe…”

KB: You’re illustrating that’s where we are, in that tension.

PV: Adults and children have had to deal with a lot of mental health challenges during the pandemic, and the end is in sight now. But I would think that those challenges won’t just go away. Can you talk a little bit about that?

KB: The challenges don’t go away, I think for all of us, but particularly those of a young age, who the past year has been a significant developmental time for them. I work with parents who have young children, who were in, whatever, the first grade, the second grade, and then all of a sudden they had to go home. “Go home, we don’t know when you’re going to come back.” “Well, when do I see my friends? When do I see my teacher?” “Don’t know. Don’t know.” So the challenges don’t go away, because that leaves an imprint on the psyche, and we just have to be aware of that. Young children in the formative years are educated in other ways, particularly in the school system, not just the three Rs, reading, math and all of that, but socializing and increasing their social intelligence, their emotional intelligence. So there wasn’t the in-person education, couldn’t take my children to play dates.

So what’s now important, it seems to me, is going to be the reentry back into summer activities and, ultimately, back into in-person schooling in just a couple of months. On the one hand, it seems like everyone lives happily ever after. We’re back to normal. But with this missing year, I think there’s going to be like reentry time with some hiccups. It’s going to be normal for children to have, with the joy and the excitement, a variety of feelings. Some apprehension maybe. They are, after all, leaving the nest, the sheltering at home and back out into the world again. And it’s not just children, it’s adults. I just talked to a neighbor, who, beginning of the week, who’s going back into the city to resume in-person work, but doesn’t feel comfortable getting on the train, let alone the subway, driving in, just that reentry back into the real world.

PV: Your job is to train the folks that help us make sense of crazy things in life, like pandemics. But, of course, they’ve just lived through this, too. What kind of self-care do you tell your students that they should be engaged in right now?

KB: Whatever your education, your level of knowledge, or income, your credentials, we’re in it together, and we have to take really good care of ourselves if we ever hope to be providing effective care for others, which presupposes self-awareness. So I’m self-aware of when I’m feeling depleted, when I’m feeling anxious, when I’m feeling irritable, when I’m ruminating about, “When do we get to the other side,” or catastrophizing. And not only am I aware of that, but I know what to do about that, or where to turn in terms of my own self-care practices. It could be spiritual practices, meditation, contemplative prayer, calming the anxious brain, as I’ve done research on already, physical activity, exercise, and just getting out and into the natural world. A change of pace helps me reorient. It’s restorative. Be about our own therapy, meaningful relationships, whether that’s friends, family, faith community, people that we can be really real and open and honest with. So these are the things that we recommend for those in our care, that we have to be doing for ourselves.

PV: Yeah. I like that idea, that being self-aware. I feel like that’s something that I’ve been, myself, trying to do more of, to actually take note. And, as I think the phrase is, make a mental note of the things that are going on and say, “Oh, wait. I know what’s going on here.”

KB: The popular term these days is mindful.

PV: Mindfulness, right, right.

KB: I’m mindful of what I’m just experiencing right now, whether it be a thought or a feeling.

PV: Three years ago, you wrote a book called Pastoral and Spiritual Care in a Digital Age: The Future Is Now. And it was about how technology was affecting our brains in ways that made spirituality and human connection more difficult. Has the pandemic changed any of your thoughts on any of this?

KB: It hasn’t changed my thinking. It’s only reinforced it, or brought it into sharper focus. While we’ve been sheltering at home, us human beings, digital technology, AI, it hasn’t been. The past year, we’ve had a change of pace. It has not. It has kept evolving full speed ahead. So the human brain was already on overload. That’s what I talk about in the book. Before, to begin with, and certainly before the pandemic, trying to keep up with the tsunami of digital information, trying to parse through all the information that comes our way, more and more, each and every day, information about the pandemic, how it’s impacting our health and wellbeing.

PV: When I think about this past year, the word that keeps coming to mind is exhaustion. What would you do and not do to recharge your batteries, so to speak?

KB: I think it’s important to be patient with one another, even kind and empathic and compassionate with those near and dear friends, family colleagues, and with ourselves. In my own faith tradition, there are Gospel stories of Jesus being into preaching and teaching and with people big time. And then the stories end with, “And then he went away for a while.” And I used to think about that like, “Oh, okay. That’s a rhetorical device for whoever the Gospel writer is.” But no, I think there’s more to it. He went away for a while, like you’re saying, to recharge the battery, to calm the mind for what was coming the next day. So that’s from my own Christian tradition, but there are other traditions. A couple of years ago, trekking in the Himalayas in Tibetan communities, I would hear them, villagers quote the Buddha, an expression attributed to the Buddha, who has also said as much, “Learn to calm the mind. Learn to control the mind, or it will control you.”

The Ever Given was freed after six days, but Lawrence Brennan, a retired U.S. Navy Captain who served aboard the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier and now teaches admiralty and international maritime law at Fordham Law, said the snafu illustrates just how dependent we are on a system we often take for granted—one that has real vulnerabilities worth considering.

Listen below:

Full transcript below:

Lawrence Brennan: Look in your room, look in my room, look in the classroom, look everywhere, look in your closet. Everything that we buy today is most likely partially the result of global trade.

Patrick Verel: The other day, I did something absolutely unremarkable. Thinking about the warm summer months ahead, I shelled out $25 for a 10-foot long inflatable pool that had traveled some 7,000 miles to the store from its factory in China. I was able to do this thanks to a $20 trillion sector of the worldwide economy that became jarringly public on March 23rd when the Ever Given, a ship the length of the Empire State Building, ran aground in the Suez Canal, causing a traffic jam of epic proportions in one of the busiest shipping routes on the planet. The Ever Given was free after six days, but Lawrence Brennan, a retired US Navy Captain who served aboard the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, and now teaches admiralty and international maritime law at Fordham Law, said the snafu illustrates just how dependent we are on a system we often take for granted, one that has real vulnerabilities worth considering. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham News.

So now the image of a seemingly tiny excavator trying to dig out the enormous bow of the Ever Given inspired some really clever memes on the internet. But in fact, there are some serious consequences to stacking 20,000 containers the size of tractor-trailers onto one boat. You said that this was an episode, that it was a little bit like the Hindenburg without the loss of life. Why that comparison?

LB Patrick, I’ve learned in 40 some years of doing this that somewhere between technology and liability, there’s an ascending risk. The larger the ship we build, the different types of propulsion we build, the more likely it is that there will be larger and less easy to handle casualties. So when we have a ship with 20,000 containers grounded and literally blocking all traffic north and south of the Suez Canal, that’s a billion or a trillion-dollar problem.

PV: The Hindenburg was a specific reference that you brought up in the sense of a shift in the way things might be done going forward.

LB: Absolutely. The Hindenburg is famous or notorious for the end of international air transportation, passenger transportation, until the end of World War II. At that time, people who were traveling between continents couldn’t just go to the airport and take an airplane. The ability of planes to fly that far wasn’t possible. The Germans built dirigibles before World War I, but they had one fatal flaw, as Hindenburg proved, hydrogen gas which was highly explosive. And that’s precisely what happened at the Naval Air Station Lakehurst in 1936 or 1937, when a fair number of the people on board were killed. Literally, the German international airline that ran Hindenburg ended transportation by dirigible.

PV: Do you think there might be a reckoning here for the idea, the wisdom of having ships this big plying these routes in areas where they could get stuck like this one did?

LB: Well, absolutely. This is like the trouble you have if a child who I should not have blamed, I should blame myself, stuck a large pencil in a narrow cup and it got wedged at top and bottom. And you put your fingers down and barely reach and you try to move it and neither side will move. You don’t want to break it in two. That’s the type of trouble the salvors had. And the fortuity here was that there was a proper full moon, a quarterly full moon that gave a magnificent tide and they were able to get the extra water off the ship to increase or decrease the draft a little and the tugs were there and they were able to move both ends off. But the people who run canals such as the Suez Canal particularly but also Panama Canal and others, need to consider what the limits of transportation are.

The length of this ship, Ever Given is limited by the statute or the regulation imposed by Suez Canal Authority. It has to be under 400 meters long. This ship was about a meter less than the maximum length. The international community also has to invest in assets to be able to respond when the fortuitous event or the intentional event occurs. You have to have assets, and we’ve seen that in the United States within the last two years with a car carrier that capsized in Brunswick, Georgia, and they’re still trying to cut up the ship and remove the wreck. And that was hundreds of millions of dollars of loss of cars and a ship.

PV: How important has the shipping industry become in our lives over the years?

LB: Look in your room, look in my room, look in the classroom, look everywhere, look in your closet. Everything that we buy today is most likely partially the result of global trade. There are very few things I can drive down to the Costco and say is a domestic product. If I want Qingdao beer, I’m having beer imported from a province in China. If I want Barry’s Tea, I’m having tea and ported from Ireland. If I want to be a fashionista like my older daughter who is a fashion lawyer, I need to buy things in Paris or London or wherever. And we’re talking about trillions of dollars of trade.

PV: It’s funny, I’m just thinking about the headlines that came out after that ship got stuck, and there was all this focus on the traffic jam. I remember reading that there were animals stuck on ships behind it, and there was some organization that was very concerned about whether or not they were all going to be fed or whether they would starve. And I remember just thinking, wait, what? Really? Even animals are traveling around through the Suez Canal on ships.

LB: Yeah. Animals travel, particularly to Muslim countries, because the lamb that are shipped are religiously acceptable. These are large ships with hundreds or thousands of lamb under deck and above deck. That’s how food travels. I’ve spent years becoming a quasi expert in the travel of soybean from the US Gulf Coast or Brazil to China and Japan. A shipload of soybean is $30 million depending on the exchange rate and the market rate, but that’s a common amount, and they can easily be damaged by delays in transit and by humidity or rain or improper ventilation. And pretty much things that we rely on for food, as well as clothing, as well as automobiles, petroleum, rocks, and things to manufacture, they all are imported today.

PV: Can you tell me a little bit about why the industry is still so important to New York City?

LB: New York has been, since the start of this nation and particularly during World War I and World War II, the major port of arrival and departure, both of US armies to Europe in 11917, 1918, and from 1941, the occupation of Iceland through the end of World War II in 1945. It was the manufacturing hub of heavy industry war material. Monitor, which won the Civil War at sea, was built in Brooklyn, but the economics of the port of New York, whether you’re importing oil for the industrial northeast, exporting grain, paper stuff, whatever you’re importing on a container ship, a bulk ship is important. But behind that is the economics of the international banking system, the international insurance system and the domestic insurance and banking system. Every piece of goods being shipped by sea is properly financed. It’s subject to a negotiable bill of lading and almost all are insured.

PV: I live in Brooklyn, and every summer my family goes over to Governor’s Island at least once, and I always get a kick out of looking back over towards Red Hook and seeing all those shipping containers. Do you know the connection between the shipping cranes and Star Wars?

LB: No.

PV: So the legend has it that if you watch, you know the movie Empire Strikes Back?

LB: Generally.

PV: George Lucas based the four-legged walkers on the cranes that he saw living in the Bay Area. So now every time I see a shipping crane, I think of Empire Strikes Back.

LB: They’re magnificent things. None of them are built in the United States. You have to see how they’re transported. They’re transported on really small, low ships as deck cargo. It’s the same type of ship that would lift a 10,000 ton US Navy destroyer.

PV: Talk to me about your classes. What’s unique about this sort of law and what do students typically use it for?

LB: It’s unique in that it is international law, and that I have to teach different US federal procedure jurisdiction in US federal courts and in state courts, and I have to teach some practices that are specifically maritime. I also teach evidence and procedure. Probably the best part of the class is that every year I learn more from my students than I teach them. They’re all different personalities with differing backgrounds. I get a few people who have been in the Navy, and I get some international students in the LLM program. We try to write a project at the end of the year. They have a choice. They can take an exam or they can write a final paper of 20 to 25 pages, and they can write any topic they can convince me is in some way attached to admiralty and international maritime law. And that’s not hard. If you can show me there’s some water linked to it and convince me, I am happy to do that.

I’ve had a fair number of students whose articles have been published, particularly in Fordham International Law Journal, and those who are cited. And I have a number of students who have gone on to practice admiralty, either part or full time.

PV: What was one of the most interesting papers one of your students wrote?

LB: A couple of piracy papers were excellent. There’s a recurring interest today in piracy because it’s the anniversary of the freeing of the officers on Maersk, Alabama that was seized and it became a famous movie. So, piracy cases are interesting. They present tremendous risk. In a sense, more difficult to predict than what we see with Marine casualties. You can go to the actuaries and you’ll see the statistics, and there will be a finite number in a range every year of fires on ships, of collisions, of strandings. Technology should reduce those, but when you get something like Ever Given, where it’s just off the charts and beyond what the insurers have prepared for, and the amount at risk is so large, that’s the game-changer.

And yet in spite of all of the uncertainty, entrepreneurs are still founding new companies. The Fordham Foundry, a business incubator based at the Gabelli School of Business, has continued to stage contests for burgeoning ideas. Its most recent one, the Ram’s Den, took place on February 6, and a second one, a pitch challenge geared toward less developed business plans, will take place March 27.

So what is life like for a small business owner these days? We sat down with Brandon Adamson, a Gabelli MBA graduate whose company BeautiMaps won the 2019 pitch challenge, and Ozzy Usman, a current EMBA student who won second place in this year’s Ram’s Den with his small business lending company Equeduct.

Listen below

Full transcription:
Ozzie Usman: A lot of startup building company building is a social thing and what I mean by that is you have to be able to plug into all these different things that you need to do, but you need to find the best people you can in those areas to really help you because there’s no one person sitting in some basement or even in a garage coding the future.

Patrick Verel: To say these are challenging economic times is an understatement. As COVID-19 vaccines are rapidly being distributed, the promise of a revived economy seems closer than ever. Not so fast though. As experts warn that life in the United States will probably not fully return to normal until the fall and yet, in spite of all the uncertainty, entrepreneurs are still founding new companies. The Fordham Foundry, a business incubator based at the Gabelli School of Business has continued to stage contests for burgeoning ideas. Its most recent one, the Ram’s Den took place on February 6th and a second one, a pitch challenge geared towards less developed business plans will take place March 27th.

So what is life like for a small business owner these days? We sat down with Brandon Adamson, a Gabelli MBA graduate whose company BeautiMaps won the 2019 pitch challenge, and Ozzie Usman, a current EMBA student who won second place in this year’s Ram’s Den with his small business lending company, Equeduct. I’m Patrick Verel and this is Fordham news.

Hi, guys. Welcome to the first-ever Zoom-enabled Fordham news conversation. So this is about business. So I’d love to hear the elevator pitches for your companies. Brandon, you’re up first. Ready? Go.

Brandon Adamson: Sure. Thank you. So my name is Brandon Adamson, as you mentioned. A recent Fordham MBA grad from the Gabelli School of Business and I am the founder and CEO of BeautiMaps Technologies LLC. So BeautiMaps is the prime and global freelancing platform specifically tailored to the beauty and makeup industry. We empower independent professionals and clients to receive and provide beauty and wellness services. Essentially my goal is to connect makeup artists who are certified or not certified with new clients and right now that’s scattered use between YouTube, Style Seat, Instagram. We’re looking to have that on one platform.

PV: Okay. Ozzie, go.

OU: Patrick thanks for having us on. So Equeduct is a company that we started about two years ago. It was started by myself and three other founders. We specialize in providing small business loans specifically to high-risk and startup businesses. What we did was we took a look at that specific segment and determined what are some of their key pain points and build a solution around how do we get funds directly to them as quickly as possible by using automation for risk management, as well as making sure that we can also ACH and wire funds to them immediately versus them being in a holding pattern for an extended period of times. So overall, what we’re trying to do is essentially provide funding for businesses that are struggling.

PV: So now, Brandon, you won the pitch challenge in 2019 for your idea and obviously, so you’ve been working with BeautiMaps since then. How has that been going?

BA: So I would say it’s been going great by way of how much I’m able to learn throughout this process. Obviously the pandemic has put a strain on the industry I’m targeting by way of makeup. Right now, people are not outside as much. Events, such as weddings and these huge events that require people to get dressed up or dolled up aren’t really happening. So there has been a slow down per se. However, what that has allowed is me somewhat extra time to be able to build the infrastructure for our company a little bit better. So what that looks like for me is making sure my MVP or my minimum viable product for an app is as sound as possible, even as a version zero iteration. That means making sure that marketing and advertisement I’m building up that anticipation to the idea that once people are able to go outside, there is this platform that can rely on it to connect them with makeup artists or institutions to provide those services.

PV: So did you make major adjustments about a year ago when all this started to fall apart?

BA: Absolutely. So BeautiMaps’s main target or main goal is to provide a mobile platform to connect makeup artists with their current clients and new clients. So it’s a way of discovery as well as continuing your book of business.

One of the long-term visions or long-term goals for the company was to also have a multi-vendor marketplace. Think of Etsy, but for makeup. So instead of doing that three to five years down the line, we somewhat fast track that and now on the Beauty Maps website, we actually do have a multi-vendor marketplace where I’ve partnered with a lot of other small businesses that sell cosmetic products, such as makeup or eyelashes or eyeliner that are now currently being featured on my website. So the app itself isn’t there yet. I’m not actually connecting to makeup artist just yet, but we’re still able to generate some revenue and at least some traction around the word or the name BeautiMapsv so that once we’re able to roll it out, people have somewhat of a familiarity with it.

PV: Ozzie, you were further along obviously with your business when you entered the Ram’s Den this year, because that’s just the nature of the Ram’s Den competition. Talk to me a little bit about what you’ve been doing.

OU: I think I’ll echo what Brandon said. It’s been very challenging. We started the business, we built out our MVP, we secured funding. So we did some basic blocking and tackling things. By the time we had entered into the new year 2019, there was word on the street for lack of a better phrase of COVID starting and then obviously it hit. The second it hit, things just slowed down initially. We ourselves were trying to figure out what our next position will be, things of that nature but very soon after we started getting in a ton of requests. As far as the way that we’ve structured it, we were actually doing Google advertising, Facebook advertising, things like that, predating COVID. Now what ended up happening with just spending just a few dollars, we’d get like hundreds, and in certain cases, thousands of users requesting loans.

So we had an overwhelming demand that started and what that meant was there was a lot of technology that was underlying our MVP that we didn’t build. So for instance, our automated risk management wasn’t built out. So we had to manually go in and do all the background checks, do all of the looking at their cash flow, things of that nature.

So what I’ll say is I think it made it very clear to us very quickly when the pandemic started and as it followed that we’re going to be critical in helping people survive. So we weren’t just a business that was helping them stay afloat. It turned into if we’re not providing loans and we can’t act fast enough, people will lose jobs. People will have to have hard conversations with their families. So then it went from being just a startup to being almost a bit of a calling for us.

So we’ve been focused heavily on being able to just get the requests, do the analysis of if it’s a risk we’re willing to take and getting them the funds as quickly as possible. So, that’s been sort of our key focus and the challenge now is its sort of flipped over where we’ve gone through the funding that we had originally acquired and as founders we’ve started putting our own funding in and so we have essentially self-funding so we can still continue providing these loans. Obviously we have a lot more skin in the game. At the same time, we’re actually going out, working with other institutions, showing them where we are, our progress so we can get additional funding for more institutional investors.

PV: Is there anything else that the pandemic has made you re-evaluate things?

BA: The pandemic has positioned to me to try to make this company as recession proof as possible. So in my position, fast tracking the timeline on that marketplace where even if people aren’t putting on makeup or women or whoever may not be putting on makeup, they still might put on lashes. They’re still doing their makeup, maybe not professionally, but just to go to dinner or brunch with their mask, if they still want to look somewhat presentable or cute.

OU: I’m sure Brandon’s going through it. We’re going through it as well. It’s how do we stay resilient in a time where we have to work a lot more than we’d anticipated. We all have our day jobs, but we’re now trying to build this company. So it’s been challenging but I think overall I say to all my partners, it’s kind of like our first fight as a couple and we just have to get through it and how we get through it will speak more to us than when we’re just being a happy go lucky couples.

PV: One of the things that you guys have in common is you both worked with the Fordham Foundry. Are there any lessons that you learned from working there that you’re able to use now?

BA: One thing specifically I learned that was important was in this realm, especially as it relates to me building out an app, certain developers have told me the app, for the features I’m looking for, it’s going to run me at least 170K and I’m not sure about you guys, but I don’t have 170K laying around and a lot of people don’t have 170K laying around, but how do I get my vision out without the capital? I can always raise the capital. We can do some rounds with some funding, etc. However, in this realm in today’s day and age, you can fake it until you make it, like literally. So take advantage of prototypes, pay for what it would actually look like and how it would actually operate so that when you show it to investors and show it to even possible clients, they can see it, also get excited about it and realize this is something they want to be a part of.

OU: I’ve been a serial entrepreneur for about eight years now and one of the things that you learn really quickly that they don’t show you in the movies is a lot of startup building, company building is a social thing and what I mean by that is you have to be able to plug into all these different things that you need to do, but you need to find the best people you can in those areas to really help you because there’s no one person sitting in some basement or even in a garage coding the future that person may have built something that can sort of give them direction but ultimately what it boils down to is being able to plug into the right people and that is the key between succeeding or not. It’s one of the main keys I believe. So the Foundry from that perspective has been phenomenal.

You, one, get to touch base with a lot of people who are subject matter experts in that particular field. In addition, if they’re not, they know where to send you or they know who to talk to. So the Foundry, I think in that respect has been instrumental, especially for first time startups. I mean, Brandan, I’m not sure how many companies you’ve built out, but my first one, I flushed $500,000 of my own money down the toilet and I had nothing to show for except a really great app. It could probably land a Rover on Mars, but what it couldn’t do was get the client in there to buy the product.

PV: What’s the biggest challenge you face right now. Brandon, you want to go for that first again? I feel like we have a thing here where it’s a counter-clockwise thing in live view here.

BA: Sure, sure. No problem. So the biggest challenge I face right now, I would say is building out a solid team. You can always find someone who loves it just as much as you and maybe they’ll get some equity in the company and they’ll do the coding or there’ll be your CTO, things of that nature. However, just so I’m clear. I’m not someone who thinks one person should be doing all the work. There’s some CEOs out here and founders, they want to be in the books. Good to great. They want to be known as the guy who took the company from zero to 100. I’m perfectly fine with delegating but part of that is either you need to find somebody who, or people who are just as interested and invested or you need to pay them.

So I think when you don’t have the funds or the capital to necessarily hire people, you’re really focusing on trying to build out a team of people who can see the vision and agree with the vision and will grind through it with you. So I think right now my biggest challenge and I actually just reached out to Al and notated from the Foundry about an intern because the Foundry also provides interns. So I’m definitely going take advantage of that for the next round. Just because having someone who can perhaps maybe strictly focused on business development or strictly focused on marketing versus me trying to have eight legs doing it or eight different arms doing it is just a better approach.

PV: And what about on a personal level? You have a day job too, and you have a life outside of work, I assume.

BA: I do have a day job as well that’s fairly demanding. I work in finance and I also have a two year old as of last Sunday. His name is Bryson. So yeah, full on employee, full on daddy mode, full on entrepreneur. But it’s one of those things where it’s the making of a good story regardless of how it turns out. So my son can also see that I can go to work and still chase my own vision and my own dreams, et cetera. So challenges, yes, but also learning moments by way of a lot of characters being built at this time, which I can imagine Ozzie, in your past entrepreneurship ventures, whether they worked or didn’t work, I’m sure a lot has molded you or changed you to a point where you’re able to attack things differently now. So that’s the one thing I’ve also learned. If this were to never work out, I know how to start a company lightning speed now. I know how to get things going super fast. I know how to do these particular things that for a lot of people is the biggest obstacle.

PV: What about you, Ozzie? Obviously we’ve heard about some of the challenges on the business front. What would you say is the biggest that you face both there and also on a personal front?

OU: I would say on a personal front, an ongoing challenge of mine has been time management, priority management and what I mean by that is I currently run about five different companies that are spread across providing microloans like Equeduct to others that do credit card processing and so on and so forth. So the challenge that I have is where am I going to spend my time is probably the hardest thing and every morning I have a little ritual I go through to determine what’s the highest priority thing that I need to solve for the day. What’s the most pernicious problem that we’re having, that I need to put my brainpower into as a founder and as a CEO of a company. If my attention goes into something that is not relevant and that does not push the company vision forward, then we’re just spinning wheels and dirt.

Beyond that, I think at a company level, our biggest challenge right now is we just need to go faster. I don’t know how else to say it, but I’ve partnered with folks who come from corporate America and there is a bit of a shackle that you wear when you come from corporate America, which is fast is not necessarily good and what I mean by that is they’re used to being very risk averse and taking very measured steps in determining what the return is and a startup is very much not like that. It’s not about taking measures step. This is about running as quickly as you can before either your juice, which is your funds run out, or you find something that works.

Brandon, I’d be curious. Obviously, I’m guessing this is your first company that you’re building up. So if you could change one thing about yourself, forget about the company. It is what it is. One weakness that you think is slowing you down, stopping you from actually building this thing out. What do you think it would be?

BA: Oh, easy answer. It would be my inclination or lack thereof to attack the social media route. So in the beauty industry, seeing is a big part of it. Being active on social media, et cetera. So for my Beauty Maps page, I have a marketing company that’s ran by a friend who’s handling the posting, et cetera, but a lot of that and a lot of things around businesses today, they want to see you, the personal person behind the business. In this case, it’s a little bit different because I’m a 6’2 African-American man and I don’t know much about makeup but knowing that’s a key, especially in this day and age to be noticed is you have to push out content, right? You have to be seen, you have to be known and I particularly don’t enjoy that. I live a private lifestyle. I enjoy that. So if there’s one thing I could change, it would be my ability to be okay with that.

OU: I shy away from publicity also as much as I possibly can, but you’re the main cheerleader for your company. Like now, I was on a flight down to Miami. I talk about my companies to anyone and everyone that’s willing to listen. I was literally trying to sell loans to people on the flight who were sitting next to me. They’re like, just put your mask on and shut up. I’m like, are you sure your business doesn’t need to tell, let’s talk about how your cash flow is and so on support. The trick really becomes is your weaknesses are your company’s weaknesses, quite frankly and it’s true when they say from being in a business perspective, as an MBA student, they always say, find people that offset your weaknesses. It is especially true in a startup because nothing happens in that area unless you have that weakness accounted for.

PV: Brandon, did you want to ask Ozzie anything?

BA: Sure, absolutely. So you mentioned that you ran through half a ticket on your first business. You can feel free to divulge the details if you want but I was just curious, what did you approach differently? I know you mentioned the prototyping, but in this case, you can’t really prototype. You’re either servicing alone or you’re not. So I’m just curious in this case, how did you approach this business idea differently than you did your first one to try to avoid those pitfalls?

OU: So I’ll give you a great example. I think prototyping is shorthand for get it out there as quickly as possible, right? And we can call it whatever we want to, but prototyping really means get it out as quickly as possible, start getting feedback. So with respect to my first business, it was in exotic car peer-to-peer car rental company. So essentially if you owned a Ferrari or Lamborghini, you can put it on a platform and someone will rent it from you and you monetize it. It’s a depreciating asset and we take a certain percentage of the profit, right? We built out the entire, we built out all the partnerships. We built out everything supply side. We had like over a hundred cars on our platform in five different states and we did all these things. What we didn’t do was we didn’t bring customers to the platform. So we spent all this money building up this supply base and this ability to connect the demand side with the supply side but we never focused in on the demand side. Ultimately, what ended up happening was when it was time to shift gears and start focusing on the demand side, which we thought was going to be not the hardest part, turned out to be very hard and on top of that, we ran out of money.

PV: Imagine in your mind now that we can kind of see our way out of this pandemic and we’re going to enter into back to normal, whatever that new normal is. But if you go to a bar and somebody you talk to asks you, why do you like starting companies? What do you tell them?

BA: I would have to say the freedom of knowing that this idea or this business is a representation of my perseverance and execution. At work, you work 40 hours a week. Maybe you’re actually productive for 25 of those 40 hours, but you’ll still get paid for the 40. At a startup, you’ll get paid for what you do. So if you’re only productive 25, you’re only getting paid for 25.

OU: I’m a child of a small business owner and my dad is great at so many things, but I witnessed firsthand discussions at the dinner table about tightening our belt or not having enough money for vacation, or at times, if I only had some more money, I could have grown the business differently or things of that nature. So for me, building Equeduct was in direct response to those conversations that I had with my dad and my family had. It’s to say to people that, listen, it is tough being a business owner and for me specifically, it’s a number of people. So for every one business that goes under, 10 people directly are impacted and by the transitive property, it’s a total of about 40 to 50 people are impacted by one business going down. So that’s a lot of people that are hurt. That’s a lot of people that don’t have money. That’s a lot of people that may not even have the ability to send their kids to school and so on and so forth. So, for me, it’s really straightforward. It’s how do I build something that can provide or contribute to their lives at that level?

Closer to home, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang is hoping his embrace of universal basic income, or UBI, will help him become the next Mayor of New York City. The idea behind UBI is that the government sends every adult a set amount of money regularly which ensures that when they enter the job market they do so not from a level of destitution but from a basic level or security.

Attitudes about wealth distribution, it seems, are changing. Thomas Massaro, S.J., a professor of moral theology, has given all of this quite a bit of thought. He’s a frequent contributor to catholicethics.com and the author of Mercy in Action: The Social Teachings of Pope Francis (Rowan & Littlefield, 2018)

Listen below:

Full transcript below:

Thomas Massaro: I would describe the pandemic as a crisis, a public health crisis, that it is, but it’s also an opportunity, an opportunity for the American public to maybe see a wider perspective that we’re all in this together, rich or poor, no matter what region you’re from, what demographic group you’re from.

Patrick Verel: On January 21st, 900,000 Americans filed new unemployment claims, adding to the 16 million who were claiming benefits at the beginning of the month, a sign that the COVID-19 pandemic is still very much a threat to the economy. A second round of stimulus checks was issued by the federal government in December and President Joe Biden has included a third round of checks in his proposed $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.

Closer to home, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang is hoping his embrace of universal basic income, or UBI, will help him become the next Mayor of New York City. The idea behind UBI is that government sends every adult a set amount of money regularly which ensures that when they enter the job market they do so not from a level of destitution but from a basic secure level.

Attitudes about wealth distribution, it seems, are changing. Thomas Massaro, a Jesuit priest and a professor of moral theology, has given all of this quite a bit of thought. He’s a frequent contributor to catholicethics.com and the author of the 2018 book, Mercy In Action: The Social Teachings of Pope Francis. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham News.

What is universal basic income? How does it actually mean?

TM: Well, great question, Patrick, and I think the place to start is looking back at just a little bit of history of the ideas, the current ideas for universal basic income, I’ll call it UBI for short, actually, can be traced back to proposals way back in time, at least a century or two ago, where various groups have proposed ideas for keeping people’s income at least above a basic poverty level. In fact, if you look back over the 20th century, pretty much every generation has at least toyed with the idea of keeping people’s income up, establishing a floor under their income, at least in the affluent nations. People want to have a certain level of equality in society, and I really think there’s an upper limit to how much economic inequality is palatable and sustainable.

So think back to the industrial revolution roughly 200 years ago, since then we have witnessed quite a bit of poverty and material suffering, and in response to that, there have been a number of utopian movements that have tried to alleviate the worst of that poverty. Some of this utopian literature and practice overlapped with socialism, even as far as going as far as Marxism. But ultimately, that has never really taken root, at least not in North America. What has sometimes appealed to a lot of people is how to transform our capitalist economy into a place where there’s less inequality, and sometimes people turn to the levers of government. I’m thinking of fiscal policy, transfer payments, welfare systems that redistribute enough income through taxing and spending to benefit the poor and keep at least a modest floor of income under all people.

PV: How has this all played out in debates within this country?

TM: In the United States, the 20th century has been almost like a laboratory for experiments. If you know your 20th century U.S. history, you may recall the progressive era, the ’10s, and ’20s during which there were a lot of proposals for ambitious welfare programs that would help the poor. Then, again, there was another great advance in the 1930s under the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to introduce ideas like the social security system. Actually, most people don’t know that even more recently, I’m thinking of the 1970s, an unlikely President, remember Richard Nixon, proposed the idea of a basic income program to replace the old welfare system. It was called Aid To Families with Dependent Children in an attempt to get rid of all of those waste and fraud and inefficiencies of the welfare system.

That idea even had the support of a very unlikely economist, the Nobel Prize-winning libertarian economist Milton Friedman, who proposed what he called the negative income tax, it’s like a refundable income tax refund, giving it to people of very modest means. And it never really got off the ground, but it did suggest that the idea of universal basic income has been bubbling up just below the surface as a potential program.

PV: Back in September, you published an essay where you connected universal basic income to the teachings of Pope Francis. How do the two go together?

TM: Notice that everything I’ve said up to this point only is premised on secular and humanitarian arguments and motivations. I said that nobody wants to live in a society that’s so sharply split between the very rich and the very poor, and that’s why we have some social programs, although we still actually do tolerate quite a bit of widespread suffering. So those are minimalistic justifications for generosity in public policies. From a theological point of view, I would emphasize what I consider to be more robust religious motivations to alleviate suffering. What would God want us to do in the face of widespread poverty? I’m pretty confident that I could identify Jesus Christ as someone who would support the general ethical obligation to assist the poor in extremely generous ways. Just think back to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, that’s chapter 10 of Luke’s Gospel, or Matthew 25, the Parable of the Final judgment, where Jesus is closely interweaving love of God and love of neighbor. If you’re going to be a religious person devoted to God, you’ve got to do something to assist your neighbors as well.

Pope Francis has been a consistent advocate for greater social concern for all types of marginalized people, refugees, people who are trafficked, people who are adversely affected by climate change, exploited workers, anybody who suffering from poverty or inequality. I have to say, there’s no specific program, policy, or formula that Francis has been advocating that would guide legislators or presidents or prime ministers in any specific country. Catholic social teaching is actually quite dedicated to avoiding the specifics of policy detail and staying with general principles, embracing values and priorities, and Pope Francis is walking in this well-trodden path. And especially during this pandemic though, he has publicized the need to address the deep needs of people.

Last Easter time, he gave an address, it was April of 2020, where he dropped this Spanish phrase. It’s an ambiguous phrase. It’s, “salario universal,” literally a universal salary. So immediately when people heard this, they started writing articles and asking hard questions of Vatican officials. Was he embracing a universal basic income in some form or other? Or was he just talking about maybe a standard minimum wage for people who are already employed, whether in the formal sector or the informal sector? So there’s a lot of ambiguity about it, but there were some very well-educated voices who were saying that Pope Francis has joined the Yang Gang, calling for universal basic income. To this day, I don’t know exactly how Pope Francis meant this, but clearly he was referring to a need, and it’s a constant Catholic teaching, that we use the gifts of God’s creation, not for just the benefit of a few, but for the benefit of all in society.

PV: So I’m going to play devil’s advocate here for a moment. I have to ask you this, what are the weaknesses to this argument that everybody should get a universal basic income?

TM: Really good question, and it has to do with the wellsprings of our political culture, grounded in the Protestant work ethic, and the American high regard for encouraging work. And, of course, these are values that are very much agreed within the Catholic tradition. Really all religions, nobody wants to discourage work. But at the same time, a structural viewpoint of the economy, recognizing how the contemporary economy really excludes many people from real work opportunities, a living wage. This is a really important argument that balances the scales again and reminds us that there is a need to address those who really, through the labor market, just don’t have a realistic way of making a good living in a dignified manner of life.

PV: The spring semester is upon us this week, and I know you’re going to be teaching a class. Talk to me a little bit about these classes. Does this topic ever come up in any of the ones that you teach?

TM: Yeah. In fact, the largest class I’m about to start teaching is called Catholic Social Teaching. I teach it most semesters and I just love bringing those topics, bringing those concerns, and values into dialogue with my students. So they’re old ideas that come from papal encyclicals published generations ago with long fancy Latin names. But what I really love doing is getting my students to see them not just as dusty museum pieces and I’m their tour guide through this museum. But really, getting them to engage thoughts that have been cropping up every generation since the Industrial Revolution, thoughts about justice, about the fairness of the economy, and the policy question of how do we deal as a government, as a secular society, how do we deal with the problem of persistent poverty of millions of people who have no chance of making it in a modern, very competitive economy? So I just love talking with my students, mostly Fordham undergrads about these topics, and sometimes I play devil’s advocate as well.

PV: The fact that Florida went Republican and voted for a $15 minimum wage in November would seem to show that raising the floor for people’s incomes actually has a bipartisan appeal to it? Do you think that’s because of the moral dimension associated with it or do you think there are other reasons as well?

TM: Well, I think that’s really significant because, as you know, Florida, a Southern state, is not usually considered a pro-labor state or electorate. So the fact that there’s an upsurge of support for a higher minimum wage in many parts of the country and across the demographics of all political stripes, suggests to me that perhaps conditions are proper, correct, auspicious for people across the spectrum to consider measures that will help all people, especially low-income workers to live a decent life. If so, that really closely overlaps the content of Catholic social teaching. The main opponent here, the main barrier to overcome a hurdle that we have to jump is that cultural element of we’re averse to seeing anybody get something for nothing, whether that’s a benefit or a tax giveaway program of any sort.

And I think the way that we can maybe overcome this is to keep in mind the goal of having work-related benefits, and most of our social security system is like that, but also an open space for some benefits that are not work-related, and especially if they’re tied, as the universal basic income is, to people who just can’t make it in the labor market through no fault of their own. I really do think Americans care about their neighbors, no matter what part of the country they’re from, whether their demographics are different, and they’re looking for common sense and reasonable opportunities to pass laws, to support legislation that will benefit all people, regardless of how labor markets treat them.

PV: Do you think that attitudes in this country will change as a result of the pandemic towards issues like universal basic income?

TM: I would describe the pandemic as a crisis, a public health crisis, that it is, but it’s also an opportunity, an opportunity for the American public to maybe see a wider perspective that we’re all in this together, rich or poor, no matter what region you’re from, what demographic group you’re from. And it could just be the occasion, as World War Two was the occasion, for wartime solidarity for post-war Britain. It could be the occasion when the United States finally recognizes that we’re in this boat together and we have enough solidarity to actually make some sacrifices that include higher taxes to support income support measures like universal basic income.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is, the coronavirus pandemic will still be with us until spring, as authorities work to distribute the vaccines to the nation’s 300 million-plus residents, some of whom may not be receptive to taking them. Just as the pandemic forced us to adjust to a reality that once seemed unfathomable, ending it will require a coordinated effort unlike anything we’ve experienced since World War II.

Troy Tassier, an associate professor of economics at Fordham, researches complex systems in economics and diffusion processes in social networks, and has been focused on the pandemic since it first struck the United States in March. He’s dismayed by the recent exponential rise in infections and deaths but says there are some lessons from the spring that can serve as a guide for going forward.

Listen below:

Dean McKay, Ph.D., a professor of psychology, specializes in anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the connections between anxiety and disgust. With winter approaching and potentially leading to more isolation, we thought it would be a good time to talk to him about what we can do to cope effectively during what will likely continue to be a traumatic time.

Listen here:

Full transcript below:

Dean McKay: Look. Anxiety, as an emotion, it’s an important one because it does stop us from having injury and harm come to us. Unfortunately, a lot of times it’s an overcorrection, and the experience of anxiety is definitely uncomfortable. But the flip side is that it also can, when experienced properly, it’s a great problem-solving strategy. I mean, if you’re worried about anything, good effective worry leads to effective problem-solving.

Patrick Verel: the events of the last nine months have thrown us all for a loop. Schools closed, businesses shuttered, and people all over the world began dying from a mysterious airborne virus. In the ensuing months, the United States has experienced a summer of civil unrest and a brutally close and nasty election for president. Now, with the holidays approaching, the coronavirus is raging out of control again. On November 13th, the number of Americans infected with the virus surged to a staggering 181,000 in one day, and the number of deaths reached 246,000.

PV: Dean McKay, a professor of psychology at Fordham, specializes in anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the connections between anxiety and disgust. With winter approaching and potentially leading to more isolation, we thought it would be a good time to talk to him about what we can do to cope effectively during what is likely to be a traumatic time. I’m PV, and this is Fordham News.

Let’s talk about anxiety. There are multiple kinds and they sometimes work in tandem in our minds, right?

DK: You’re right. There are several kinds of anxiety, really, several different ways that anxiety manifests. And so, for starters, the reason why we get anxious is because it’s an evolved reaction to protect us from threat. And as a result of experiencing anxiety, in small as well as major ways in the course of our lives, we end up really having basically three different kinds.

One is based on what we call a real threat. So if you have, let’s say, a near-miss accident, or you’re confronted by an assailant, the anxiety that you feel in the face of that is a bona fide reaction to a real, imminent threat that you face, some real danger.

A second kind is where you have a false alarm. We’re evolved to basically overcorrect for threat, and so since in our environment there are certain things that sound or look dangerous, it’s better to know that in advance and act, rather than have to wait until it’s verified. So if there’s, let’s say, a shadow that looks threatening and you’re approaching it, the anxiety that you feel is in response to the fact that it might be a danger. Now, it’s possible that you’ll end up learning later that it’s actually a tree in a formation that resembles an assailant, and so that’s a false alarm. It looked real, but then it ended up being, on closer inspection actually, not.

Then the third one is what we called learned alarms, and so because our environments are idiosyncratic to us, and over the course of our lives we end up having certain anxious experiences, some of those are ones that are specific to us, that we might find to be potentially dangerous. So, those are ones that we learn to be afraid of and we start to avoid those, as well. Now, those also don’t have to be bona fide dangers, but because we’ve consistently avoided them and we’ve consistently associated those with the experience of anxiety, then we have that association.

Let’s say that you were out at night and you were attacked. In fact, you survive. Now, in the future you got to, let’s say, those same places and you see shadows or figures in those places that might not be real threats. You might experience anxiety, anyway, and that would be a learned alarm.

PV: It feels like right now we’ve got all three kind of mixed up together.

DK: Well, that’s true. The issue that we face with a pandemic is that it activates anxiety in a very specific way, and it does call all three of those to bear.

First of all, there’s a real threat, so we know that in our midst there is something that is dangerous. Now, what makes it more challenging is that we can’t see it, so the examples that I used of a real alarm is where there’s like a visible danger. But now there’s an invisible one, and we have to now learn other ways to manage it. That means connected to that there are going to also be, let’s say, false alarms. So, you encounter somebody who looks sick. They’re not sick, necessarily, or they’re sick with something other than COVID. That would be a potentially false alarm.

Then there are learned alarms, because we’ve now been taught, based upon public health information and other media sources, that there are certain things that we should avoid. So, let’s say if you’re the kind of person that routinely wears a mask, a learned alarm is if you encounter somebody coming really close to you who’s unmasked. That’s going to also pose a pretty significant threat.

PV: You’ve conducted research directly connected to anxiety and the coronavirus. What can you tell me about your findings so far?

DK: First of all, given that the threat of COVID is an invisible one, that only manifests visibly in people who are ill, we really have five major dimensions that we can describe as being relevant factors that are implicated related to COVID. Those factors are what we call contamination and disease risk. So, that concern that you may have contracted an illness, or a concern that you may have come in contact with something, that would be one facet of this COVID-specific kind of reaction.

The second is because we are acutely aware of the social and economic consequences, that forms another factor that activates a lot of anxiety for people. So, we are concerned about our own well-being, but then kind of competing with it is also the concerns about social and economic consequences of the disease.

Another factor, so the third of these five, is traumatic stress reactions. This is a largely traumatic event for the public. It’s a pretty widely shared traumatic event, and some people experience it more acutely than others. So, if someone has contracted and survived COVID, or if someone has had someone close to them pass away or contract and remain ill with COVID, there’s a lot of ways in which COVID is experienced by sufferers.

Obviously, the biggest concern that we have is the risk to one’s life from COVID. But then there are also people who survive it, who are the so-called long-haulers that we hear about, who have neurological consequences and all kinds of lasting physical consequences, multi-systemic consequences. And so, those form the basis for a series of traumatic reactions that sufferers may have.

A fourth factor is a broader social category of xenophobia. This has been observed in prior pandemics, by the way, where the natural desire for the public, given that we want to make seen that which is unseen, so what better way to do it than to ascribe cause to a group? We’ve seen this happen in multiple ways. For example, the attribution of the disease to being brought to these shores from China has led to some xenophobic reactions to people from China. Or even to, in a smaller scale, things like not eating Chinese food.

Then finally, the last factor: that is an anxious-related response is checking. People engage in checking behavior either for themselves, to see whether or not they’re ill. It’s sort of like this internal monitoring that people might engage in. Let’s say for right now if somebody were to feel a little bit of a scratchy feeling in their throat, they might start to really pay much more attention to that than they might have pre-pandemic. Because they are now attending to whether or not maybe they’re coming down with the illness, and there will be some checking that they might engage in to see whether or not this represents the onset of illness.

So, on the one hand, there’s a constellation of individuals who have what we would call a COVID Stress Syndrome. They have elevated levels of many of those five factors, and that leads to all kinds of other mood and anxiety reactions, ones that we might see pre-pandemic. People get depressed. It’s a lot to manage if you experience all five of those factors that I just listed. That’s stressful, and people experience it in a pretty demanding way.

There’s a flip side to this, though, and it’s one that we’ve seen here. There are people who, as we’ve had well-documented in the news in this country, people who are basically denying that COVID even matters. So, you see people who are neglecting to bother with wearing masks and are not engaged in social distancing, and are basically taking the position that, really, this is nothing, and why are you making a big deal of it? They have low levels on all of those factors, and also would feel that their personal risk is just low, for reasons that have little to do with reality.

PV: I hope this doesn’t sound flippant, but it seems like this is a golden age of time to study anxiety.

DK: Well, that’s true. There is an abundance of anxiety, and rightfully so. The theory that helps to describe why we see some of these things that I’ve described as those five-factor,s is called the behavioral immune system. It’s basically an automatic process that we have evolved, which is when there’s an unseen danger, what steps can we take to try and make it as seen as possible? What ways will it be visible, and how can we protect ourselves?
DK: So, it’s an important evolved feature, and in order to do it successfully it does require anxiety. Look, anxiety as an emotion, it’s an important one because it does stop us from having injury and harm come to us. Unfortunately, a lot of times it’s an overcorrection, and the experience of anxiety is definitely uncomfortable.

But the flip side is that it also can, when experienced properly, it’s a great problem-solving strategy. If you’re worried about anything, good effective worry leads to effective problem-solving, and that’s true for everything. We would get very little done if we never, ever worried. We’d be like, “Oh, whatever. I guess that will come and go. The deadline is here and gone.”

And if we didn’t worry about getting diseases, then we’d probably get sick and die very easily. There’s a value here to this, and so it’s not flippant to say that. It’s actually accurate, and a lot of my colleagues and I, we’ve been very, very active during this time.

PV: I want to talk a little bit about this connection between the virus and xenophobia because I think that’s really interesting.

DK: There’s a lot of talk right now about tribalism in our politics, and so this does kind of cross the barrier into the political realm. In politics right now, the tribalism suggests that you have groups of people that form coherent wholes: they share attitudes and opinions and culture. But that notion of tribalism goes back also centuries; and tribes, as let’s say bubbles of groups, they would also be protective of themselves.

One way to protect themselves would be to make sure that outsiders who carried, literally, disease risks that would be foreign to them and could wipe them out, they would then be vigilant to guard against that. And so, an outsider would be deemed dangerous, just for being an outsider. So, xenophobia … We’re hardwired to be somewhat xenophobic. That doesn’t make it defensible, but it is certainly a bulwark that we have to work against.

Now, in the modern era, because in modern technology we don’t really need to have that kind of disease vigilance about outsiders the way that we once did, with the rising of a more global economy and the fact that people can travel all over the place very readily. It doesn’t change the fact that you can capitalize on that natural xenophobic impulse, at least in some individuals.

In 2018, President Trump went to great pains to talk about the caravan of people who were coming north from Central America, and his descriptions of it were very much designed to capitalize on that disease risk that people are concerned about. He’s done this all along, from the beginning of his campaign.

That notion is something that we see now, and now bringing it fast forward to the pandemic, Trump’s use of terms like “the China virus,” which has been roundly attacked as a xenophobic statement, is exactly for that reason. It’s to try and assign an ethnic cause to the pandemic. We see this throughout history, and politicians have known how to capitalize on it, on the left as well as the right. I mean, there are left-leaning leaders who have certainly used this.

PV: I want to move from the theoretical to the concrete for a second here. I left Brooklyn in March with my wife and our five- and eight-year-old, and we moved in with my in-laws in Vermont, so we could work remotely while they attend school online. My father, who is 72 years old, died of COVID about three weeks after we left.

I’ve had very few opportunities to see the rest of my family, and thanks to the New York City school situation it’s unclear when we’ll be able to return home. So, I have a bit of anxiety these days. Everybody’s situation is unique, of course, and I know I’m probably not alone when I describe this sort of crazy situation. So, what advice would you give to fight this kind of anxiety, which is born largely from circumstance?

DK: Sure. First of all, I’m really so sorry for your loss. I know we spoke prior to this podcast, and it’s tragic. Your life has been touched in a very specific way by this virus, and so adversely. The experience that you have of anxiety, in terms of returning to what might resemble a pre-pandemic way of life, is a hard one to imagine. So, that traumatic kind of symptom that I described before as one is particularly salient for you.

To deal with that in some way, probably it will be necessary to be able to return to your environment that you lived in originally. Just to really start to etch new memories in, that will be present to allow you to recapture some sense of normalcy, given that you experienced this loss in a rather significant way. And now it’s going to be very much crystallized with your experiences of life now, in a way that’s so abnormal from what it was prior to this.

That’s true for most sufferers, people who have lost a loved one. They’re going to face some real challenges going forward, especially when the pandemic is over. There’s going to be this really lingering memory of this event, and the way to really handle it is to honor the person that they’ve lost in a way that’s meaningful for them.

In the meantime, there are some other lingering issues, and the stop-gap measures are things like the extent that you can engage in any kind of social practices now. We do have the benefit of remote technology that allows us to stay connected with people; and it’s easy to not do that, because we get busy with things, especially if you have children. But to try and capture some of that. Like, married couples who have children, it’s very difficult now. You’re home all the time with your kids, and how do you get time alone?

Well, that’s a very significant challenge, and there needs to be some creative problem-solving around how to do that, even to steal away some time alone, because that’s something that couples usually try to do. If you routinely did that pre-pandemic, and you’re not doing it now that we’re eight months on, that’s something that should be done and really prioritized. That will help to alleviate some of the anxiety because you can share with each other some support.

If you don’t have someone in your life but you have a social network, you should definitely make sure you stay connected to people. If you are a solo person, and you’re not connected to somebody right now but you have a social network, you really want to strengthen that as much as you can, and make sure you stay connected to people. Maybe rekindle connections that have dwindled a little bit.

All of those help to buffer anxiety. You know, that shared experience so you don’t feel so isolated can put a block on it. It also allows you to share information with people that facilitates problem-solving, which is really the point of experiencing anxiety in an adaptive way.

PV: I would imagine there would be people out there even who don’t necessarily … who might not have lost somebody, who might just look back and say, “Oh, my God. What happened to the life that we had in New York City?” in particular.

DK: Right. Loss is very global right now. There’s loss in terms of not just potentially loved ones, which is maybe the most profound in this case. But loss of livelihood, change of livelihood to something that is not what was desirable before. Maybe you had an ideal or a very desirable lifestyle beforehand, and that’s been upended. Loss of time with loved ones, because of distance and inability to connect because you can’t travel. That’s something that a lot of people are experiencing.

On a personal side for me, my daughter lives in Florida. We haven’t seen her since the end of February. We happened to go to visit her in February and we really haven’t been able to travel down there since, because my mother-in-law, who’s 84 years old, we’re the sole caregivers and it’s just too risky. So, a lot of people experience these kind of losses.

PV: Yeah. I’m glad you brought up that your daughter and the holidays because that’s something that I do think is important to note for this conversation. I wonder if you have any thoughts for people who right now are hearing this, and are very anxious about whether they’ll be able to have any semblance of a holiday. Whether it’s this coming Thanksgiving, or even Christmas and New Year’s and Hanukkah, and all the other holidays that the winter months usually bring us?

DK: Yeah. This week, as we’re speaking, also brought some hopefulness. That is, it seems that there is very rapid and encouraging news on a vaccine, so maybe the first time in months that people feel a glimmer of optimism that maybe this is going to be over. So, it’s hard to do this in the moment, because you’re thinking “this year,” “this holiday,” this thing that we’re looking forward to so much, like Thanksgiving. Which … I, too. We love Thanksgiving. My family, we celebrate Hanukkah. We love the holidays to spend time with our kid, or to at least have some engagement in a real meaningful way.

But if you think about it in the course of your life, you’re going to celebrate the holiday around 75 or 80 times, and so you’re going to miss it once. It’s not even really that you’re going to miss it entirely. This is an opportunity where we might want to think about creative alternatives. Since we do have the luxury of remote technology, there is something to be said for at least making sure that you maintain contact for the holiday. Yes, it’s not the same. Absolutely, you’re going to feel the change and the difference. It is going to be abnormal.

But think about the fact that we have some measure of optimism on the horizon that you’ll be able to do it next year. And, yeah. It’s frustrating, but the other side of it is that we want to contain the spread. The danger really remains great. So this is, I think, probably the best alternative, is that we have to think in terms of how many more holidays do we get to enjoy? And we get to look forward to the fact that we can enjoy them because we’ll be hopefully making sure everybody stays healthy.

PV: Let’s talk about the future. Let’s say, fingers crossed, that a vaccine is approved this winter; and by this time next year we’ve returned to our offices, schools have reopened, and the economy has begun to crawl back out of the hole that it’s in. What kind of psychological aftereffects can we expect in the years to come?

DK: First of all, there will probably be an uptick in mood disorders, so depression is probably going to be the thing that will be a lingering aftereffect. In all likelihood, people who were anxious prior to the pandemic or prone to being anxious, it may kick it off for some people. The return to a pre-pandemic life, to whatever extent we retain that level of comparable lifestyle, I would imagine over a reasonably short timeline, in a matter of months, not years, a lot of those anxious reactions will fade.

So, let’s say there are some people who may be much, much, more attentive to washing. They’re probably not going to develop OCD, like based on contamination fear. It will probably snap back once it’s clear that it’s safe. For people who may have treatable levels of contamination fear, they probably were near to developing OCD prior to the pandemic, and this was the stressor that pushed things over the top. So, I would not think that these are pandemic-specific, but more like this was the stressor that got it going.

The other thing that I think will be left over will be probably a fair bit of alcohol and substance use problems. We see that now, and those are harder to shake. Those are habits that people develop. Alcohol is abused because people like it, and so after the pandemic is over, if you’ve been drinking a lot, you might continue to drink a lot. Maybe you’re going to carve out the time to work and do other things that you did before, but alcohol abuse will stick around.

And alcohol has a great history of alleviating anxiety. I mean, it has all kinds of horrible other consequences attached to it, but it’s well known that people engage in what they call self-medicating, to use a mental health term. And self-medicating, if we manage it effectively, it’s not universally bad, and I don’t think we should refer to it as such. It’s a mental health term when we talk about people who are alcohol abusers, and it’s what we call secondary.

So, secondary meaning like the first thing that really was there was anxiety problems, and that individual identified alcohol, or other drugs like opiates and other kinds of medications, as a way to tamp down their anxiety. So, they don’t have to necessarily deal with it through other structure coping mechanisms, they can just drink it away. And plenty of people do that. The notion of saying, “I’m going to have a drink to unwind,” that statement alone is a self-medicating statement. You don’t have to have an alcohol problem to make that statement.

PV: Okay. That makes me feel better.

DK: Yeah, good. Yeah, yeah. This doesn’t have to be like, oh, let’s reveal your psychiatric problems on the podcast. There’s a giant normal range, here.

PV: I’ve already revealed way too much in this podcast.

DK: Yeah. This was a very … Yeah, yeah. We both did a little bit of sharing here.

PV: What gives you hope right now?

DK: I probably really only felt hopeful, myself, in the last week-and-a-half. I’m trying to avoid being overly political, but I’ll be personally political right now. I think the election results point to some things that I think will change in a way that will be beneficial for us, at least in terms of the country managing COVID more effectively. I’ve had the good fortune of having a pretty large network of colleagues in other places, and what I hear about them doing in other countries, it’s stark. And it’s not political, by the way.

I have friends across the country in Canada. I have colleagues in almost every province, and in Canada … They have all kinds of political divisions in Canada, like deep, deep political divisions like we have here. But they did not politicize the virus. That’s the one thing that they did not do, and Canada is one of the countries that’s actually doing the best.

I frankly don’t blame Canada for keeping Americans out. We’re not allowed to go to Canada right now. We’re not about to be able to go anytime soon and for very good reason, because in this country, we’ve been doing a terrible job of it. The idea that maybe that’s going to change is something that I feel very optimistic about.

That and the news, I think, they would not report these promising vaccine findings without there being some reason to expect that it will be ultimately scalable so that the public at large can benefit from it. Those are the two things that give me real, true optimism about this. Had we had this conversation three weeks ago, I would have really struggled to answer that question, frankly. I don’t know that I would have been able to end on a more upbeat note, so I’m glad that we’re speaking now.

In a new Fordham News podcast, political science professor Monika McDermott, Ph.D., explains why it’s essential that we make plans to vote right now. McDermott, Ph.D., the director of Fordham’s master’s program in elections and campaign management. taught the first cohort of students enrolled in the Graduate School of Arts and Science’ advanced certificate in public opinion and survey research this past spring. Their capstone project was the Fordham poll, a survey designed to address areas of American life that had been overlooked by most pollsters and was retooled to reflect life during the pandemic.

For information about early voting and absentee voting in your state, visit USA.gov/absentee-voting.
For information on early voting in New York City, visit vote.nyc/page/early-voting-information.
To learn about provisional ballots, visit this explainer at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Listen below

Full transcript below:

Monika McDermott: It’s really going to be a trial for our democratic system, and how much confidence people have in our government and how much confidence people have in our voting system. And that’s what we’re waiting to see, is how it all plays out.

Patrick Verel: This fall was always going to be a tumultuous time for the United States thanks to a nationwide election on November 3rd that will determine who will be president next year. But with less than 40 days left until election day, the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging, making it even more challenging. It’s not clear how safe it will be for most Americans to vote in person, and although many states have successfully held elections via mail and vote, there are real questions about how to expand it to the rest of the nation. To get a handle on this problem we sat down with Monika McDermott, a professor of political science and the director of Fordham’s master’s program in elections and campaign management. This spring, McDermott taught the first cohort of students enrolled in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ advanced certificate in public opinion and survey research. Their capstone project was the Fordham Poll, a survey designed to address areas of American life that had been overlooked by most pollsters and was retooled to reflect life during the pandemic. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham news.

How confident are you that the upcoming election will go smoothly?

MM: I would like to say I’m confident, but in reality I don’t think I have a lot of confidence at this point that it’s going to go smoothly.

PV: What worries you most?

MM: Well, we’re in the middle of this perfect storm of everything coming together at once, and obviously the coronavirus is the number one problem that we’re facing. You’ve got the tightness of the presidential race in some states, and added to that you’ve got issues with mailing balloting and the differences in rules and regulations across the state. And you’ve got concerns about the postal service, and you’ve got CIA warnings of Russian influence in the election, and also China and Iran meddling in the election. And then to add to that, you’ve got what’s been happening over the past, since about 2012, you’ve got closing of polling stations in high minority areas that are potentially suppressing the vote for some people. And that’s also coming to a head in this election.

PV: Even before the pandemic, five states actually conducted all their elections primarily by mail. Yet many have raised concerns about the validity of mail-in and absentee ballots, including the president. Is there an actual difference between mail-in voting and absentee voting?

MM: So yeah, there is a technical difference between those two. So the states that do mail-in voting, all-mail voting, those states send out ballots to everyone who is registered to vote automatically. If you’re talking absentee voting that technically is people have to request a ballot from the state and receive it. And they have to supposedly have an excuse, although some states are waving that this year, such as New York, they’re saying COVID is a good enough excuse. And so you have to actually take the active step to request a ballot, whereas in mail-in voting, basically, they’re giving you, they’re sending it out to everybody and that’s Trump’s complaint here.

PV: But I mean, is there a difference in terms of one being more prone to being ripe for fraud?

MM: There’s no evidence of that. Places like Washington and Oregon say that they have no more fraud with their mail-in systems that they had before mailing systems. So, no, there’s actually no quantitative evidence that there is a difference.

PV: Now, last month the House passed a bill that would provide the post office with $25 billion in funds to help it deal with an unexpected increase in mail-in ballots this fall, the Senate opted not to pass it. That same week or roughly around that same time, postmaster general Louis DeJoy told the house oversight committee that the post office “we’ll do everything in our power and structure to deliver the ballots on time”. What do you make of all this? Is this something we should be concerned with at all?

MM: I think, yeah, there are reasons to be concerned. I do. There’s been mostly anecdotal evidence of slowdown of the mail service and given how much they’re going to need to be on the ball for this election, given the increase in mail balloting it’s concerning, it should concern everyone. Like I said, there’s anecdotal evidence that there could be problems just handling the regular mail delivery right now. And so when you think about the impact that all of these absentee ballots or mail-in ballots are going to have on the US postal service, it really is a little bit frightening.

PV:  The thing that I’ve heard that could be problematic is where you have ballots that are cast in person, that are counted earlier. And then you have the mail-in ballots, which will be counted later. And so you run the risk that one candidate basically declares victory before all the ballots have been fully counted and then questions the validity of the mail-ins.

MM: That’s why there’s going to be conflict after this election, no doubt, because unless you do have a strong winner on election night, which there’s no reason to believe there will be one, unless you do have that, you’re going to have court cases and accusations of fraud and mistrust on both sides. And questions about the legitimacy of the next president. It’s really going to be a trial for our democratic system and how people, how much confidence people have in our government and how much confidence people have in our voting system. And that’s what we’re waiting to see is how it all plays out.

PV: A lot of the talk when it comes to these ballots is focused on the delivery, right? That some of them might not make it in time and there’s different levels of like, okay, it gets counted if it’s postmarked by a day, versus it gets a rise by a certain date. So there’s been a lot of focus on that. Are there any other things that you can think of that people should know about when it comes to these absentee ballots that might be areas of concern?

MM: Well, the problem with the system of absentee balloting in the United States is that every state has its own rules. And so the thing voters have to worry about is informing themselves of the rules of their state and abiding by those rules. And that means acting in time, allowing plenty of time for the whole process to happen for you to get your ballot and return it and then have it received by the government and then have it counted. So really it’s just a question of informing yourself about what the rules are. And we know from a lot of political science research that’s been done in the past, American voters aren’t good at informing themselves on rules. That’s not what they do. They’re used to habits, habituated behavior. And if we change it up on them, they’re going to be ballots that are returned after the date, they’re going to be postmarked late. And then they’re going to be questions about whether they’re valid and yeah, it’s going to look like Florida 2000 all over, but with a mail-in system, rather than with the hanging CHADS that we saw at that point in time.

PV: Yeah. I mean, I think I heard that as a percentage-wise, absentee ballots are rejected by a larger margin than votes cast in person. That’s just a fact because people just don’t do things right.

MM: And it’s not just the voters, it’s also the states. Sometimes the states, the post office actually, gets ballots that don’t have the scan codes that they need to have on them for them to process them appropriately. And so that’s a problem that a state might have. They might have envelopes, return envelopes that weren’t printed correctly. Or we actually had friends of ours who voted in the Democratic primary this year and they voted absentee and their envelope, their return envelope was too small for their ballot. So they actually had to call up the government and get another ballot or another return envelope sent to them. And so luckily they were doing this all in time and as far as they know their vote counted, but it was last moment and very frustrating for them.

PV: Do you think the accuracy of polls is affected in any way by the fact that so many people will be voting by mail?

MM: Well, it doesn’t really affect the day-to-day polling that pollsters do because they’re still running likely voter models and trying to estimate who’s likely to vote, which they’re taking into account absentee voting and mail-in voting. So they’re working with new models for that. So that is a little bit tricky, but they’ve been doing this for years and they’re very smart people and they know what they’re doing. I think the main problem, although this is being accounted for as well, are the exit polls that we’re used to getting on election day themselves, which are polls that come as people leave their polling places. Those are going to have to switch over to a lot of telephone polling of mail voters before the election. Now, they’ve already been doing this for years with places like Oregon and Washington, because they’ve had to, so they’re incorporating that into what they’re doing this year, but there could be some glitches there. That’s going to be interesting to watch.

PV: Wow. So this is really going to be unpredictable on November 3rd. It sounds like?

MM: Oh yeah. There’s very little chance that we’ll know any winner on November 3rd.

PV: Best case scenario, what do you think it’ll be announced? We’ll actually have a clear winner?

MM: Best case scenario, I would say within a few days of the election or inside a week, but that’s being a little bit optimistic. I think. So, I just think that a lot of states that aren’t used to dealing with the number of absentee ballots that they’re going to get, are going to have trouble counting them in time and that’s going to be what delays things. And it’s fine, it should be delayed. I mean, we want these votes counted and we want them counted accurately. The problem is going to be that, as you said, if there’s a red wave or even a blue wave and someone decides to claim victory before all the votes are actually counted, then that’s going to call into question the legitimacy of the election. And that’s going to be a major problem for us. But if we can just sit tight and wait for the election results to come in and wait for all the votes to be counted, then I think we’ll be okay.

PV: Has there been any polling done on what people’s expectations are for when the results will be revealed?

MM: I haven’t seen any polling on that. There’s some really interesting polling on how people are going to vote and how they feel about going to an all-mail system and things like that. And they’re very supportive of letting people vote by mail if they want to. But most people themselves say they’re going to vote in person.

PV: Really? In general, still?

MM: Yep. Either early voting. Yes. Those were August numbers I think I saw. Yeah. So they either vote early in person in states that allow it or in-person on election day.

PV: Well, what is the percentage of people in the United States who are actually planning to vote in person or in early voting?

MM: So according to the most recent numbers, I saw 48% of people plan on voting on election day and another 13% plan on voting in-person early voting.

PV: What do the polls tell us about American’s confidence in mail-in voting?

MM: As a general rule, people are skeptical. Almost half of people say that they think there’s going to be some kind of fraud involved in absentee voting. So it’s pretty split and of course, there’s a huge partisan split here, but slightly more believe that there will be fraud than believe that there will be very minimal or no fraud at all. The interesting thing though, is that you actually have, when you ask people, if they’re confident, if they vote by mail that their own vote will count, they say that they’re confident in that. So they’re confident that their own vote is fine, but they’re also convinced by the messaging that they’re getting from above that there will be some fraud involved if there are large numbers of absentee votes.

PV: That’s so interesting. So they believe their own votes will be counted correctly if they mail them in, but they believe everybody else who’s mailing in their votes are highly at risk for fraud?

MM: Yeah. This phenomenon we see with all kinds of things in the political science research. It’s an, I’m okay, but my neighbor’s not kind of thing. And what I think is happening is that people in red states are confident their vote will be counted because they’re confident that their government is doing a good job. But they believe there’s fraud overall, they just believe that fraud is going to happen in the blue states. And so they’re setting themselves up for a situation in which they can say all of Biden’s votes that came in after the fact, after November 3rd, those are fraudulent because there was fraud in those states because there’s a very big partisan split there. And I would imagine that’s what’s going on, is that people are thinking that their own absentee voting will be counted well in their state, but they don’t trust other states.

PV: What should people do to make sure their votes count?

MM: If you’re voting by mail or absentee, a lot of states that you can actually online track the status of your absentee ballot. So if you send it in, you can track it there online and make sure that it goes in and gets counted. So I would say, definitely do that, track your ballot, make sure it goes in. And if it doesn’t seem to have gone in by election day, then go in, if you feel like it and cast a provisional ballot at your polling place. Other than that, the only sure way to make sure your vote is candid is to actually vote in person. I hate to say that because I know there are people who are susceptible to the virus and who have underlying health symptoms and things like that, but that is the one certain way to make sure your vote counts.

PV: One thing that came up was this idea of casting a absentee ballot, and then going into the polling place and also casting a ballot. That was something that Trump had suggested in, I believe it was North Carolina and everybody said, “Oh, you’re suggesting that they all break the law.” But then I heard from a friend, a colleague, that you can do that kind of thing in New York State that that’s not considered breaking the law. What do voters need to know about casting a second ballot in person if they’ve already sent one in by mail?

MM: My understanding is that at least in New York and I don’t know about all the other states, my understanding is that if you have reason to believe your absentee ballot didn’t make it in on time, that you have a right to cast an in-person provisional ballot that will only be counted if your absentee ballot wasn’t counted. And so if they find two ballots for you, they will throw out the provisional ballot and they will count your absentee vote. But you can’t actually vote twice. Now, in all mail voting states, obviously you can’t do that. Those are completely reliant, but I would worry much less about votes not being counted in those states because there are systems that are set up and ready to deal with the influx of mail that they get. I’m just afraid that other states aren’t ready for it.

PV: It seems like that early voting is going to be a much more important factor in the election this time around, because you can be sure your vote will count because you’re going in person. But you can also minimize the risk of being exposed to the virus by going when there won’t be nearly as many people around, that seems like that’s the sweet spot right now.

MM: Absolutely. And yet you’ve only got 13% saying that they’re going to do early voting. So people seem to like the tradition of election day. And that’s the only thing I can think of is that they want to go in and vote on November 3rd and that’s the way they’ve done it and that’s the way they’re going to continue to do it. So yeah, we’ll see what the numbers actually show and how many people do vote early. But at this point, it’s a pretty small proportion.

PV: Is there anything that gives you hope when it comes to the election?

MM: Yes, I have hope in the American, I have faith in the American people. I believe that despite the coronavirus, despite all the problems we’ve seen this year and the disasters that have befallen on us from coast to coast, I believe that people will turn out to vote. I believe they care about who wins the election and I believe that they will make it happen in whatever way, shape or form they have to. If they have to stand in line forever, I think they’ll stand in line. If they have to do absentee voting, they’ll do it. I think I have faith that Americans will stand up for their democracy.

PV: For more information about your state’s rules on voting, including provisional votes in New York State visit fordham.edu/vote2020.

With that, the issue of housing in American suburbs became an issue in the 2020 presidential campaign. Although the suburbs of today bear little resemblance to their cookie-cutter predecessors like Levittown, Long Island, they are still, in important ways, resistant to diversity and change.

To explore why that is, and how it happened in the first place, we sat down with Roger Panetta Ph.D., a recently retired professor of history and the author of Westchester: The American Suburb (Fordham University Press, 2006) and The Tappan Zee Bridge and the Forging of the Rockland Suburb (The Historical Society of Rockland County, 2010). He also co-wrote Kingston: The IBM Years (Black Dome Press, 2014).

Full Transcript Below:
Roger Panetta: How have I, as a white suburban resident, a former white suburban resident, contributed to this at the same time I espouse very liberal ideas about redistributive justice, about economic opportunity, about integration?

Patrick Verel: On July 29th of this year, President Trump shared this message with the world on Twitter, “I am happy to inform all the people living in their suburban lifestyle dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low-income housing built in your neighborhood. Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH rule. Enjoy.”

And just like that, the issue of housing in American suburbs shifted to the foreground of the 2020 presidential campaign. And although the suburbs of today bear little resemblance to their cookie-cutter predecessors like Levittown, Long Island, they are still, in important ways, resistant to diversity and change.

To explore why that is and how it happened in the first place, we sat down with Roger Panetta, a recently retired professor of history at Fordham and the author of Westchester: The American Suburb, and the Tappan Zee Bridge and the Forging of the Rockland Suburb. He also wrote Kingston: The IBM Years, which came out in 2014. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham News.

What is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing or AFFH rule? And why is Trump so eager to advertise that he’s getting rid of it?

RP: Your opening statement about Trump saying how happy we should be because he is eliminating this rule is a wonderful example of his political genius. Fact-checking his statement, of course, gives us the general pattern of a pile of errors. The rule does not enforce any construction, any zoning law changes. In fact, the Fair Housing Assessment rule simply implies study. And it was meant to be a tool in order to enable the Fair Housing and the Affirmative Furthering Program to find ways to know and assess, by community, whether or not they were complying with fair housing rules. And deliberately and specifically, it required no actions by communities without public approval. So it did not threaten to build public housing, it did not threaten to build multiunit housing. In fact, it promised no change. It simply required an assessment of whether or not that community was complying with the fair housing regulations. That’s all it did.

So he very cleverly has escalated that. I think what he has done is struck a nerve, and a very important nerve, and that nerve is my house, my home, my community where I live. And that’s why it’s incredibly politically shrewd. He’s cut to the chase. Right to the heart of what it means to live in the suburbs, to own your house, your principal lifetime economic investment. And he has promised not to endanger that.

PV: As I understand that this Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which just really rolls right off the tongue, this came out of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which made it illegal to discriminate against people in housing. So this was an update to that 1968 act. Why would that be necessary? Why would there need to be an update?

RP: I think for about 40 to 50 years, the Fair Housing Act has not been able to successfully grapple with the issues of suburban housing and the segregation of suburban housing. So in order to try to give it some teeth without legislating the construction or the planning of those units, what it did is decided, let’s have communities do an inventory, assess where they are on the fair housing continuum, and tell us where they are and then suggest to us remedies they would make, that they would take, in order to create a more fair housing community where they were residing. So that’s all. And Obama was very careful, specifically implied there would be no imposed housing construction. So Trump’s saying there’s going to be public housing because of this action is absolutely inaccurate. I don’t think that matters. And I think to quarrel with him over the inaccuracies over this or whether or not the statements are fair misses the point. He’s striking a nerve.

PV: Besides legalized discrimination, which is what the 1968 act was meant to prevent, what were some of the other ways that suburbs were historically kept segregated?

RP: Now what Scarsdale and other communities had been doing for years is using restricted covenants. That is a group of community homeowners would agree, in writing sometimes, by specificity, naming the group, no Jews allowed, who could buy and purchase a home in that community. Some of those covenants actually got legal standing. It took a long time for the courts to overturn them, so community residents had formal written documents prescribing who could buy a home in that suburban community. And that expresses a fundamental problem here that people living in the suburbs want to live in a community of sameness. And that’s sameness is broad-based, it’s class, it’s ethnicity, it’s race, it’s probably political preference. It’s all of those things. And that they define as both comfort and safety. Those are the hallmarks of the suburb. And I think they’re very powerful and deeply embedded in the popular culture. Very hard to remove that.

And the long battle of Westchester, which Trump points to as ground zero, is very interesting. For almost a decade, they resisted the requirements of the Fair Housing Act to create more dense, racially mixed housing units throughout Westchester. And that was a bloodbath. It’s recently that they have conformed to that. And they’ve gone to introduce some community construction, but that bow is very interesting as a telltale marker about the way in which suburban communities resisted, politically, the notion of equal distribution of fair housing.

PV: Did you see the movie that they did on the guy in Yonkers? It’s like We Need a Hero, or something like that?

RP: Yes, so for a while I lived in Yonkers and there was a great diversity. And I remember a terrible, terrible story in my life. I lived in an apartment building that was racially integrated, 50% black, 50% white, and my wife were very committed to staying. And you could see it beginning to tip. You could see whites leaving in faster numbers. And there was a fire in the building one day and I had a two-year-old child and a fireman came up to me in the hallway. The fire was in our hall in the incinerators. And he said, “You know, those fires are caused by the super. He’s throwing paint rags down the incinerator, and you’re going to have an explosion.” And then he grabbed me by the throat and he said, “When are you getting out of this building?”

PV: Oh my God, really?

RP: Yes, he said, “When are you getting out of this building? What are you doing here? Why are you still here?” And he never said, of course, he meant, “Why are you as a white person are still here?”

PV: Wow.

RP: And that stayed in my head. And then we moved to Hastings. And when we moved to Hastings, my five-year-old daughter at that point said, “Where have all the black people gone?”

PV: I read that a 2018 survey experiment found that even politically liberal homeowners tend to oppose increasing development in their communities, even when they’re told that such development helps the disadvantaged. Any thoughts on how to counter that?

RP: Patrick, I thought that’s why your opening quote and the whole idea of this was so on target. It really gets to the very core of this issue we’re in now with Black Lives Matter. I wrote a letter to the president of the university and to the Bishop of the Episcopal church where I’m a member. And I said, “Really, I think what’s called upon now is for me to acknowledge my role in the patterns of racism. The blind privilege I have, and the advantages I have had as a white, professional, educated person.” I need to acknowledge those. And I think before I do anything else, I must create consciousness of how I fit in this in ways I do not see.

That’s exactly what you’re asking me here. How have I, as a white suburban resident, a former white suburban resident, contributed to this at the same time I espouse very liberal ideas about redistributive justice, about economic opportunity, about integration. But when it comes near my house, when you want to put multiple units in my community, when you want to put low-income housing, or fair housing in my community, you threaten the cost and the value of my primary life investment.

And when you do that, all of my political liberalism goes out the window. We need to confront that. And the studies you talk about raise another interesting issue, how and why do we not as a public know that about ourselves? So part of this question you’re asking is our sense of self-consciousness and self-awareness, do I understand what’s going on here? And I know what I feel. And it doesn’t matter to me if one black professional person moves next door to me, because that person somehow seems like me in some ways. It’s the notion of multiple units. It’s the notion of people I don’t know. So we’re prepared to allow slow accretions of blacks in the suburbs, but we’re not prepared for an open acknowledgment that the fundamental imbalance of that racially, and building the kind of multiple units in the centers, that we need to correct that. It’s a remarkable area of blindness, if not self-delusion.

PV: Do you think about this when you think about the ways that you… You were just telling me about how you moved from Yonkers to Hastings, which are very different places within Westchester. Do you think about that much now?

RP: Yes, I don’t know why. I think that was an important experience at Yonkers for my wife and I. I think we were very committed to that integrated living. We had terrific pangs of guilt when we left about what we had done. It was a matter of conscience, but that fireman shaking me by the neck, scared the wits out of me. And he pointed to my child and he said, “How could you be living here with your child? Are you a responsible father?” And I thought, “Gulp.” So it was a blow. It was a belly blow. And we continued to think about that. And so now, wherever I am, I tend to look around and see whether this place is white or black. Is this a mixed community? I can go four or five days and not see a black person? And that question always comes to my mind. I never want to let that go.

PV: Are there any suburbs that you’ve come across that have really embraced housing pattern changes that can be looked to as a model?

RP: There was a book recently done in 2019 by Amanda Hurley called Radical Suburbs. And what she did is she went back to the thirties and fifties and found experimental community developments in the suburbs that were based on more communitarian values, that were racially integrated, that had fair housing, inexpensive housing units, that really attempted to create and live up to the fair housing law before there was a Fair Housing Act. And that we have a history of that. That’s the irony. It’s not something we just need to look at places like Portland, where they have done a good deal of work creating more fair residential communities in the suburbs, but we have a history of it. And, again, it’s my deep feeling about our needing to come into contact with that information to realize about what were they trying to do, who were these places?

And, by the way, this also raises for me the other issue of the need to begin to study in our curriculums at the university level, the real estate history of the state, and the city, if not the country. Because in that real estate history, we have one of the fundamental issues of civil rights. American historians have been negligent in examining the place of real estate. And we live in a city that is governed and held by real estate. And we have a president whose reputation and power is rooted in real estate.

PV: Do you think we’re painting suburbanites with too broad a brush? Are there more progressives in the suburbs than we realize when it comes to this particular thing?

RP: Yes, and I think too broad a brush and really tells us about the power of popular culture in shaping our views of the world. I think we need to take a much more critical posture to how we know what we know and whether we think we know that. And so if I look at the white picket fence, the sort of house with a little backyard, all those images that really… The community of common people sharing common views. All of those very powerful images are stuck in our minds as what the suburb looks like. Tom Sugrue at NYU has done a lot of work in the last couple of years in trying to show us that the suburb is much more diversified than we think. And he has outlined a kind of phases of suburbs. For me, the easiest way to manage that, and for your audience, is to think of a series of concentric circles.

That series of concentric circles was first used in the 1920s at the University of Chicago to describe the development of cities. You can still use that now, and it’s very helpful to understand the suburbs. The suburbs have a series of concentric circles, not exactly, but it’s a helpful visualization. At the center of that may be the diverse suburb. And there are increasing numbers of those that Sugrue points out. Places like Yonkers, and the communities around Yonkers in lower Westchester. Indeed, lower Westchester is a good example of a diverse community that has a balance between, and the numbers fluctuate, between blacks, whites, and brown or Latinos. Those numbers also use the older housing stock to attract whites. So whites looking to buy houses find some of the old houses in Yonkers extremely attractive and affordable. So they buy them.

The end result of that process is to create a mixed suburban community. Now, the difficulties are those communities, those mixed communities, is they have a hard time holding the line. They slowly slide into segregated communities, which is a second form of suburban community. And that’s very old. We have black suburbs going back to the 19th century. And then in the third phase of the third circle of our concentric circles, we have communities that are mostly white. And then in the fourth circle, what we call the ex-urb, we have almost fundamentally white communities. That’s the Trump stronghold. So the profile is much more mixed than we tend to look and really has a much more politically diverse looking model for us.

PV: Yeah, it’s interesting. He should have been pitching not to suburban voters, but to ex-urban voters. It’s a whole different class.

RP: The point he’s also trying to make is that, and I’m fascinated by it, and I don’t know an answer to this, is this tipping point. When those diverse suburbs get too black or brown, and I don’t know what that number is, whites begin to leave and eventually diverse suburbs become segregated suburbs. It’s hard to hold on to them, their diversity. Now the question is why? What makes whites think, “This is going. I can feel it, and I have to flee?” And is there a way that we could subsidize those home values to stabilize those communities? We do not, I do not, you do not, we do not have experience of living with, working with African-Americans and browns the way we should. They remain, in our minds, the creatures of popular culture. So when my neighborhood increasingly becomes black, I think, “What do I know?” I go back to popular culture and it tells me what’s going to happen. Can we counter that? If we can’t, diverse suburbs all will eventually evolve or devolve into segregated suburbs.

PV: Why does red lining matter so much when it comes to the racial makeup of places like the New York metropolitan area?

RP: It’s a very good question because it gets behind the issue. It asks, what is the process by which these communities have been segregated and the way in which communities are shaped? And redlining is also a very good word, because it’s the actual red line that you would see on real estate maps. It’s the actual redline. And in historic documents, when we found those maps from banks, or communities, and you saw the red line, people said, “What was that?” And slowly they figured out it was used by banks to determine the value of property and where they would and would not grant mortgages. So redlining meant, if you were inside that red line, you were not going to get a mortgage. Indeed, the value difference between redlining and outside the red lining is about one half. So houses redlined were devalued by one-half houses not redlined.

PV: Wow, is that dramatic.

RP: Very dramatic. And then of course the difficulty is the banks think, “You’re asking for $150,000, but I valued your house only at $25,000. I can’t do that.” But I’ve made that number because I’ve redlined. And redlining is… And this is a word I want to hold on to. This is so pernicious. It’s hidden. People don’t see it, it’s subtle. It took a very long time from the 1930s to the 1970s to really outlaw the practice. And it still goes on. It goes on in other kinds of loans, it goes on and other kinds of banking procedures, it goes on in credit cards. It goes on in a whole series of things because I use those measures to determine whether you’re loan worthy.

PV: It reminds me of the conversations that you hear about race in the sense that racism hasn’t gone away, per se, it’s just that we’re better about using euphemisms to cloak it. So like when you think about a neighborhood you’re not talking about, “Okay, we’re not going to come out and say, ‘We don’t want a multiple dwelling apartment building because we don’t want poor people.'” You’ll say things like, “It’s going to ruin the character of the town.”

RP: What you’re talking about is the subtlety and sophistication of racism now. In a lot of communities where there have been proposals for multiunit housing, the very liberal community members respond to that by pointing to the environmental impact. So, “We’re not arguing about the unit, the numbers, or who. That building is going to damage our environment. And that has nothing to do with the race.”

PV: What gives you hope that things will change for the better?

RP: I don’t want to be a Pollyanna. And I don’t want to say I’m filled with hope. Because my first feeling about this problem is there’s something about it that’s intransigent. The government, political leaders, have had a crack at it for several decades and we have not moved the needle very far. It’s a problem that I think the public has found ways to dodge, to hide. And I think the word I keep coming back to how insidious this is. There is a battle here about whether this is a class or race issue, and suburbanites like to say, “I’ll let you into the suburb if you can really meet the economic level of life here.” So that’s a class issue. I don’t object to you based on race. We know from recent studies that the black incomes in the United States are going up, black professional incomes are going up.

The number of blacks with advanced degrees is going up. And the general economic condition, and the number of blacks in suburbs is going up. So all of those hallmarks tend to show that they’re beginning to have the badges that we have required for entrance into the suburb. So I tend to think that may be a method of change more readily than the way in which we tried to do this through the law.

As a matter of fact, this is a very good question, that people will qualify for what you think is the standard. And, again, “I’m going to let you in one by one, not in 25 units.” So the pace of this is abhorrent, but that’s where the change is coming. It’s very difficult, based on all the evidence and what you’ve said, to get communities to openly acknowledge, “We have been wrong here. We have to figure out a way how to change this.” I have a hard time seeing that change of consciousness unless I admit that I am part of the problem. And the first way the response, for me, to Black Lives Matter is to think, how have I contributed to this, and how do I change? I need to find ways to publicly say to my community, we need to open this up now. No matter what the danger is to what we think is our primary asset, our home value.