How to Decolonize Future Histories of COVID-19, Starting Now
Let’s start with the numbers. COVID-19 has killed more than 211,000 people in the United States, of a global death toll of over one million. Of those we mourn, a disproportionate number are Black and Brown folk choked by the fatal holds of COVID-19 and structural racism.
For these communities, this devastating impact comes as no surprise. For others, COVID-19 is finally unmasking the violent systems that have violated the lives, harmed the bodies, and imperiled the futures of marginalized populations, for far too long.
Website for the Pandemic Journaling Project
Yet this terrible moment is also a chance to radically reimagine the society we inhabit, and to join the uphill work of building it anew. As we struggle to care for ourselves and our loved ones, and as so many people of color in the U.S. struggle to survive – to breathe – there are concrete actions we can take, some individual and others collective.
Collectively, we need to decolonize public consciousness, science, and history. We must decolonize our record keeping and rethink how we count. We must disaggregate public health data, so the effects of racism are starkly clear and beyond dispute – and also so we count and measure life, joy, and flourishing rather than just disease, illness, and death.
Image contributed publicly by a participant in the Pandemic Journaling Project.
At the same time, we also need to change how we listen, and hear. We must create spaces in which BIPOC people, and all those at heightened risk because of their intersecting identities, frame and lead conversations about their lives. We must create histories of this era that chronicle how Black and Brown people in the U.S. are navigating this new world – a world full of risk, but also a world in which a genuine reckoning around health, inequity and racism may, finally, be underway. In the U.S., a country built on white supremacy, we must reject attempts to homogenize the lived experiences of BIPOC into a nameless monolith, or to erase BIPOC voices and experiences.
Individually, we can refuse the erasure of our stories by creating our own chronicles of this COVID-19 era – by preserving our personal and communal strivings and struggles in our own words, voices, and photographs.
One tool for decolonizing future histories of COVID-19 is the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), an online journaling platform that lets anyone with a smartphone (or computer) create their own journal – for themselves and their loved ones, and for the historical record – in about 15 minutes a week.
PJP was created by anthropologists at the University of Connecticut and Brown University (including SSW), working in partnership with an Advisory Board of professors and students (including CZ and AS) and a small research team, all representing varied disciplines and intersecting identities. Although PJP originally was created to capture experiences of COVID-19, the killing of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, and the subsequent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement revealed the urgent need to ensure PJP would be a space to reflect freely on police violence, systemic racism, and its impact in our lives. All three of us have all been part of PJP since its creation in Spring 2020, and we have watched it blossom as a space of witness and struggle, of deep emotion and radical hope.
So far, more than 530 people from around the U.S., and around the world, have contributed over 3,700 individual entries to PJP, either in English or in Spanish (PJP runs fully in both languages). Anyone 18 or older can participate, but people and communities disproportionately affected by the pandemic – especially BIPOC, essential workers, and/or others facing significantly higher rates of COVID-19 risk and infection – are especially encouraged to record their stories. As of now, about 14% of journalers identify as Black of African American, 17% as Hispanic or Latino, 8% as Asian or Pacific Islander, 3% as Native American, and 52% white. (Others are Caribbean, Middle Eastern, or something else.) Soon, the team hopes to have permission for high school students (age 15-17) to participate as well.
U.S.-based PJP journalers’ ZIP codes of residence.
Before creating their first journal entries, participants are asked for a contact email or phone number where they’ll receive weekly links to participate (No names or other personal information are ever requested). We then ask some basic questions about demographics, COVID-19 exposure, and current health status. This information helps the PJP team see who is participating – and who is not, so we can see where more work is needed to achieve representation from underrepresented groups, including people with low income and lower levels of education.
Each week, participants are asked to create two journal entries by typing, recording and uploading their own voice, or sharing a photo. One question is asked every week: “How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now?” For the second entry, participants choose between two questions on topics like work and money, health, and encounters with racism, as well as experiences of social connection, community, and creative expression. Participants can log in securely at any time to view and download their journals. If they choose, they can also give permission to share individual entries on the project’s Featured Entries page. After 25 years, all contributions will become part of a publicly accessible historical archive.
For so long in American society, we have purposefully avoided talking about systemic racism and white supremacy. As a result, many of us lack the language to talk about these issues openly or honestly. PJP provides a safe space not just to vent about personal struggles with racism and other forms of structural violence, but also to hear what others are experiencing.
Acquiring the language to tell your own story is a crucial step toward radical change. After all, it’s hard to decolonize your world if you haven’t first decolonized your mind. The act of putting our experience on the record reminds us that many of our daily tribulations reflect larger violence committed on a population level -- and, moreover, that we are in this together. For BIPOC, whose stories have so often been hijacked and misappropriated, it is especially vital to have this sort of a space for the indispensable practice of telling one’s own story.
Your participation in PJP can play a vital role in decolonizing the history of this lethal pandemic, and of documenting its entanglement with deeper patterns of systemic racism, government ineptitude, and other forms of violation and injustice. If you are yearning to say your piece, think about starting a journal. If you are an educator, check out PJP’s Educator Resource page for ideas on how to engage PJP with your students. And if you have questions, check out PJP’s FAQ, or email the team at PandemicJournalingProject@gmail.com.
BIPOC have a right to write history – to refuse to be remembered just as tragic statistics, and to insist on being seen as people with important, unique and extraordinary stories and lives. We have lost – and still are losing – unfathomable portions of our Black and Brown communities to the deadly entwined crises of COVID-19 and racism. It is vital that we record these stories of struggle and loss, change, resilience and hope, now more than ever. We invite you to join this effort. You, too, have a story that needs to be recorded and inscribed in our collective history.
Image contributed publicly by a participant in the Pandemic Journaling Project.
Corona Zhang is a Master’s Student in the Program in Applied Public Health Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Their research interests include: Critical medical anthropology, social epidemiology, decolonial transition designs, racial health disparities, philosophy of race, Asian American studies, migration studies. Corona is a member of the PJP Student Advisory Board
Adriana Sowell is a Bachelor of Science student pursuing an Individualized Major in Sociomedical Sciences at the University of Connecticut. She earned an A.S. in Liberal Arts and Sciences from Manchester Community College. As a black woman of both African American and Jamaican descent, she must navigate the all-pervasive and ever-present disease of racism daily. Her passions coalesce around the intersections of race, gender, disability, health and policy; more specifically maternal health, developmental disabilities, racial health inequities & disparities, social epidemiology, food justice and health & social policy. She has advanced this work as a dual research fellow of the Health Disparities Clinical Summer Research Fellowship Program at UConn Health and the UConn University Center of Excellence in Developmental Disabilities. Adriana is a member of the PJP Student Advisory Board.
Sarah S. Willen is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, where she also directs the Research Program on Global Health & Human Rights at the Human Rights Institute. A medical and sociocultural anthropologist, she is author or editor of four books and five special issues. Her book, Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) was awarded the 2020 Edie Turner Award and the 2019 Yonathan Shapiro Prize for Best Book in Israel Studies. Sarah is Principal Investigator of ARCHES | the AmeRicans’ Conceptions of Health Equity Study, and Co-Founder of the Pandemic Journaling Project.
(c) 2020 Corona Zhang, Adriana Sowell, Sarah S. Willen