Black healthcare workers in US do double duty fighting Covid-19 and racism

Seattle - Before the pepper spray, before the pandemonium

and the torched police cars that would light up media reports the

next morning, Hazzaunah Underwood was in central Seattle, peacefully

protesting - and exhausted.

The nurse and single mother of four was worn out from several night

shifts in the emergency department, on the front lines of fighting

the novel coronavirus, but took the trip from her home in Mukilteo,

Washington state, to Seattle for the May 30 protest against police

violence and embedded American racism.

It started peacefully but ended in flash bangs and shattered

storefront windows - one of many protests across the country, then

the world, sparked by the video showing the death of George Floyd

while in police custody in Minneapolis.

For Underwood, it was supposed to be a day of recuperation from her

two emergency-room jobs, one in Edmonds and one in Bellevue, both

near Seattle. She needed rest, and maybe a hike with the kids.

But she felt compelled to join the protest downtown, then other

marches in days to come - despite the pandemic and its stay-home

orders, and despite her own exhaustion.

"For me as an African American woman, police brutality has been my

corona since before corona showed its face," she said. "I have a

7-year-old son. I want him to be able to grow up, to walk the street,

for me not to be fearful every time he leaves the house that he won't

come back."

Her voice broke into tears. "It's not OK," she said. "So when do you

speak? When do you stand up?"

For the past few weeks, the United States has been wrestling through

two tough conversations with itself about two pandemics - though the

volume got turned way up on the one about racism - and health care

workers, particularly those of colour, are living in the middle of

both.

"Racism is the biggest public health crisis of our time," said Dr

Nathan Colon (pronounced "cologne"), a black surgeon at the

University of Washington who attended a June 6 demonstration with

thousands of health care workers and their supporters, which marched

from Harborview Medical Center down First Hill to City Hall.

(Underwood was at that one, too.) "As health care providers, we take

care of people."

But how do they navigate the tension between those two crises? To

take care of people by urging them to "Stay Home, Stay Safe," as

Washington state governor Jay Inslee dubbed his March 23 social

distancing order, or to wade into the streets for political action?

"I felt the risk was bigger not to go," said Tupamara "Tupi" Maestas,

an OB/GYN nurse from South Seattle. "By not going, I was risking the

lives of the people I care about, people of colour who are harassed

and afraid to call the police, even for assistance. Both my parents

came with me. We felt the benefit outweighed the risks for having our

voices heard." (Maestas' mother is a public health nurse; her father,

Juan Bocanegra, is a longtime organizer of Seattle's annual May Day

immigrants' rights march.)

For Underwood, and other working parents like her, the negotiation

between being on the front lines of coronavirus and the front lines

of activism is complicated by even starker, more immediate factors:

the needs of her children, and the number of hours in the day.

Lately, because of the stay-home orders, she's not only a single

mother and a nurse in the middle of a pandemic - she's a teacher,

too.

"I'd be exhausted, mentally and physically at work, seeing the

sickness, seeing the death, literally counting the bodies in the

morgue to see if another one can fit," she said.

Then she goes home.

"You have to keep it together, not only at work for people looking to

you for direction, but for your children," she said. "I've got to

pretend I didn't just see what I saw at work, but put on my mom face

and my teacher face. So the question is: 'When do I sleep?'"

Underwood is quick to credit the people helping her, including nearby

siblings and an overnight babysitter who looks after the children

during nursing shifts, and has been staying in the mornings to help

with schoolwork.

But Underwood says that, despite these demands, the protests have

provided an unexpected surge of energy - and hope.

After years, and generations, of talking and marching about racism,

after so many videos and photographs of people of colour being killed

by white police officers or white vigilantes, she feels like the

United States has hit a mysterious moment of critical mass.

"I don't know how to explain it," she said. "I feel like this time is

different. I feel like people are a little more open-minded, finally

willing to listen."

Other health care workers think so, too. Some suspect it's because

the video of George Floyd's killing was so graphic.

"It took irrefutable proof," Nhi Tan, a nephrologist at the

University of Washington, said at the June 6 medical workers' march.

"The perfect video, the perfect camera angle, the perfect light for

America to see what's going on."

Ugbad Hassan, a Somali immigrant who grew up in South Seattle and

works as a mental health provider at emergency rooms around the city,

suspects the coronavirus era itself - and the way it's narrowed the

menu of potential distractions - has contributed to this diverse,

amplified protest of American racism.

"It's been strange and I don't know what changed," she said. "Maybe

the fact that we're in a pandemic made them finally sit with their

feelings about how wrong these things have been."

Hassan has been part of the Black Lives Matter movement since 2012,

and said those efforts are typically marshalled by "brown and black

bodies."

But the past few weeks, white colleagues have written to apologize

for not being more involved in anti-racist work over the years, and

white people are not only showing up at demonstrations, but offering

their bodies as shields between Hassan and the police.

That, she said, is a definite first.

"It's all emotionally exhausting but amazing to see," she said.

"People are showing up in numbers, but I hope it's not just a trend.

I hope people really mean it, and follow up with voting, being aware

enough to follow the movement - that it's not just them checking off

a box."

Underwood said the size of the June 6 medical workers' march, and the

white colleagues who showed up, were a tremendous boost.

"My feeling of hope - if it was a balloon, it inflated tenfold," she

said. "Often you go into a workplace as a woman of colour and you

don't know who's got your back. I've lived that life all 13 years of

being a nurse. But seeing white coats for Black lives, which became a

hashtag, seeing people in unity saying: 'I see you, I hear you, I

stand in solidarity with you.' That means so much."

tca/dpa