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
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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."