Back to COVID

It's back to school time for the 3rd school year since the start of the pandemic. Back in May 2020 when I was still at Emory, I submitted one of my favorite pieces of writing as the final writing assignment for all of my classes - a Twitter essay. It was a ballsy move for me, especially as I was taking classes with professors whom I respected dearly. What I did not respect was all the organizing that had to be done on behalf of low income students by income students - all to NOT receive the grace and empathy we so deserved at the time.

To set the stage, in March 2020, mine and so many other universities announced that they'd be closing due the new deadly disease making it's rounds about the globe - COVID-19. This was like what 20 variants ago? It was new, sexy, and terrifying back then. People were buying up tissue paper and canned goods like it was 2012 again - or Y2K for the older crowd. Me? I was in Puerto Rico for my birthday with a group of friends from school when the US began it's first wave of lockdowns. It was crazy. The week before, we were on campus doing business as usual and within a few days, we were being evicted from campus with just 2 weeks time to pack and find new accommodations for the remainder of the semester. My friends and I had 1 week since we were not to return to Georgia for the rest of the week.

Now if you're not a rich asshole, you know that 1 week is not enough time to find money for airplane tickets, alternative housing, and storage. If you're not a billion dollar corporation like Emory University, you'd probably would have thought to mitigate harm ahead of time by providing low-income students with the funds to evacuate, at least in the form of a refund for housing. After we low income students created petitions that got thousands of signature, outlined alternative grading systems for the semester, met with school councils and staff, and worked our fingers to the bone organizing all during our next few weeks of classes (which was again the week after spring break still), we were finally able to secure a crumb of accommodations. They refunded our housing (I only got like 100 bucks), created a COVID grant (this was more sizable at a few hundred dollars per semester), and they allowed people to apply to stay on campus ( I was not accepted). I have a few YouTube videos from that time period - one outlining Emory's COVID response in more detail and another cutely thumbnailed "Get Evicted With Me".

But we're not here to dunk on Emory today - we're here to imagine better for ourselves as we enter another COVID school year. What are we owed by the institutions that gatekeep and redline resources from our communities to put it in the pockets of the privileged few? Will you demand protection from the deadly disease we know to be circulating in increasingly violent proportions, or will you allow these institutions to sell you another year of precarity? I present to you, my Twitter essay.

The Twitter Essay

The most intellectual engagement I’ve had since being evicted- having a virus scare in March and again last week, being quarantined in self-isolation, having a family member die, having my mother have a virus scare and get tested, falling into a deep, terrifying depression, and being told time and time again that the academy will not support me in the ways I need despite earning my place in it, despite being told I’m brilliant, being told I have all this promise, and despite being told I deserve to be here and am a “delight to have in class”- has been on Twitter. Emory administration and the faculty this semester have so much more to prove to me than me to them- this has always been true, but is particularly salient now- so here is a compilation of my tweets this past month. They demonstrate a critical engagement, not just with peer-reviewed essays and assigned reading, but with unvetted, raw accounts from the people in my community within the digital and in the physical world, my Black queer family.

This is about realness- my commitment to myself and knowing that what I have to offer right now is more than enough, despite those that will say otherwise. It’s about the care I have to provide myself and others as we move in the Wake, not guaranteed the shit that is ours, not guaranteed a coherent grammar of understanding and empathy. This is inspired action in the legacy of my living and other worldly family and friends, who couldn’t or refused to move within the confines of legality, correctness, rationality, and institutionalism because it was wrong for them to do so. Wrong for them to push themselves into harms way, to desecrate the flesh and soul for acceptance and mercy that wouldn’t come regardless. This semester taught me to doubt myself in ways I knew were wrong, in ways that could have killed me. This semester pushed me to resigning myself to death, to illness, and to trauma to the point of self-infliction. From the bottom of all of this I look up not to my grades, to my elders, or to my peers. I look up to myself, my resilience against it all, and my ability to see power that is unrecognizable to others. That is my place in the academy moving forward and my papers will reflect that.

Realness at the Bottom

Care in the Wake

- Mo Wisdom