—SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY—

Part of that interrogation also involves reflecting on how we frame the “before” or “normal” times—that is, what life may have looked like for any given individual or community pre-pandemic.

“In ‘normal’ times,” when low-wage workers, people with disabilities, and other marginalized groups were the ones disproportionately and wrongfully denied access to critical benefits, few who weren’t personally affected noticed or cared,” says Emory alumna Rebecca Vallas 06C, senior fellow with the Center for American Progress (CAP).

“But now that it has grabbed so much of the nation’s attention—and so many people have seen the flaws of this paradigm firsthand—it’s time we named the need for a shift,” she adds.

For the last decade, Vallas, who refers to herself as a legal aid lawyer at heart, has been helping shape economic justice policy in the U.S. and representing low-income individuals and families.

In 2017, she helped launch CAP’s Disability Justice Initiative, making the organization the first and only progressive think tank in the country to have a dedicated disability project.

“This moment offers a long-overdue opportunity to retire the ‘us and them’ mythology surrounding economic policy and the safety net,” says Vallas. “Instead of viewing public assistance as a budget problem to be shrunk, it’s time to start understanding it as a public investment we’ve put in place to protect all of us.”

—THE COMMON GOOD—

The idea that we’re all in this together is part of “the heavy lifting of democracy,” says Anderson, who looks to the current fight against voter suppression across the country as an example of how thoughtful collaborative efforts can help bend the arc toward justice.

“During the 2020 elections, we saw the mass mobilization of multiple organizations at multiple levels, working in the cities and the rural counties, working on college campuses, working with citizens to regain their voting rights,” she says. “It’s setting up private car systems so that people could get to and from the polls when 66 Alabama polling places were shut down. It’s people knocking on doors to check whether you were registered to vote or not. That kind of level of civic engagement.”

Voter suppression, like other structural barriers to equality, says Anderson, “is designed to make you think it is futile. It is not.”

For Emory alum Qaadirah Abdur-Rahim 11B—who has been serving as the city of Atlanta’s chief equity officer since October of last year—acknowledging and addressing the racial and social disparities of a major metropolis requires collaborating across multiple social sectors.

Abdur-Rahim also oversees One Atlanta, a 2018 initiative launched by Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.

In her first 100 days in these roles, Abdur-Rahim witnessed the power of cross-sector collaboration with the hiring of Atlanta’s first chief health officer, whose primary goal is to address health inequities among Atlanta’s underinvested communities. Having an official position primed to build coalitions across the city and a collaborative agenda already in place, she says, significantly helped the city in its response to COVID-19.

“The coordination of resources across government entities, across nonprofit organizations, across school districts, it’s not always easy,” Abdur-Rahim says. “But when organizations and people are collaborative, opportunities open up for us to share our resources.

—UNITY MOVES THE NEEDLE—

Emory assistant professor of history Chris Suh teaches his students how united forces among marginalized groups have helped move the needle in the past.

“What’s exciting about teaching Asian American history is that the field itself originates from that desire to forge solidarity,” Suh says.

According to Suh and other historians, the Black Power movement of the late 1960s, which notoriously opposed the Vietnam War, is what inspired many frustrated Asian Americans already eager for an end to the war, as well as for a new identity in a country that had perpetually perceived them as “foreigners.”

It wasn’t until this era, adds Suh, that Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, Filipino Americans, and Indian Americans even began viewing themselves as one group. Together, Asian American and other immigrant communities joined the Black movement in expressing their own oppressions, transforming fear of speaking out against the dominant state into collective indignation.

“They weren’t just focused on the self-interest of the Asian Americans or the self-interest of African Americans,” he says. “Rather, these different groups came together to demand a common respect for life and for dignity.”

—SUSTAINABLE JUSTICE—

To ensure current efforts to bridge the divides lead to sustainable solutions for the common good, Emory scholars and leaders believe it is imperative to prioritize meaningful record keeping.

“If you think about it, the first thing someone does when they want to make a policy decision is look at the data or do some research,” says Alyasah Ali Sewell, associate professor of sociology. “No one does that blindly.”

Creating an accessible repository of information is exactly the mission behind Sewell’s Race and Policing Project. Launched in 2016 in response to the tragic deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling at the hands of police, as well as the rise in misinformation around police violence in the U.S., the Race and Policing Project is a crowdsourced effort to pull in credible, empirically driven research about racial violence, crime, trauma, and policing.

Since its inception, says Sewell, the project has largely been student-driven. In 2020 alone, five undergraduate students, two graduate students, and additional Emory alumni collaborated with the Department of Sociology to keep the repository up and running with original curated content as well as infographics influenced by peer-reviewed research.

Abdur-Rahim’s own office is also currently documenting its collaborative efforts across Atlanta’s institutions to serve as blueprints for its partners and for future generations leading the city.

“When activists look back 10 years from now, there needs to be a record of what the city and its partners were doing to address equity and how. It’s important to have that blueprint so that this information isn’t lost in this moment in time,” she says.

Adds Suh: “We read and write stories so that we can understand the human capacity for accommodation and resistance.” He warns that “our memories of today’s events, like those of civilians past, will be contested.”

As the pandemic’s most devastating effects wane, Suh hopes we will all be in a more reflective and meditative mood. Stories can, he says, “make us remember, feel, and act in ways that perhaps the numbers failed to do.”